Musk Settles the $1m-a-Day Voter Giveaway Lawsuits. The Terms Are as Random as the Winners
Two Arizona residents said the swing-state prize was sold as a lottery but picked in advance. Now there is a deal, no published price, and a judge still to sign off.
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In the autumn of 2024, Elon Musk promised to hand $1 million a day to a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state who signed his petition. Two years later, the most predictable part of that promise has arrived: lawyers, a settlement, and no public number.
Here are the facts. Musk and his America PAC told the judge overseeing two related proposed class actions in federal court in Austin, Texas, that they have reached settlements, subject to court approval. The filings did not include the terms, and lawyers involved declined to comment or did not respond, according to The Guardian. The Verge reports the plaintiffs are settling for an undisclosed sum.
The plaintiffs are Arizona residents. They said Musk and America PAC misled voters in seven swing states into signing a petition supporting the US constitution by promising $1 million a day to randomly chosen signatories. Musk founded America PAC to back Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. A federal judge ruled in June that Musk must testify in the cases.
The sentence that sank “random”
The heart of the complaint was a single courtroom moment. When Philadelphia’s district attorney sued to stop the giveaway as an illegal lottery, America PAC representative Chris Gober told a judge: “The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance … We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”
That defence helped answer the illegal-lottery question, since a lottery needs chance. It also handed the Arizona plaintiffs their argument. If winners were not chosen by chance, they said, then the public announcement that they were random was false, and they would never have signed the petition had they known.
The data question nobody priced
The suits also raised what happened to the information people handed over. The plaintiffs said the petition “places no limitations on America PAC’s use of or sale of the personal data it collects,” and accused the PAC of using the giveaway as a way to gather voter data. A settlement without published terms leaves that question where it started: unanswered in public.
Why this matters beyond Musk
Prize-style promotions tied to politics sit in a legal grey zone in the US: election law, consumer-protection law and state lottery rules all apply, and they do not always agree. A settlement means no ruling on any of that. It also means the cases, once the deals are approved, end without the trial at which Musk had been ordered to testify, so the most-watched witness in the dispute may never take the stand in public. Campaigns watching this case learn a cheaper lesson than a verdict would have taught: the giveaway can work, and the bill arrives later, in private.
The court still has to approve the deals. Until then, the only confirmed facts are that someone was paid to go away and nobody will say how much. For a promotion sold on chance, it ends with nothing left to chance at all.