Comment on Elon Musk Is Offering Pennsylvania Voters $100 to Sign His Pro-Trump Petition

Elon Musk’s obsessive quest to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Friday, the tech CEO tweeted to more than 20o million followers that he’s offering $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign his pro-Trump petition. If you’re a registered Pennsylvania voter, you & whoever referred you will now get $100 for signing our petition in support of free speech & right to bear arms.Earn money for supporting something you already believe in!Offer valid until midnight on Monday.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 18, 2024 This $100 deal is an expansion of a previous bargain he levied with swing state voters earlier this year, where he offered $47 to any voters located in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina who’d be willing to refer a friend to the petition. However, this $100 special offer is exclusively for Pennsylvanians. According to the site, the goal is to get “1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.” The tech CEO tweeted this offer shortly after hosting his first solo political event at a Pennsylvania town hall on Friday night, in which he reportedly peddled debunked election conspiracy theories. While this petition isn’t his only bid to flip the swing state in Trump’s favor, (last week, Musk offered to go door-to-door in Pennsylvania to petition for the former president), it’s certainly one of his stupidest ones. As my colleague Tim Murphy writes : This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation.