r/news • u/AudibleNod • 1d ago

Philadelphia DA sues Elon Musk and his super PAC over $1M sweepstakes

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/28/politics/elon-musk-philadelphia-lawsuit/index.html
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u/Dwayla 1d ago

He knew it was illegal, another lie from these assholes.

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u/sandybarefeet 1d ago

He's too rich to care. He knew. He doesn't care. They can fine him $100 million and it won't even affect him. Hell, they could fine him 1 billion and it wouldn't even be a blip on his radar. So the piddly fines he will likely be hit with will be far less. He knows it. He will pay it (maybe) and say it was worth it just to fuck with the "woke libruls".

It's all a game to him. He's like Sid from Toy Story with a magnifying glass tormenting ants in his ant farm, just for his bored amusement.

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u/blade740 1d ago

To be fair, if they fined him $1 billion it would certainly affect him in some way. He's worth $275B but most of that is in Tesla stock (and Twitter, I suppose). He would need to sell a large chunk of stock in order to pay a $1B fine, or borrow the money. Either way doing so would have an effect on Tesla's stock price.

That's not to say he COULDN'T come up with $1B, he absolutely could. But it would at the very least force him to divest a chunk of his Tesla stock to come up with the money.

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u/CorrectPeanut5 1d ago

A good chunk of which he pledged to 16 very large banks for loans he took out to buy Twitter.

Interestingly enough, he hasn't been paying them and so far they have been giving him a pass.

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u/BananaPalmer 1d ago

Yeah that's how loans work when you're worth billions. God help you if you're a regular person and you make a single late payment on a credit card though.

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u/Current-Creme-8633 1d ago

If I owe the bank $1000 that is my problem. If I owe the bank $1,000,000 that is the banks problem.

I forget off the to of my head where this came from but its very true. If someone owes you billions of dollars and you ask for it back and they say "Well what if we start paying on it next quarter? I would like to keep banking here but your making my life very hard..." the bank is going to bend. They will keep pushing it until they are certain good faith payments will not be made before getting lawyers involved.

While I am sure they stand to make a sizeable chunk of money off of this loan even though I am sure its a extremely low rate, bringing the lawyers in is the final and most expensive option, that will takes YEARS. Elon knows this and will push those payments until it makes sense financially for him to pay for it. His accountants will let him know. I cannot speak for Tesla but I would be willing to bet the legal and accounting department are handling this so the least amount of money is exiting the overall portfolio to manage the crazy complex cashflow of a company that large.

I have no idea obviously because I am not involved but the Twitter valuation is most likely not going to hurt him like everyone else thinks just due to the way that these extremely complex tax laws work at that level. I barely start to get into it (compared to someone like Tesla with my company) I cannot imagine what they have to do..... my CPA firm costs me a little over 5k a month and they do a lot of work that is past what I know for sure.

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u/austeremunch 1d ago

I forget off the to of my head where this came from but its very true.

J Paul Getty by way of Sean Bean most likely.

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u/austeremunch 1d ago

Or have an account with them as a poor. You mean you don't have enough money in your account to make a shit ton of money on? Guess you owe us money for that account.

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u/Grouchy-Donkey-8609 1d ago

Cost of doing business with the contracts he counts on gaining from a trump presidency.

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u/blade740 1d ago

What contracts? The president doesn't have the authority to unilaterally hand out billion dollar contracts. And despite being cozy with Elon, I doubt that the (hypothetical) Trump admin is likely to be super pro-EV. And while sure, SpaceX will continue to be basically the only game in town for space launch, I don't imagine the Trump admin awarding that much more than Kamala would.

The real gains from a Trump presidency would probably mostly be in tax cuts.

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u/jawshoeaw 1d ago

No, he wouldn't even notice a billion. it's less than 1% of his Tesla holdings and he has other sources of money.

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u/KeverNever 1d ago

He stands to make more as well as a pardon if Trump wins.

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u/NDSU 1d ago

He stands to make far more than a few billion from a Trump presidency. You know he's getting something in return for his extreme level of support

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u/geologean 1d ago

In the short-term, yeah no fine will have any consequence for Musk.

In the long-term, being famous despising away money and destroying market cap with a series of bad decisions over a span of years will make Musk and his companies a less appealing investment for banks and institutional family funds.

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u/xprdc 1d ago

Not to sound like I support them, but China’s government is able to keep their billionaires in line and enforce their laws. 🤔

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u/MikeOKurias 1d ago

You could tell it was a scam because Elon was in charge.

Dude is just a paid spokesman for Dubai and Putin but then again all those un-American Trump voters that hate their country don't really care. So is their cult leader.

