It’s become something of a trademark. When Elon Musk strutted onstage Saturday night for a town hall supporting Donald Trump, he waited a moment to bask in the crowd’s applause before jumping like a child, extending his arms in the air and his T-shirt above his waistline. To this, he received another thundering ovation.
For the hundreds gathered in the Lancaster, Pa., hotel ballroom, Musk’s leap had become a symbol of his MAGA metamorphosis. It practically broke the internet earlier this month when he frolicked around the stage at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa, the site of an assassination attempt against him months earlier. Since then, Musk has only elevated his efforts to return Trump to the White House: pouring more than $100 million into his new PAC to boost the former President in the battleground of Pennsylvania and barnstorming the commonwealth for freewheeling question-and-answer sessions to turn out Trump enthusiasts.
On a stage festooned with a giant American flag and signs that said “Vote Early,” Musk meandered for nearly two hours on a range of curiosities mixed with right-wing talking points. The billionaire waxed poetic on his ambition to colonize other planets: “The future of civilization could depend on creating a self-sustaining city on Mars.” He spread the baseless conspiracy theory that elites are directing undocumented immigrants into swing states to vote for Democrats, calling it a “massive importation” operation. He characterized Kamala Harris as beholden to the ruling class—which was why, he said, she hasn’t been the target of a shooting like Trump. If Harris were removed from the race, he suggested, an amorphous cabal would “just replace her with another puppet.” (Authorities have found no clear political motives in Trump’s would-be assassins.) The most striking moment of the night was when someone asked why voters shouldn’t fear that a second Trump term would result in democratic backsliding. Musk’s response? He denied that Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to block the peaceful transfer of power, was an assault on American democracy. “Jan. 6 was in no way a violent insurrection,” he said.
The spectacle exhibited Musk’s singular role in the 2024 election: The world’s richest man, who owns one of the world’s most powerful communications platforms, deploying his vast fortune and influence to promote a presidential candidate. Trump has vowed to put Musk in charge of a “government efficiency commission” that would oversee the agencies that regulate his companies such as SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and X, formerly known as Twitter. But when addressing the Lancaster crowd, Musk portrayed Trump’s candidacy as a final bulwark to thwart irreversible national decline: “We are at a fork in the road of destiny.”
Musk’s detractors say he represents a dangerous marriage of economic and political power. “He is abusing power in a way we’ve never really seen,” says Lisa Gilbert, president of the government watchdog Public Citizen. The group filed a complaint last week against Musk with the Federal Election Commission over his plan to give $1 million a day to a randomly chosen registered voter in a swing state who signs a petition in support of free speech and gun rights. The Department of Justice has also reportedly warned Musk that the scheme could violate federal law if it amounts to a monetary incentive to register to vote. When one of the attendees in Lancaster asked Musk why he hadn’t yet announced a winner on X that day, he brought onstage a large check written to a woman sitting in the audience. “You don’t have to vote,” he told her. “It would be nice if you voted, but you don’t have to.”
The checks are far from the only concern critics are raising about Musk in the election’s final days. “We’ve been most worried about the misinformation and disinformation that could happen both in the lead up and aftermath of the election when people question the results,” Gilbert says. “Musk has positioned himself to be the number one bad actor.”
For now, Musk is camping out in Pennsylvania, where the two candidates are stuck in a dead heat. Trump holds less than a half percentage point lead in the current 538 average of state polls. Yet even a small margin of victory here could reverberate far beyond the nation’s fifth most-populated state. “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said at a rally last month. “It’s very simple.”
To that end, an allied network of pro-Trump organizations has systematically sought to tip the state in their column. Four years ago, Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555-votes, propelling him to the White House. Republicans have since funneled millions into the state for targeted voter registration and mobilization drives. In March 2021, registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans in Pennsylvania by 630,000. As of this month, that lead has been reduced to roughly 300,000. Musk has buoyed that effort with his political action committee, America PAC, which he has given at least $118 million in donations since July.
Read more: Democrats Lose Ground in Swing States
In Lancaster, many of those who came to see Musk said they were drawn to him because of his self-styled free-speech evangelism. “If you don’t have free speech, you don’t have freedom of thought,” says Betsy Stecz, a marketing specialist from Mount Joy wearing a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt. In a long line outside before the event, Stecz says she follows Musk on X and thinks his broadsides against the “woke mind virus” and his backing of the former President has helped to unleash what was previously a silent majority. “You have people finally feeling like, Okay, I can hold my head up and say: I’m not ashamed to vote for Donald Trump.”
For Chris Hill, who runs operations for a commercial bathroom remodeling firm in nearby Mechanicsburg, Musk is taking a stand against cosmopolitan elites who want to censor his language and suppress his political views. “That is really what resonates with me the most,” says Hill, donning a red MAGA hat and a Tesla sweatshirt. “I’m a strong advocate of communication.”
Throughout Musk’s two hours on stage, he captured a mix of hard-right grievances, such as immigration (despite reports that, early in his career, he worked in the U.S. illegally as an immigrant) and declining birth rates. “If masculinity is toxic,” he asked, “how come the people who are so messed up don’t have dads?” Garnering one of the loudest applauses of the night, he excoriated critics who say that Trump, given power once again, would govern as an authoritarian. “Those who say Trump is a threat to democracy,” he said, “are the threat to democracy.”
Many of people there expressed admiration for his entrepreneurial triumphs. But Musk was not there to talk about his career trajectory. He was there to get Trump over the finish line. Midway through the town hall, someone walked up to the microphone and asked him for the “most useful” and “most powerful” piece of advice he’s ever received. After a long pause, he chuckled. “Vote Republican.”