Elon Musk's Wants To Buy The U.S.'s Future

On the campaign trail for Donald Trump, Musk has already begun gathering shareholders of sorts, offering $47 to anyone who refers a swing-state voter to sign his petition, which he says he is using to juice the get-out-the-vote campaign for Trump. He has also turned it into a lottery, and says that a different random signer will win $1 million each day from now until the election, a successful way to buy media attention. (The petition is designed for Trump supporters, but anybody in a swing state can sign, and if liberals participate it might screw up his metrics and his roll out, but that’s a different story.)

Musk’s Super PAC, which is fueling the lottery, the petition, and an ad campaign, boasts a similarly patriotic moniker, America PAC, and Federal Election Commission records show Musk has already pumped $75 million into it.

But what is Musk trying to buy here, exactly?

Musk’s vision for America — a place of high personal and economic freedom, where political activity could become criminal, under the rule of tech-controlled joint-stock companies — is one of the most important stories of this election.

Whether a vehicle for political activity, shielding activities from oversight, or more formal attempts at corporate capture of the American government, “United States of America Inc” points in a clear direction: capitalizing on the government for private gain. But there’s little in Musk’s past or present that suggests he’s interested merely in the quotidian government-contracting corruption. His admiration of Argentina’s libertarian president Javier Milei and El Salvador’s crypto-sovereign Nayib Bukele, executives rising out of the philosophical fermement of the New Right, suggest a deeper project may be underway.