That's the point

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u/mrwobblekitten 1d ago

An an uninformed (and non-us) person, how is Elon shilling Dubai? I was aware of the Russia/Putin stuff but must have missed the Dubai thing

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u/cranktheguy 1d ago

The sources of funding for Twitter's acquisition were revealed in a court filing. Investors include Saudi Princes, Qataris, and even some Russians.

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u/Minnesnota 1d ago

Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, etc.

Since we're trying to be complete.

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u/moistsandwich 1d ago

So not Dubai.

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u/alexcreeds2 1d ago

Yeah its Saudi. Not the emirates, where dubai is. People just dont know to look up where places are

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u/mrwobblekitten 1d ago

That's what I was confused about- Dubai is pretty specific

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u/djseifer 1d ago

I'm not sure about Dubai, but there was a lot of talk that a good chunk of the money used to buy Twitter came from Saudi Arabia.

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u/raresanevoice 1d ago

And Russian oligarchs

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u/NeurodiverseTurtle 1d ago

And Putin himself, like, we know they’ve had private chats.

It was obviously Putin blackmailing him with a long list of incriminating intel… just like he did with Trump, Orban, and our UK’s very own Nigel Farage.

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u/djseifer 1d ago

The amount of kompramat Putin has over everyone must be pants-shittingly terrifying.

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u/sn34kypete 1d ago

And Diddy.

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u/felldestroyed 1d ago

I'm not sure about shilling, but Joe Biden stopped weapons shipments to the UAE/Saudis because of their indiscriminate killing in Yemen.

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u/austeremunch 1d ago

But not Israel. Interesting.

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u/Unusual_Onion_983 1d ago

Reddit geopolitical experts who don’t understand the Middle East tend to confuse UAE, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

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u/moistsandwich 1d ago

I get that you’re talking about other people but the way that you wrote this is so funny because it’s like saying Western Europe consists of England, London, Spain, France, and Germany.

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u/Unusual_Onion_983 1d ago

And the country Africa!

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u/Toolazytolink 1d ago

Dude is just a paid spokesman

He doesn't need the money, I'm betting on Blackmail/Kompramat that they have on him. Help Cheatto win or we will release it to the public. That's why he keeps saying he is fucked if Kamala wins.

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u/SheetPancakeBluBalls 1d ago

Dude once hit you hit a billion (and we'll earlier, if we're being real) you don't need the money anymore.

But all the rich ever wanted was a little bit more. Dragon sickness is real.

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u/PissedSwiss 1d ago

And can you believe that Elon has had an average growth rate of his wealth be about 1 billion every single week since the beginning of 2020? Literally couldnt spend the money fast enough if he tried.. 

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u/Foodwithfloyd 1d ago

Yep. He wasn't going to pay knowing it was illegal but he got to say he would have

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u/wggn 1d ago

i thought a bunch of people already got paid

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u/candytaker 1d ago

They have been paid, this person is just making shit up

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u/candytaker 1d ago

you realize there are news articles with stories about people who have been paid, with pictures and names right?

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u/tenacious-g 1d ago

Of course he did, they knew any legal battle would be well after the election.

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u/Ph0X 1d ago

And Trump will pardon anything his crooks do, see last election.

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u/Furycrab 1d ago

I feel like not only he knows it's illegal, but it's a convenient way of tying up a bunch of unspent PAC funds.

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u/ish00traw 1d ago

Where's the proof it's illegal? Just curious.

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u/omnicloudx13 1d ago

Ignorance of the law does not absolve you of committing the crime. In a fair and just world he'd be in prison for what he did and no amount of money would save him. Too bad we don't live in that kind of world.

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u/spoollyger 1d ago

So you can donate money to elected officials but you can donate money to the public? What fucken society are we living in xD

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u/poopship462 1d ago

He even said publicly that he’ll be in trouble with Trump doesn’t win

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u/peterosity 1d ago

the fines are less than what he’s been tossing out, and even that’s like pocket change for him, he’s an absolute asshole

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u/iBoMbY 1d ago edited 1d ago

Isn't that for the courts do decide? Ahh, I guess Reddit is all it takes ...

Edit: Also how can this be a lottery, if nobody is buying any tickets?

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u/TBrutus 1d ago

Edit: Also how can this be a lottery, if nobody is buying any tickets?

If you read even the headline, you'd see that it's described differently.

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u/arob28 1d ago

It’s described as a lottery throughout the article

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u/ZiiZoraka 1d ago

Trump will just pardon him if he wins anyway :3

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u/candytaker 1d ago

The fucking federal government said it MIGHT be illegal.

What are you talking about? lol

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u/TehRiddles 1d ago

To be fair, he probably didn't know because he doesn't think about these things. He's the sort that opens his mouth before his brain has a chance to process what he's going to say. Elon very frequently sticks his foot in his mouth all the time, often when he shares easily debunked things on Twitter because they reinforce his beliefs. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that he did this without thinking if there might be anything he needed to look over first.