IIt has become a sort of trademark. When Elon Musk strutted on stage Saturday night for a town hall supporting Donald Trump, he waited a moment to bask in the crowd’s applause before jumping like a child, stretching his arms in the air and his T- shirt above his waist. At this he received another thunderous ovation.

For the hundreds of people gathered in the hotel ballroom in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Musk’s jump had become a symbol of his MAGA metamorphosis. It is practically broken THE Internet earlier this month when he frolicked on stage at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of an assassination attempt against him months earlier. Since then, Musk has only intensified his efforts to bring Trump back to the White House: more than 100 million dollars in his new PAC to bolster the former president in battleground Pennsylvania and barge into the Commonwealth for freewheeling Q&A sessions to become Trump enthusiasts.

On a stage adorned with a giant American flag and signs reading “Vote Early,” Musk wandered for nearly two hours over an array of curiosities mixed with right-wing talking points. The billionaire waxed poetic about his ambition to colonize other planets: “The future of civilization could depend on the creation of an autonomous city on Mars. » He spread the baseless conspiracy theory that elites are directing undocumented immigrants into swing states to vote for Democrats, calling it a “mass importation” operation. He called Kamala Harris beholden to the ruling class — which is why, he said, she wasn’t the target of a shooting like Trump. If Harris were removed from the race, he suggested, an amorphous cabal would “simply replace her with another puppet.” (Authorities found no clear political motivation in Trump’s would-be assassins.) The most striking moment of the evening was when someone asked why voters should not fear that a second Trump term would leads to democratic backsliding. Musk’s response? He denied that January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to block the peaceful transfer of power, was an attack on American democracy. “Jan. 6 was in no way a violent insurrection,” he said.

The show showed Musk’s singular role in the 2024 election: the world’s richest man, owner of one of the world’s most powerful communications platforms, deploying his vast fortune and influence to promote a presidential candidate. Trump pledged to put Musk in charge of a “government efficiency commission” that supervise the agencies that regulate its companies such as SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and X, formerly known as Twitter. But speaking to the audience in Lancaster, Musk described Trump’s candidacy as a last bastion to thwart irreversible national decline: “We are at the crossroads of destiny. »

Musk’s critics say he represents a dangerous marriage between economic and political power. “He’s abusing his power in a way that we’ve never really seen,” says Lisa Gilbert, president of the government watchdog Public Citizen. The group filed a complaint last week against Musk to the Federal Election Commission over his plan to give $1 million a day to a randomly chosen registered voter in a swing state who signs a free speech petition and gun rights. The Justice Department also reportedly warned Musk that the project could violate federal law if it amounted to a financial incentive to register to vote. When one of the attendees in Lancaster asked Musk why he hadn’t yet announced a winner that day, he brought onto the stage a large check written to a woman sitting in the audience. “You don’t have to vote,” he told her. “It would be nice if you voted, but you don’t have to.”

The controls are far from the only concern raised by critics about Elon Musk in the final days of the election. “We were very concerned about the misinformation that might arise before and after the election, when people would question the results,” Gilbert said. “Musk has positioned himself as the number one bad actor.”

For now, Musk is camped out in Pennsylvania, where the two candidates are stuck in an impasse. Trump is less than half a point ahead of the current 538 average state polls. Yet even a small margin of victory could have repercussions far beyond the nation’s fifth most populous state. “If we win Pennsylvania, we win everything,” Trump said at a rally last month. “It’s very simple.”

To do this, an allied network of pro-Trump organizations systematically sought to tilt the balance of the state in his column. Four years ago, Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes, propelling him to the White House. Since then, Republicans have pumped millions of dollars into the state for targeted voter registration and mobilization campaigns. As of March 2021, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by 630,000 in Pennsylvania. Since this month, this advance has been reduced Musk has supported the effort with his political action committee, America PAC, to which he has donated at least $118 million since July.

Learn more: Democrats Lose Ground in Swing States

In Lancaster, many of those who came to see Musk said they were drawn to him because of his so-called evangelism for free speech. “If you don’t have freedom of speech, you don’t have freedom of thought,” says Mount Joy marketing specialist Betsy Stecz, wearing a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt. In a long line outside before the event, Stecz says she follows Musk on to liberate what was previously a silent majority. “There are people who are finally saying: OK, I can raise my head and say: I am not ashamed to vote for Donald Trump.”

For Chris Hill, who runs operations for a commercial bathroom remodeling company in nearby Mechanicsburg, Musk is taking a stand against cosmopolitan elites who want to censor his language and suppress his political views. “That’s really what touches me the most,” says Hill, donning a red MAGA hat and Tesla sweatshirt. “I am a strong advocate of communication.”

Throughout Musk’s two hours on stage, he captured a mix of far-right grievances, such as immigration (despite the reports that early in his career he worked illegally in the United States as an immigrant) and in decline birth rate. “If masculinity is toxic,” he asked, “how come people who are so disturbed don’t have fathers?” » Drawing one of the loudest applause of the evening, he blasted critics who say Trump, if in office again, would rule authoritarianly. “Those who say Trump is a threat to democracy,” he said, “are a threat to democracy.”

Many people have expressed admiration for his entrepreneurial triumphs. But Musk wasn’t there to talk about his professional journey. He was there to get Trump across the finish line. In the middle of the town hall, someone walked up to the microphone and asked him for the “most helpful” and “most powerful” advice he had ever received. After a long pause, he laughed. “Vote Republican.”