The Elon Musk controversy Million dollar gift to voters who signed a pledge to the First and Second Amendments was not a random gift at all, and his team admitted as much.

In a hearing in a Philadelphia courtroom that lasted hours Monday, Musk’s lawyer, Chris Gober, told a judge that the $1 million was actually a “salary” that the contestants earned to be a spokesperson for the pro-Trump America PAC. Winners were pre-selected based on their “fitness to serve” and personal history, not chosen entirely by chance, which would fall under Philadelphia’s gambling law. A nice way to argue in your defense that what you did wasn’t a crime because you lied to your followers in the first place.

Chris Young, another Musk deputy, summed up the team’s defense: “The opportunity to win is different from the chance to win.” Gambling does not require any skill or ability to win and is subject to strict gambling laws. When Musk initially announced the giveaway, he explicitly said, “we’re going to award $1 million randomly.” It seemed like there were no conditions, no allegiances or “fitness to serve” required.

After Musk announced the competition, many people immediately raised questions about whether the program was legal, for various reasons. It is illegal to pay anyone to register to vote, but the contest rules required participants to be registered voters. At the very least, the plan appeared to dangle money to American citizens to entice them to register. Musk has held pro-Trump rallies in key states and critics have speculated that the giveaway was a thinly veiled way to buy undecided voters for Trump.

A sort of Mr. Beast-style contest, this whole charade risks turning politics into more of a popularity contest to see who can go the furthest and be the most “epic” for attention.

The Department of Justice would have warned the American PAC about the gift, and the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office took Musk is going to court over this.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said in court today that the so-called giveaway constituted an illegal lottery under its gambling laws and that America PAC was not adequately disclosing information to participants that he collected. “They were scammed out of their information,” Krasner testified. “Its use is almost unlimited. He used other harsh words to attack Musk, calling the charade “fraud” and “deception.” Krasner’s team noted that the America PAC made the winners sign an NDA agreeing not to talk about it, meaning that according to Team Musk’s logic, the winners were supposed to support the PAC but not mention that they had been instructed to do so.

Musk’s team defended itself by claiming that it was not at all an illegal lottery as Krasner believes, because the “winners” were actually supposed to earn money from the work. But in its closing argument, Krasner’s team said lying to his fans was not a valid defense. “They basically advertised this as a lottery. This is not a defense that “what we said is not true.”

Krasner’s team called the hiring of undisclosed spokespeople “one of the great scams of the last 50 years.”

Regardless, Musk’s team told the judge that the “giveaway” would not run beyond Tuesday.

This is a developing story and we will update this article as we learn more.