Musk Puts Himself at Center Stage in Wisconsin Court Election - Gaslighting the heck out of the MAGA crowd.

Elon Musk campaigned on Sunday in Green Bay for a state Supreme Court candidate he has spent lavishly to support — but who did not attend his event.

After taking the stage wearing an iconic Wisconsin cheesehead hat, Elon Musk laid out why he supports the Republican in Tuesday’s high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court race — and why he awarded million-dollar checks to two Wisconsinites who signed an America PAC petition opposing “partisan” judges.

“It’s to call attention” to the important race, he told the crowd of about 2,000 gathered in a standing-room-only room at the KI Convention Center, just a few miles from Lambeau Field.

He brought a billionaire friend, $1 million checks and a Packers cheesehead hat. A pastor prayed for him. A superfan begged him for a follow on X.

“It’s a super big deal,” Musk said of the race, acknowledging the contest might affect “the entire destiny of humanity” in part because of the ripple effect that could affect the 2026 congressional races.

Musk took the stage after the state Supreme Court refused to block his effort to give out the million-dollar checks. On Saturday, Wisconsin’s Democratic Attorney General Joshua Kaul had asked the state’s high court to halt the giveaways after two lower state courts declined to do so.

The giveaways have drawn criticism for potentially violating election laws that bar giveaways in order to persuade voters.

The election is the most expensive judicial race in American history, with more than $80 million spent on both sides so far. Musk has put in about $18 million — drawing criticism for getting involved after his Tesla car company filed a lawsuit challenging a Wisconsin law that is preventing the company from opening dealerships.

Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel faces Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, who’s backed by Democrats in a contest that would determine the balance of the court and could affect how Wisconsin addresses abortion, congressional maps and labor issues in the coming years.

The election is also a confidence test on what President Donald Trump and Musk are doing so far in the new administration to revamp government.

Elon Musk was the star of a 2,000-person rally on Sunday night in Wisconsin — ostensibly for the conservative candidate in a closely watched state judicial race — just 36 hours before polls open on Election Day. Of course he was.

The billionaire Mr. Musk looked very much like a candidate at this rally, putting himself front and center in the final stretch of an election pitting two rivals against each other, neither of them named Elon Musk: Brad Schimel, the conservative in the race, and Susan Crawford, the liberal.

The closing moments of campaigns are highly choreographed. Mr. Musk’s visit to support Judge Schimel on the eve of the election was voluntary — Judge Schimel did not even attend the event. Mr. Musk appeared comfortable making himself the face of those closing arguments, and living with the results.

No one forced Mr. Musk to visit the state, obviously. Despite entreaties from Wisconsin Republicans, President Trump declined to make a similar trip, perhaps sensing that the race is one conservatives are likelier to lose than to win, and that the most prominent booster could get tagged with blame.

Former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, was among those hoping for a Trump visit. He said in an interview that he thought Mr. Musk was insulated to some extent from the politics of credit and finger-pointing.

“He doesn’t care,” Mr. Walker said. “It’s not like all these consultants on either side who don’t want to be pegged as losers.”

To hear Mr. Musk tell it, the stakes call for any and all interventions.

Weeks ago, Mr. Musk was only sporadically supportive of Judge Schimel, but his remarks about the race have turned existential. Mr. Musk and allied groups have spent over $20 million to support him, and he framed Tuesday’s election in nothing less than apocalyptic terms.

“What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives — that is why it is so significant,” Mr. Musk said, referring to the key role that the court could play in congressional redistricting. “And whichever party controls the House to a significant degree controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”

At a highly produced town hall in Green Bay, already sporting more Packers paraphernalia than normal ahead of the city’s hosting of the N.F.L. draft next month, Mr. Musk pushed voter turnout. Republicans believe the key to victory revolves around turning out what Mr. Walker said were about 200,000 Trump voters who are unlikely to vote in an off-month and off-year election. Mr. Musk, despite any anger he stirs up among liberals, is popular among conservatives.

