Musk and America PAC Agree to Settle Voter-Giveaway Lawsuits Without Disclosing Terms

Elon Musk and America PAC have agreed to settle two proposed class actions over the 2024 $1 million voter giveaway, but the deal still requires court approval and its terms remain undisclosed. That advances the cases toward procedural closure without telling the people whose signatures and personal information were solicited what, if anything, the defendants agreed to pay or change.

The dispute concerns more than a prize that may or may not have been awarded as advertised. The Arizona plaintiffs said Musk and America PAC persuaded voters in seven swing states to sign a petition supporting the US Constitution by promising $1 million a day to randomly selected signatories. The Verge described the public offer as a daily prize for a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state. The petition was therefore presented as the route to access a valuable benefit, while the petition was associated with America PAC.

That arrangement is placed under sharper scrutiny by a statement attributed to Chris Gober, identified as an America PAC representative, during a court hearing. Gober told the judge, “The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance … We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.” That account conflicts with Musk’s public description of random drawings. The available reporting does not include a hearing transcript or establish whether Gober was describing a different stage or selection process, so it does not by itself resolve the legal claims. It does establish why the selection method was central to the lawsuits rather than a peripheral dispute over advertising language.

The plaintiffs said they would not have signed the required petition had they known the selection was not random. They also accused Musk and America PAC of using the petition to obtain user data, saying it placed no limits on the PAC’s use or sale of collected personal information and gave no additional information about planned data use. Those assertions describe a concrete exchange: signers gave up a choice about whether to participate, according to their account, in reliance on a representation about their chance of receiving money, while the PAC’s reported data terms left the value and future use of what it collected unclear. Musk and America PAC denied the allegations.

That denial means the settlement cannot be treated as a finding that fraud or unlawful data use occurred. But it does not answer the transparency problem created by the parties’ notification of a settlement without disclosing its amount, obligations, releases or treatment of the data issue. The public need not presume liability to conclude that an undisclosed agreement is an inadequate accountability answer when the central question is whether a petition and personal-data collection were conditioned on a prize represented as random while the PAC’s representative described the recipients as predetermined. Musk and America PAC may secure a path out of the litigation, subject to the judge’s approval, but the lack of publicly disclosed terms leaves the signers and the public with procedural closure instead of an explanation of how their information and consent were treated.