Elon Musk’s obsessive quest to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Thursday, 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.
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. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.
It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important.
On Saturday, Musk will speak at a Pennsylvania megachurch with strong ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, a religious movement that believes Christians are called to take over the government.
Correction, October 19: An earlier version misstated the date of the tweet. It was tweeted on Thursday, October 17.