Elon Musk says U.S. is ‘at a fork in the road of destiny’ at Harrisburg event

As part of a series of town hall events across Pennsylvania, tech mogul-turned-Republican megadonor Elon Musk gave a wide-ranging, two-hour talk to roughly 1,500 attendees at the Harrisburg-based Life Center church on Saturday.

Musk’s speech touched on the significance of Pennsylvania this election cycle. “Pennsylvania really is the linchpin in this election,” he said. “How Pennsylvania goes, I think, is how the election goes.” His discourse ranged from the national debt to immigration policy to reducing regulations and reforming the federal government.

Musk also discussed the impetus behind forming his super PAC, America PAC, and getting directly involved in the 2024 presidential election. “We want safe cities, we want secure borders ... we want less government overreach,” he said. "With a Trump presidency, we have a real opportunity to reduce the size of government, to have sensible regulation and really free the American people to do what they want to do,” he said, adding that “the reason I'm doing this is because I really think we're at a fork in the road of destiny.”

Musk, the world’s richest person and a driving force behind companies such as Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has recently turned his focus to U.S. politics via America PAC, which says on its website that it is dedicated to promoting conservative policies and bringing Trump back to the Oval Office.

October campaign finance filings with the Federal Election Commission show that Musk has donated nearly $75 million of his own wealth to America PAC, which has spent more than $73.5 million in the calendar year, including over $65.8 million in the third quarter of 2024.

According to his PAC’s most recent campaign finance filing, it has spent more than $68 million this year in support of Trump’s reelection bid. Part of its work includes efforts to hire workers to boost voter registration and turnout in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. The PAC has advertised roles with pay starting at $30 per hour, with the opportunity for performance bonuses.

The organization has also said it will pay people $47 for each person they get to sign a petition indicating their support for the First and Second Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Musk said Saturday that he will be giving away $1 million each day from now until Election Day to a random town hall attendee who signs the America PAC petition; on Saturday, he awarded $1 million to an attendee at the Harrisburg town hall, prompting much applause from the audience.

In an Oct. 16 post on X, Musk outlined how a person could attend one of his town hall events: “If you’d like to attend one of my talks, there’s no attendance fee. You just need to have signed our petition supporting free speech & right to bear arms & have voted in this election,” he wrote, later clarifying that the person must have voted in Pennsylvania. 

Election law experts, including UCLA law professor Rick Hasen, have questioned whether Musk’s America PAC town halls run afoul of federal election laws. According to a report from Popular Information, Hasen noted that a federal statute, 18 U.S.C. section 597, means that “in a federal election, one cannot give anything of value in exchange for someone agreeing to turn out to vote.” Hasen went on to write in a blog post: “Just like one cannot give out free ice cream or car washes or concert tickets, one cannot give out free admission to hear a speech by a tech (entrepreneur).”

However, attendance criteria for Musk’s Saturday town hall in Harrisburg did not mention whether attendees must have already voted in order to attend; it only required that attendees must be registered voters in Pennsylvania and must have signed the America PAC petition.

Musk has not shied away from making and amplifying controversial and demonstrably false statements during the runup to Election Day. In recent months, Musk has shared debunked information about elections – he falsely claimed at his Thursday town hall that Philadelphia uses Dominion voting machines (the city actually uses the ExpressVote XL voting machine made by Election Systems & Software). 

Officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency have also accused Musk of spreading false information about the government’s response to Hurricane Helene after he claimed that the agency “actively blocked” donations to disaster victims. The agency also disputed Musk’s claims that immigrants were depleting disaster funds, stating in an Oct. 8 release: “No disaster relief funding was diverted to support migrants. FEMA’s budget is dedicated to responding to disasters. No money is being diverted from helping people before, during and after disasters.”

Musk, in interviews, in posts on X and in his town hall remarks, has also backed the creation of a federal Department of Government Efficiency, which he refers to as DOGE, a nod to the online Doge meme and the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

“The opportunity to reduce government waste is actually, I think, easy, because there's so much of it,” Musk said about the potential for a department focused on improving the efficiency of the federal government. “The Department of Government Efficiency is going to face a target-rich environment for reducing costs.”

Labor leaders with the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO ripped Musk over his labor record ahead of his visit to Harrisburg. Maurice Cobb, the secretary-treasurer of the statewide labor organization, suggested that Musk wants to scale back labor protections and accused the tech mogul of trying to buy votes in Pennsylvania.

 “I understand what Musk gets out of this. He’s working hand-in-glove with other billionaires to try to dismantle the NLRB and roll back labor protections. What these men share is a disdain for labor protections that benefit workers,” Cobb said. “When they get together, they laugh about firing workers who go on strike. I’ve never met a struggling worker – union or not – who thought being fired was funny. Pennsylvanians are sick of out-of-state and out-of-touch billionaires trying to buy our votes.”

Musk endorsed Trump in this year’s presidential race on July 13, shortly after a failed assassination attempt on the former president at a campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania.