Ignore anything positive. Let me see …
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You’re right.
In my defense I did say I was being lazy. 
SAAAAAAAAAAAM! Reddit is being mean to me!
I guess Mr “first amendment absolutist” doesn’t believe what he preaches.
Of course, at the same time he claims to be for free speech, he supports a regime that does arrest people for using their first amendment rights.
Elmo’s ex-daughter says she used to have to carry him in games of Overwatch and that he would make her and her brother read “Ready Player One” as a punishment.
Eh, complaining to a fellow tech bro about death threats doesn’t bother me, at least among the hundreds of really shitty things he has done.
Complaining about subreddits that don’t allow posting of X links is of course more the sort of loser anti-free speech behavior I expect from him.
This is Elon Musk we’re talking about. He thinks flipping the bird at a Cybertruck is terrorism and tweeting the publicly available flight logs of his jet is “assassination coordinates” and carries his 4-year-old around as a literal human shield.
He’s the softest widdle man-baby on the planet.
Well, wouldn’t you know who won the pony?
CBS is reporting on it.
Taking the stage in Green Bay wearing a yellow foam cheesehead hat, Musk gave out $1 million checks on Sunday to two Wisconsin voters, declaring them spokespeople for his political group. One of the recipients, Nicholas Jacobs, is listed as the chairman of the Wisconsin Federation of College Republicans.
As far as I can tell, the other recipient really is some random lady. (I looked her up and she’s a graphic designer for a local packaging company.)
Musk and his DOGE techbros are reportedly scheduled to show up today at the offices of the CIA.
God, I miss the Deep State.
Last year it was revealed that the million-dollar recipients were pre-selected:
I’ve also seen that every Musk-money recipient (of the millions, not of the ‘sign up with me to get $100’ amounts) is a registered Republican. (I don’t have a cite on that yet.)
So I doubt that the Wisconsin woman was chosen at random.
(This is from last year, and doesn’t mention Wisconsin:)
Random in that she doesn’t seem to be employed by the Republican Party, that’s what I meant. Not like the other guy.
But even what I quoted before, Musk was clear that it wasn’t random in the sense that anyone could have received it, like a real lottery. Here is part of my quote from the CBS article, bolding mine:
You don’t draw a person from total random chance and make them a spokesperson. I’m not sure what qualified her in particular, that’s what seemed random to me.
Those are all fair points.
Less fair: the way Elon, at least last year, either strongly implied or stated outright that it WAS random. That anyone had a chance. Which was apparently never true.
Jerkishness and deception: on-brand.
It’s hard for me to determine what was actually promised. The claim is that on October 19, 2024, Musk offered a chance for people to win random $1M prizes if they signed a petition. Here is a BBC article reporting such a thing.
As part of that effort, Musk announced in October that he would randomly award a $1m prize to people in battleground states - Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina - every day until 5 November.
However, I’m not seeing anything from Musk actually saying such a thing. No social media posts from him or direct quotes. I wonder if it was only assumed it would be random based on the idea of people being “eligible for a giveaway”.
And less than a month after the giveaway was announced, a judge declared the giveaway wasn’t a lottery of any kind because it wasn’t random.
Testimony and evidence from last week’s hearing showed instead that participants did not pay for the chance to enter the sweepstakes, were carefully selected before winning, and received their $1 million windfalls as compensation for working with the PAC, not as a lottery prize.
Musk may have been guilty for letting people assume it was random and not clarifying publicly that it wasn’t, but I’m not sure he actually claimed it was random. It makes me a little Ill to defend him even a little but I don’t see evidence he actually said it was random.
It still seems like buying votes though. I can’t understand how all that shit can be legal.
Is he really buying votes, or just voters’ contact info? And then assuming his own stench will keep away the voters who cannot tolerate him.
It’s technically payment to sign a petition, which is apparently legal. Or at least, such laws depend on state law, and it seems to be legal in the states where he made this offer.
Yes, you do give up your info when you sign the petition, and you can see that as selling him your info, though it’s a package deal. It’s like the prize in the cereal box I guess (and some people have been known to buy a box of cereal just to get the prize in it).
The $1M giveaway was tied to things like what you did to support his PAC, including social media efforts. So, in a sense it was payment for services rendered I guess.
It seems to me that here in my state of Washington, offering money for signing a petition would be a misdemeanor (as of next year; it’s not illegal yet).
Violations—Corrupt practices—Initiative, referendum petitions. (Effective January 1, 2026.)
Every person is guilty of a gross misdemeanor who:{snip}
(3) Gives or offers any consideration or gratuity to any person to induce him or her to sign or not to sign or to vote for or against any initiative or referendum measure;
However, that is solely for petitions for initiative measures. From what I can determine, Musk’s “petitions” wouldn’t be real petitions in my state because they’re not actually leading to any political action; they are just pledges toward a particular political philosophy. The old petitions were to pledge to support “free speech and the right to bear arms”, and the one in Wisconsin is about “rejecting the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and demanding a judiciary that respects its role”.
So, they’re not even real petitions that will lead to anything, they’re just publicity stunts to draw attention. It’s a form of political advertising.
I guess that it’s not really buying votes or even changing laws, it just seems wrong (though I guess I understand now why legally it isn’t).
His activities in Turkey, during the last election, should have gotten more press.
Maybe future mother of spawn number XV?
Why do I keep hearing the Boomtown Rats singing “Banana Republic”? We used to topple countries doing this type of stuff.
The US used to encourage anti-democratic nonsense like this in other countries in order to topple them. Especially when it looked like democracy was going to return a government hostile to US, or French, British, Belgian, etc., businesses. You’d expect this would work to inoculate the US against such shenanigans, but apparently not.