It’s Find Out Time for Musk

The law is beginning to catch up to the right-wing billionaire and cyberbully.

Photo courtesy of Forbes

I’ve been following the strange, red-pilled descent of Elon Musk for years, but lately even I have been surprised by just how much trouble he is managing to get himself into. These past weeks alone have seen several instances where Musk has come under investigation or has been named in an enforcement or even criminal action. 

And all of it is due to his ill-advised foray into politics, his gigantic ego and his big, stupid mouth.

Today, I want to review five of the legal matters where Musk now finds himself under intense scrutiny or even named as a defendant or in a complaint. As his legal problems continue to mount, and his businesses continue to flounder, I can’t help but see Musk and Trump as very similar villains in comparable morality plays. 

He should have stayed out of politics

Musk waded into politics even after saying he would stay out of them. Specifically, he recently created a political action committee called America PAC and dedicated it to helping Trump get reelected. He announced his full-throated endorsement for the ex-president following the attempt on Trump’s life back in July.

But Musk doesn’t have any experience running a PAC, and he may come to regret dumping millions into one and just turning the lights on. As I wrote about last week, Musk’s America PAC was caught bait and switching users in the swing states with ads that falsely claimed it was registering them to vote, when in fact their personal data was being collected for later targeting. 

That sounds a lot like election fraud, and within hours of a report from CNBC on these possibly illegal activities, a watchdog group in North Carolina called American Muckrakers filed suit to stop him there, and the state’s election board is now investigating. Two days later, the Michigan Secretary of State announced it was conducting an investigation for election fraud.

It’s to early to say whether the investigations will yield evidence of intentional misconduct. But the good news is, Musk is now under heavy scrutiny for his activities, and it’s unlikely America PAC can get away with pulling anything like this going forward.

Go F*ck Yourselves

I wrote yesterday about the technical glitches and the boring yet casually horrifying nature of the Twitter Spaces event Musk set up between himself and Donald Trump. I noted that Musk had already been hit with millions in fines in July for violating the EU’s social media laws, and that prior to the livestream, the body had issued another warning to Musk against amplifying misinformation during the Trump broadcast.

Musk responded, “Take a big step back and literally f*ck your own face.” 

This isn’t likely to cause the desired result. The last time Musk told an important group to do the same, it was his own advertisers, whom he told to “go f*ck yourselves” back in November of 2023. Twitter has been bleeding money ever since Musk took over, and now he is actually suing those same advertisers for, as he claims, illegally conspiring to boycott his platform. Included among the defendants are global giants such as Mars and CVS Health. 

Advertisers fled Twitter because Musk allowed right wing hate groups, racist speech, misinformation, and Nazi and white nationalist propaganda to spread unchecked. Call me crazy, but suing the very companies you want back on your platform as advertisers doesn’t sound like a winning long-term plan.

An illegal livestream

Musk runs a PAC, and there are rules about not intertwining the PAC’s operations with those of the candidate it backs. There are also limits to how much a company or individual can contribute to a campaign, and rules around reporting such contributions, including in-kind donations.

That’s why a Democratic PAC, End Citizens United, filed an FEC complaint over Musk’s illegal in-kind contribution in the form of a Trump livestream watched by over a million viewers.

“The Donald Trump-Elon Musk campaign rally hosted on X wasn’t just an incoherent diatribe of lies marred by technical difficulties, it was a blatantly illegal corporate contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign,” End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller said in a statement. “This brazen corporate contribution undermines campaign finance laws and would set a dangerous precedent for unfettered, direct corporate engagement in campaigns. The FEC must investigate this corporate-funded campaign event and hold Trump, his campaign, and X Corp. accountable,” she added.

While there is a “media” exemption in the election laws, Twitter doesn’t qualify for that, the group argued, because of the considerable resources, bandwidth and staff support the company provided, as well as the time of the company’s owner to participate in the livestream personally.

An illegal threat to workers

During the livestream, many were struck by how brazen Musk and Trump were when discussing U.S. labor and what to do in the face of striking workers. In particular, there was this exchange that suggested illegal behavior:

“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk. “I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump said. “You walk in, you say, You want to quit? They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.”

