What does Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, want from Pennsylvania ... and America?

The writers behind the latest James Bond thriller have really outdone themselves. This time out for the storied 60-plus-year-old spy franchise, the supervillain with a maniacal plot for world domination doesn’t live in an elaborate ice palace carved into Antarctica or on a secret island hideaway somewhere in the South Pacific — but in a tiny two-bedroom prefabricated house in Boca Chica, Texas. Yet, his plot for a global takeover is more diabolical than ever.

After making more than $200 billion by casting himself as a planetary environmental savior, Bond’s evil nemesis uses his vast wealth to take over one of the world’s most popular communication networks and, over several years, warp its once free exchange of ideas into a platform for right-wing disinformation, including rank antisemitism, xenophobia, and increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories — in a world where everyday folks no longer know what to believe.

This is just the prelude for our antagonist throwing his pile of loot and growing influence behind an authoritarian candidate for U.S. president, hoping that by installing him in the White House, he won’t just be the world’s richest man, but also its most powerful.

OK, yes, this was another one of my half-baked jokes. No one would believe that plotline at their local cineplex. That may explain why the shell-shocked American body politic doesn’t seem to grasp that this story is actually playing out in real life, as megabillionaire Elon Musk amps up a brazen attempt to buy the American government in the election just over three weeks away.

Is it hyperbole to say that the Tesla and SpaceX founder is frantically trying to buy the election on behalf of Donald Trump? This week, the Musk-funded America PAC tweeted (after Musk stole the @America handle from another user) photos of his minions right here in Philadelphia handing out $47 in cash to voters, part of a maybe-legal-but-sketchy-anyway scheme to spread pro-Trump dollars around in critical swing states.

And Musk — who came to a rally in little Butler, Pa., last weekend to campaign with Trump with a goofy “Oh, What a Feeling!” Toyota flying leap onto the stage — has said that he all but intends to move here to the Keystone State these next few weeks if he can help Trump nail down this evenly divided state’s 19 make-or-break electoral votes.

Sources close to the America PAC leaked to reporters that Musk — who went to college in Philly at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (just like Trump, a fact that the Ivy League school’s PR team doesn’t play up for some weird reason) — plans to basically camp out here in Pennsylvania between now and Nov. 5. Sure enough, Musk showed up at Heinz Field Sunday night to watch the Steelers-Cowboys game, during which he (reportedly) picked up the phone to tell Gov. Josh Shapiro about his big ideas for investing in Pittsburgh. Musk’s same helpful aides also leaked that the South African-born billionaire is a big fan of both the Steelers and the Eagles.

Really? I mean, what could convince Pennsylvanians of your sincere love for our state more than the fact that you root for two teams whose actual fans pretty much despise each other? Or that after years of investing in low-tax, no-regulations Texas, Elon suddenly discovered — just 30 days before the election — that Pittsburgh is the new Austin? I can’t wait for the future leaks that Elon is equally besotted by Sheetz and Wawa (he has put on a few pounds lately), that he slathers Heinz ketchup on the scrapple he eats every morning for breakfast, and occasionally on a Tastykake butterscotch krimpet, and that his next SpaceX missile will be launched from the 50-yard-line at the Linc after the Birds score a touchdown.

C’mon, Elon. What do you really want from us here in Pennsylvania? Or in the United States of America, which you seem hell-bent on buying?

Arguably, this column so far is part of the Musk dilemma. It’s so tempting to treat this 53-year-old father of 12 children by three different mothers, maker of occasionally exploding cars, and author of increasingly risible tweets on the formerly Twitter platform that he rebranded X as something of a joke.

But Elon Musk is no laughing matter. To the contrary, his two-pronged effort — buying a major channel for U.S. political conversation and bending it into a disinformation machine, and now spending untold millions from his fortune to elect Trump and other MAGA candidates — is exactly the kind of democracy-crushing event that would have terrified the nation’s founders. It’s hard to say what’s worse: that the world’s richest man is trying to buy the White House, or that — amid the increasingly outrageous lies from Trump and the historic nature of Kamala Harris’ eleventh-hour campaign — we’re not giving it proper attention.

