Elon Musk Is Openly Trying to Buy Votes in Crucial Supreme Court Race

Elon Musk is paying Wisconsin residents $100 each to sign a petition denouncing “activist” judges, collecting troves of voter data in the final days before a crucial state Supreme Court election.

Donald Trump and the billionaire bureaucrat leading the Department of Government Efficiency have spent the last week railing against one federal judge who dared to question the administration’s deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members, who were transported to a prison in El Salvador without due process and in defiance of a federal court order.

Now Musk is attempting to artificially shift public opinion by circulating a petition against “activist” judges and offering compensation in return.

“By signing below, I’m rejecting the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and demanding a judiciary that respects its role—interpreting, not legislating,” the petition said, according to Axios.

Musk’s petition comes little over a week before Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, in which Musk has already put a whopping $20 million behind conservative candidate Brad Schimel.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court is set to weigh questions on hot-button issues, including the use of voter drop boxes in elections, abortion access, and redrawing congressional maps. A Republican majority on the court could influence the outcome in any of these cases, which would have national repercussions.

While Musk won’t know how respondents to the petition answer, after they receive their $100 credit, Musk will walk away with their information and be able to contact them again in the future. Like, in the days before the election on April 1.

“No District Court Judge, or any Judge, can assume the duties of the President of the United States. Only Crime and Chaos would result. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday.

“Unlawful Nationwide Injunctions by Radical Left Judges could very well lead to the destruction of our Country! These people are Lunatics, who do not care, even a little bit, about the repercussions from their very dangerous and incorrect Decisions and Rulings,” he wrote in another post Thursday. He urged judges to stop placing injunctions on his potentially unlawful actions.

Donald Trump’s death knell to the Education Department isn’t likely to go over well with the American public.

The president stripped apart the centralized authority overseeing the American educational system on Thursday via executive order, marking the end of a 45-year-old institution. But hours after Trump signed the agency’s death certificate, even Fox News was sharing polls indicating that the vast majority of the country is unlikely to support the president’s sweeping move.

“Most voters oppose Trump’s efforts to reduce the number of government employees, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and, ranking near the bottom in support: his campaign promise to close the Department of Education,” the network reported.

Fox also aired a full-screen of the company-hosted poll, published Thursday, which revealed 65 percent of respondents opposed the agency’s end. That number included 92 percent of Democrats, 81 percent of independent voters, and 33 percent of Republicans.

The same poll suggested that nearly seven in 10 Americans are concerned that Trump’s executive actions “may permanently alter the country’s system of checks and balances.”

The Department of Education has historically been responsible for approving, monitoring, and distributing federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants and other aid made available to the public via the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. It’s in charge of assessing and analyzing America’s K-12 systems, as well as aggregating data and research on American educational policies. The department also oversaw the implementation of Title IX and ensured that the American public had equal access to a valuable education.

It’s unclear what the future will look like for a college-going American public with such a massively diminished department.

The Education Department annually distributes $120.8 billion in grants and federal loans to college-bound students, according to the office of Federal Student Aid. The Department of Education was already the smallest Cabinet agency, with just over 4,000 employees. Its budget constituted roughly 4 percent of overall spending, costing American taxpayers $268 billion in 2024, just $14 billion more than it had when President Jimmy Carter brought it into existence in 1979.

After The New York Times reported Thursday that Elon Musk would be getting a secret Pentagon briefing on the potential for war with China the next day, the tech oligarch was livid.

Musk posted about the article on his X account early on Friday morning, including a screenshot of President Trump criticizing the article in his post and calling the Times “pure propaganda.”

“Also, I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” Musk threatened. “They will be found.”

The Times article in question infuriated the president, who rejected the report and claimed that while Musk was scheduled to visit the Pentagon Friday, China wasn’t on the agenda.

“[The Times] said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential ‘war with China.’ How ridiculous?’ China will not even be mentioned or discussed. How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also denied the report, with Parnell saying Musk was “just visiting” the Pentagon and Hegseth saying Musk’s meetings at the building will be “informal.” But after their denials, The Wall Street Journal corroborated the Times’s reporting.

Musk has many business interests in China, and depends on the Chinese market for his companies—a red flag for someone with a security clearance and billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts. On top of that, Musk is the world’s richest person and wields tremendous power within the Trump administration for someone whose official title is “senior adviser” to the president. Why then is he receiving top secret defense meetings?

Department of Government Efficiency operatives have found their new target: your local library.

Elon Musk’s so-called DOGE infiltrated the Institute of Museum and Library Services on Thursday, according to multiple sources.

This comes just a week after Trump signed an executive order that called for the closing of the IMLS. Now, employees of one of the most critical arts and cultural support systems in the country are under attack.

“The Institute of Museum and Library Services is being raided by DOGE and the new Acting Director (also somehow DepSec of Labor) Keith Sonderling with the express intent to shut it down, a worker wrote in the federal employee subreddit. “Sonderling was sworn-in in the lobby of the office building (955 L’Enfant Plaza) and they are proceeding with quickly and quietly dismantling the agency. There is no major reporting on the death of IMLS. There are [Department] of Homeland Security personnel present - to bully a bunch of civil servants who administer grants to museums and libraries.”

The IMLS has a $313 million annual budget and about 70 employees. Its stated goal is to “advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development.

Local libraries are mostly funded by local tax dollars, but the funding they do get from the federal government goes towards things like employee training and technology updates. This is especially critical in more remote areas.

IMLS also supports museums of all kinds—aquariums, arboretums, art museums, botanical gardens, and more—by “awarding grants that help them educate students, preserve and digitize collections, and connect with their communities.”

“There is no efficiency argument when IMLS represents just 0.0046% of the federal budget, while museums generate $50 billion in economic impact,” the American Alliance of Museums wrote in a statement.

Elon Musk, the unelected face of the Department of Government Efficiency, is scheduled to receive a Pentagon briefing Friday on the U.S. military’s plan for a potential war with China, The New York Times reported.

The meeting would be a massive and unprecedented expansion of Musk’s supposedly temporary role in the federal government, and would have handed some of the nation’s top military secrets to a billionaire who has fostered cozy relationships with Chinese officials and holds enormous financial interests across the Pacific.

Donald Trump did not take the news well. In the ensuing hours, the president and his administration vehemently rejected details of the report, revealing that Musk was scheduled to head to the Pentagon while repeatedly denying that China would be a part of the conversation.

“The Fake News is at it again, this time the Failing New York Times,” the president posted on Truth Social late Thursday. “They said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential ‘war with China.’ How ridiculous?’ China will not even be mentioned or discussed. How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue!!!”

By the next morning, the explosive story was still at the forefront of Trump’s mind.

“Their FAKE concept for this story is that because Elon does some business in China, that he is very conflicted and would immediately go to top Chinese officials and ‘spill the beans,’” Trump continued in another post.

But Musk does have connections and business interests in China that critics have argued should disqualify him from such a powerful role in Trump’s White House.

Despite declining sales around the globe, Tesla has retained a stronghold on the Chinese market. The company’s Shanghai “gigafactory” is one of its biggest, and singularly accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global sales in 2023. Musk has also developed unusual connections with several Chinese officials and was tasked by Russian President Vladimir Putin to limit his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan “as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

And all of Musk’s goodwill towards China has provided him with a remarkably cushy relationship with the foreign country. In mid-January, Bloomberg and the Journal reported that Chinese officials were reportedly open to selling TikTok to Musk, despite reports from China’s commerce ministry that the country would “firmly oppose” the sale of the massively popular video sharing app.

Musk’s clear dependence on the Chinese market, as well as his willingness to acquiesce to the country’s geopolitical stances regarding Taiwan, has sounded the alarms amongst American critics—on both sides of the aisle.

In a letter to newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in January—before Musk was appointed by Trump as a special government employee—Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden warned that Musk’s business operations in China were a fundamental conflict of interest that should prohibit the billionaire from accessing sensitive data and government secrets.

But none of that mattered to Trump as he ranted about the Times story to his followers. Instead, he spent part of his morning referring to one of the story’s reporters, Maggie Haberman, as “Maggot Hagerman,” while attempting to discredit her via far-right-minded strawman arguments. He also attacked the notion of anonymous sources, a longstanding practice that is protected by the U.S. Constitution, a document that was adopted due to the anonymous efforts of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, who jointly wrote under the pen name “Publius” while publishing the Federalist Papers.

“The Fake News is the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE … And Elon is NOT BEING BRIEFED ON ANYTHING CHINA BY THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR!!!” the president posted.

Shortly afterward, a Pentagon spokesman had come out with the department’s own rejection of the Times story, which sourced several unnamed Pentagon officials in its reporting.

“That is completely fake,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told Fox News, holding up a printed copy of the article while swearing that the White House is focused on Trump’s “peace through strength” agenda. “This is egregious, this is fake.”