The moment raised many questions, including whether Musk had ever spoken privately to Trump about how he illegally fired striking workers, perhaps even when Musk visited him in Mar-a-Lago this spring and pledged his financial support. Trump apparently got the vignette from somewhere; Musk said “yeah” and laughed at Trump’s description encouragingly without ever disputing it.

The UAW moved quickly and filed a formal complaint with federal labor regulators. “Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk,” said UAW president Shawn Fain. “Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal and totally predictable from these two clowns.”

As Professor Sanjukta Paul of the University of Michigan noted, the charges could “chill” efforts at collective action by workers, including union organizing or simply getting together to improve working conditions. “You’re approvingly describing, you’re wholeheartedly commending the blatant violation of our main federal labor statute,” she said. “It would constitute interference with protected rights.”

Musk is no stranger to government enforcement actions. In June, eight former workers at Musk’s SpaceX sued, alleging Musk ordered them fired for challenging rampant sexual harassment and a hostile “Animal House”-style work environment.

And as The Guardian noted, 

Musk has previously been reprimanded for comments made on X, formerly Twitter. In 2021, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordered Musk to delete a tweet in which he threatened workers for trying to organize a union, ruling the tweet violated federal labor law. Musk is still appealing the ruling, while in separate cases he has presented arguments against labor law violations that claim the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional.

The cyberbully

There was perhaps no bigger story in the Olympics than the horrifying and false attacks upon the gender of female boxer Imane Khelif, who then triumphantly went on to win the gold medal, despite the wave of online harassment she endured. 

Many wrongfully accused Khelif of being a man, ignoring the fact that she was born female, is listed as female in her passport, and has never identified as transgender. Chief among the amplifiers of the false claims were Elon Musk and author J.K. Rowling, two billionaires with highly warped views on gender identity who predictably allowed their bigotry toward trans people to bleed into blatant misgendering of women athletes like Khelif.

For context, Musk recently dead named his trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, who he claimed was “killed” by the “woke mind virus.” Wilson fired back in an epic post on Threads, a competitor site to Twitter, and it is really worth reading. She also has described Musk’s puff-piece biography as “genuinely defamatory” about her. (That’s code for “I’m going to sue.”)

With respect to Khelif, Musk amplified to his 194 million followers the false claims of professional anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, who had posted a picture of Khelif with the claim, “Men don’t belong in women’s sports.” Musk retweeted that post, writing “Absolutely.”

Yesterday, Musk and Rowling were both named in a complaint filed by Khelif and posted to the public prosecutor’s office in Paris on August 9. Her attorney, Nabil Boudi, added that “Trump tweeted, so whether or not he is named in our lawsuit, he will inevitably be looked into as part of the prosecution.”

Boudi explained that the lawsuit was filed against X to “ensure that the prosecution has all the latitude to be able to investigate against all people.” He noted, “If the case goes to court, they will stand trial.”

While the lawsuit was filed in France, Boudi insisted that “it could target personalities overseas,” and prosecutors can make requests for assistance from other countries.

Those found guilty of cyberbullying under French law can be subjected to fines, but also prison time of up to five years, though that is very unlikely in this instance. Rowling, who seems never to shut up about gender identity or cease attacking the trans community, reportedly has not posted about Khelif or trans issues in over a week.

While it’s understandable to assume that men as rich and as powerful as Elon Musk will not be deterred by investigations, lawsuits and enforcement actions, his legal woes are in fact beginning to mount. And as we saw with Donald Trump, these can begin to take a massive toll and pin him down in certain cases. And because these cases are brought by ordinary citizens and prosecutors, they rankle men like Musk and Trump even more, who are normally beyond the reach of the public and accountability in nearly every way.

Musk may soon find out that he cannot simply do and say whatever he wants without facing legal consequences when he runs afoul of laws, whether in the U.S. or in the E.U. In high profile cases, as the Khelif case will likely be, his very fame and fortune may operate against him as authorities endeavor to prove to their constituents that the law applies to everyone, no matter their station.