Some in the Green Bay crowd wore Musk paraphernalia and said they wanted an up-close look at someone they had followed for over a decade. “I’m here for Musk,” said Michael Labarbera, a 25-year-old who installs solar panels, in a DOGE hat he bought online. John Rosner, a retiree, sported a different Musk hat, bearing the Boring Company name, and said he was here “basically to meet Elon,” calling this moment “the closest I’ll ever get to him.”

Robert Cool, an 81-year-old retiree who was seated in an empty row to the side of the auditorium as he nursed an injury from a fall, said he had decided to make Mr. Musk’s event the first political rally he had attended in his life. A Trump rally, he said, “wasn’t as precise.”

“I wasn’t needed; this one, I felt, I need to be here,” said Mr. Cool, who has been bothered by the attacks on Tesla, which Mr. Musk himself complained about Sunday. “I support Musk more than I have anyone else in politics.”

Mr. Musk is known for his belief in himself, and he plainly enjoys the encounters with voters who believe in him. To those in attendance, he is a hero even more so than the last time Mr. Musk was on a similar rock-star tour, in Pennsylvania all of five months ago.

This is the flip side to the blame game. Should Judge Schimel win, Mr. Musk’s activity will surely be given a tremendous amount of credit.

Other Republican groups that might be expected to spend money to support the conservative candidate kept to the sidelines. Mr. Musk’s super PAC has waged an ambitious ground game, and a nonprofit previously backed by Mr. Musk spent millions of dollars on television ads that it claims helped Mr. Schimel close the gap. Mr. Musk’s defenders like Mr. Walker believe that this race was made a winnable race only thanks to Mr. Musk’s spending.

Mr. Musk has also brought publicity. A million-dollar sweepstakes for signing a petition — and, for 12 hours, a questionable plan to open the sweepstakes only to Wisconsin residents who had already voted — broke through the saturation of the news cycle in this state. (Just before the rally began, the state’s Supreme Court declined to halt the sweepstakes.)

And so, as he did in Pennsylvania during the general election last year, Mr. Musk on Sunday brought out oversize checks to hand out to winners. He trotted out one of his closest friends, Antonio Gracias, to deliver a presentation on what Mr. Gracias called “outrageous” fraud in Social Security. And that was all after he took the stage donning a foam cheesehead hat before signing it and tossing it into the crowd.

The showman does all this even as he concedes that Judge Schimel may very well lose. As Mr. Musk wrapped up his remarks before beginning an extensive question-and-answer session, headgear was once again top of mind.

“We’ve got to pull a rabbit out of the hat — next level,” he said, retelling Judge Schimel’s standing in betting prediction markets. “We actually have to have a steady stream of rabbits out of the hat, like it’s an arc of rabbits flying through the air, and then landing in a voting booth.”

https://www.youtube.com/live/7ETb3RzLqXQ?si=xH9XUdOZYlXP7zYr

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Elon Musk is one of illegal immigration’s harshest critics. He once described his past immigration status as a ‘gray area’

Musk’s critiques of illegal immigration have become a prominent part of his online presence. And he’s an increasingly powerful force shaping and amplifying conversations around the issue — especially since his 2022 takeover of Twitter, now known as X, and given his huge audience on the platform.

Immigration is a top topic on voters’ minds heading into the 2024 presidential election, and it was a major focal point of the August 12 conversation Musk hosted on X with former President Donald Trump.

The tech magnate’s more than 195 million followers on X frequently see him sharing posts endorsing conspiracy theories that claim the Biden administration has deliberately allowed undocumented immigrants to cross the border to gain political advantage. It’s also common to see posts referring to his own background as an immigrant and advocating for increased legal immigration to the US.

But it’s far less common to hear Musk talking about a chapter of his family’s immigration story that’s been described by his younger brother in several interviews — an anecdote that raises questions about the billionaire tech tycoon’s own immigration status when he was starting his first company in the United States.

