Musk pledges $1 million daily awards to pro-Trump petition signers

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has announced that he will award $1 million each day to a swing state resident who signs his online petition in support of the US Constitution until the US presidential election on November 5.

Musk launched the petition and a referral offer in early October, having initially pledged a $47 payout to everyone who gets one registered swing-state voter to sign it. The petition on defending free speech and gun rights is aimed at bringing in potential voters for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The CEO of Tesla and owner of X (formerly Twitter) kicked off his give-away campaign on Saturday by handing the first check for one million dollars to an attendee of his rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, while urging people to vote for the former US president.

“By the way, John had no idea. So anyway, you’re welcome,” Musk said as he gave the check to a man named John Dreher.

With just over two weeks before the election, the latest polls suggest that Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is outpacing Trump in three battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

One of the two major US political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, dominates most of the states of the country. However, voters are more evenly divided in the ‘swing’ or ‘battleground’ states, making them key to winning.

Nationally, the current Vice President leads the former head of state by two points among likely voters, as per polls conducted by the New York Times.

Musk, who had previously positioned himself as politically neutral, publicly endorsed the Republican nominee shortly after the failed assassination attempt on Trump on July 13. The former president has promised to create a new government post called ‘secretary of cost-cutting’ tailored specifically for Musk if he wins.

Earlier this month, Musk, whose current net worth stands at more than $247 billion on the Forbes list, said that he had donated $75 million to the America Political Action Committee, or America PAC, which he had founded himself back in July. The group’s primary focus is on recruiting canvassers and placing digital ads to get Trump supporters to vote.