This crisis has been decades in the making. As the current podcast Master Plan brilliantly recounts, a pro-business scheme to seize American politics and stave off perceived threats to capitalism hatched in the early 1970s — which included conservative information sources (like X/Twitter has increasingly become) and huge spending on elections — has largely succeeded. A GOP-and-rich-dude tag team takeover of the American judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court, cleared the way for unlimited billionaire political cash, in the rulings Musk now exploits with his America PAC. Thus, we’ve seen oil billionaires like the Koch Brothers or entire industries like cryptocurrency invest tens of millions of dollars on candidates — but America has no idea how to handle a problem like Elon.

» READ MORE: The other giant threat to U.S. democracy is a conspiracy hatched 53 years ago | Will Bunch

The potential for Musk’s incredibly toxic mix of unlimited dollars and over-the-top disinformation to blow up the American Experiment is evident in a visit to the same America PAC website that promises voters $47 for referring a friend to sign Musk’s petition for unhindered gun rights and free speech in the manner Musk defines it. There, its “key values” are illustrated with tweets from Musk’s own X/Twitter — some of which are just false (the claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of hurricane money because the money was spent on migrants) and most others misleading (like the claim that a small town called Charleroi, in Musk’s beloved Pennsylvania, is overrun by Haitians and “nobody seems to know where they’re coming from”).

Although Musk’s public persona pegs him as impulsive, and he probably is, his scheme to gain political power couldn’t be better thought out.

It starts with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in 2022, which seems to be one of the worst financial investments of all time — its estimated value has plunged to less than $10 billion after reputable advertisers fled in droves — unless the actual move was using his money-to-burn to buy global political power. Musk has trashed his promise to make the rebranded X into a bastion of free speech by re-platforming hate speech icons while throttling actual news. He’s remade the social media site as a bastion of antisemitism, the great replacement theory that inspired a mass killer in (wait for it) suburban Pittsburgh, and utter lies about important subjects like Hurricane Helene relief.

But Musk’s evolution as a leading voice of the far-right entered a new phase in 2024, as he’s put his massive wealth where his tweets are. After his brief flirtation with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Musk gradually went all in with Trump and created the America PAC. It probably hasn’t followed through on an initial promise to spend $45 million a month on the GOP nominee but is helping in other ways. Musk has become a leading donor in helping MAGA Republicans retain control of the House, with his PAC investing more than $8 million in key races. He’s even spending more than $1 million on candidates for the state legislature in Texas, where his businesses are increasingly based. The soundtrack for Musk’s foray into politics should be Jonathan Edwards’ 1972 hit “Sunshine.”

“How much does it cost? I’ll buy it!”

In becoming more political, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that the world’s richest man plays like the normal rules don’t apply to him. An early gambit by his America PAC — a supposed voter registration link that gathered information from voters but didn’t always connect them to get registered — drew scrutiny from regulators in Michigan and North Carolina. That was before the $47 petition-signing scheme, which experts say — much like the registration ploy — may be OK under the letter of the law even if it smells like a vote-buying scheme from the 1880s.

With the election at hand, it’s clear what Musk is doing. But why?

The simplest Occam’s razor answer is that Musk is a huge government contractor — more than $15 billion over the years through SpaceX, on top of federal loan guarantees for Tesla — who wants a supporter in the Oval Office. Since Musk officially endorsed Trump, the candidate has modified his frequent attacks on electric vehicles to tell a rally Monday in Reading that “they’re fantastic for certain groups of people who want them.” Musk could be just an old-fashioned influence peddler, but it feels like more than that.

It’s been 39 years since Tears for Fears sang that “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” but the fantasy has never gone away. The widespread notion in Silicon Valley among the people who knew Elon before he went off the deep end is that Musk — who can’t entertain the crazy notion of running for president himself because of his South African birth — believes he can wield influence over Trump and be the actual power behind the throne.

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I’m sure that would come as news to Trump. But either way, the fact that America has come to this point — where our kleptocracy has devolved down to this Bond-flavored world-takeover scheme now playing out before our nation’s lonely eyes — is something the public, especially here in Pennsylvania, shouldn’t stand for. Voters here should tell Musk where he can put his $47 and his plot to buy our votes. Send him back to Texas, where he can root for the Cowboys. They deserve each other.