Kimbal Musk: ‘We were illegal immigrants’

Elon Musk, 53, was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and moved to Canada shortly before his 18th birthday, acquiring citizenship there through his mother, a Canadian citizen. According to numerous biographies and profiles of him published in recent years, he had an enterprising spirit from a young age and his sights set on immigrating to the United States.

It’s been more than three decades since Musk came to the US in 1992 for his junior year as a transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, he’s founded several high-profile Silicon Valley startups. And today he’s the CEO of Tesla Motors, the CEO of SpaceX and the chairman and chief technology officer of X. Forbes estimates his net worth at nearly $270 billion, placing him atop the magazine’s real-time billionaires list.

But his first company’s origins were humble.

He’s described its early days in numerous speechesand interviews — as has his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, a cofounder of the startup that set them both on a path to success in the United States.

In 1995, Musk moved to Palo Alto, California, where he planned to begin a Ph.D. program at Stanford. But shortly after the school year started, according to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, Musk decided he’d rather capitalize on the emerging dotcom market and focus on founding a company with Kimbal.

During 2013 remarks at the Milken Institute Global Conference, an annual gathering of business executives and thought leaders, the brothers described details they’ve often shared about how they kept living expenses low by eating at Jack in the Box — and by living at their office.

“It was cheaper to rent the office than to rent an apartment. So we just rented the office, and slept in the office, and showered at the YMCA,” Elon Musk recalled, drawing laughs from the crowd.

At the 2013 event, the brothers also touched on a topic they’ve discussed less frequently in public: their immigration status during the company’s founding.

In early 1996, their startup, an early online city guide and mapping tool, got a $3 million infusion from venture capitalists. The investors soon found themselves surprised, according to Kimbal Musk’s account captured in a video of the 2013 event posted on the Milken Institute’s YouTube page.

“When they did fund us,” Kimbal Musk recalled, “they realized that we were illegal immigrants.”

“Well…” Elon Musk interjected.

“Yes, we were,” Kimbal Musk pushed back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T55CcN5c5as

Video of the remarks shows Elon Musk laughing as he jumped in with a different interpretation: “I’d say it was a gray area.”

He didn’t elaborate, and it’s unclear what Elon Musk meant by that characterization. The Musk brothers haven’t responded to CNN’s requests for comment on the exchange, nor to reports earlier this year quoting it on the tech website Gizmodoand in The Los Angeles Times.

Other accounts they’ve shared in public, and descriptions in biographies of the billionaire entrepreneur, don’t specify what kind of visas they had when founding the company or at later points — key details that would reveal what requirements they would have needed to meet to maintain a legal status in the US.

Two biographies of Musk, Isaacson’s eponymous tome and Ashlee Vance’s 2015 “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” state that investors in the startup went on to help both brothers obtain visas.

It’s unclear what kind of visa Elon Musk had when the brothers and their friend Greg Kouri started the company eventually dubbed Zip2, and what path he went on to take to become a legal resident and citizen of the United States.

How experts interpret Elon Musk’s ‘gray area’ description

According to Isaacson’s biography and an Esquire magazine profile of Musk, he became a US citizen in 2002 — 10 years after he arrived in the country — in a ceremony at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds.

But exactly what steps he took to reach that point after his years as a student are unclear.

In response to questions from CNN, US Citizenship and Immigration Services says the agency can’t “share, confirm, or deny immigration information about specific individuals” due to privacy considerations.

Elon Musk has not responded to CNN’s questions about his immigration journey.

It is remarkable to observe that the South African shadow president, who has never obtained a work visa for the United States, stands on stage misleading and gaslighting the American public throughout his entire speech. He has engaged in deceptive practices and bribery to secure his stay here, build his ultimate wealth and power and now took over the White House. Where is Tom Homan & ICE when we need them?? How is everyone looking away when it comes to the richest ( NAZI) in the world??

REBEL, REVOLT, RESIST ‼️

HAPPY MONDAY

Love 💕 NIKA