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For the past few months, Elon Musk has thrown his energy and substantial wealth behind electing Donald Trump, after his official endorsement of the former president in July. With weeks to go before Election Day, the Tesla CEO has focused his attention on the pivotal battleground state of Pennsylvania, with plans to stage a series of town halls across the commonwealth.
On Thursday, Musk held the first of those solo events in Delaware County, one of the five Philadelphia “collar counties” that were key to President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Speaking onstage in the auditorium of Ridley High School in Folsom, Musk said that the future of the entire nation will be determined by the results of the election in the state. “I can’t emphasize enough that Pennsylvania is, I think, the linchpin in this election, and this election is going to decide the fate of America and, along with America, the fate of western civilization,” Musk said.
Musk played up his local connection to the state by highlighting his time attending the University of Pennsylvania. “I lived in the city for three years, I went to school here,” he said. “I know the state — I’m not some just-arrived situation.”
He used that moment to transition into a claim that crime around his former school had gotten worse in comparison to his time there in the 1990s. (Philadelphia has reported a major decline in homicides throughout the city in 2024, per the Philadelphia Inquirer.) “If you don’t put hardened criminals in jail, they will kill people. That’s what it comes down to. And, unfortunately the situation we have here is that the Democratic Party will not put hardened criminals in prison,” he said. “So, they roam free and they prey upon you and your kids and your family and your friends.”
Musk also painted a bleak picture of the state of the country, making comparisons to the dystopian films Mad Max and World War Z, the latter of which he invoked while discussing the southern border.
Though Musk urged Pennsylvania voters to vote early, he cast doubts on mail-in voting and raised long-debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Services. “When you have mail-in ballots and no proof of citizenship, it becomes almost impossible to prove cheating is the issue. There are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely,” he said in response to a question from the audience. “There’s always this question of, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County but not in a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”
During the 2020 election, Trump and his allies promoted falsehoods about Dominion, alleging it rigged its voting machines to swing the election toward Biden. The company, which settled a defamation suit with Fox News for $787.5 million, addressed Musk’s recent comments in a statement to NBC News.
“Fact: Dominion does not serve Philadelphia County. Fact: Dominion’s voting systems are already based on voter verified paper ballots. Fact: Hand counts and audits of such paper ballots have repeatedly proven that Dominion machines produce accurate results. These are not matters of opinion. They are verifiable facts,” the statement read.
One member of the audience asked Musk if he thought there was a shadow government behind the Biden-Harris administration. The Tesla CEO took a shot at Biden, saying he doesn’t have “two functioning neurons,” and revived an old insult against Harris, calling her a “puppet.”
“But it’s just obvious that Biden isn’t in charge. It’s obvious that Kamala isn’t in charge. I mean, with Kamala, they just replaced the Biden puppet with the Kamala puppet, very obviously,” he said. “And you can tell if the teleprompter stops working, then the puppet stops — breaks. And it’s like the puppet just starts looping because the teleprompter broke. I don’t have a teleprompter. I just talk like a normal human.”
Musk plans to make additional stops in Philadelphia and Harrisburg ahead of Pennsylvania’s voter-registration deadline on Monday. He has donated $75 million to his own America PAC, per NPR, which he launched in support of Trump. Trump has embraced Musk’s support, inviting him to speak at one of his campaign rallies and promising to appoint him to a government efficiency commission if reelected. According to a Bloomberg analysis, Trump has mentioned Musk 82 times since Musk endorsed him earlier this year.
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