Elon Musk escaped consequences in 2024 after he handed out $1 million checks to swing state voters in highly publicized events intended to sway the presidential election. The richest person on Earth got away with the galling attempts at bribery after Pennsylvania dropped its case against him. But there’s still a chance Musk’s attempt at swinging a state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin with the same tactic could result in criminal charges.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission has referred two complaints to the Brown County District Attorney’s office after it found Musk may have violated the law when he cut $1 million checks to voters in Wisconsin in 2025, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
The commission made the referrals during a session on July 10 that was not open to the public, according to the Journal-Sentinel, with a final vote of 5-1. The referrals allege that there’s probable cause Musk violated state law “by making a social media post that offered one million dollars to individuals who voted in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election in order to induce them to vote in that election,” according to a copy of the motion seen by the newspaper.
The election pitted Republican-backed Brad Schimel against Democratic-backed Susan Crawford who were fighting to hold a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The election broke a record for the most money ever spent on a state judicial race, with over $100 million invested by powerful people like Musk.
The SpaceX CEO spent at least $3 million of his own money on the race while groups affiliated with him, like America PAC and Rebuilding America’s Future, spent at least $19 million more, according to the Associated Press. But it wasn’t just money for TV ads or the kinds of things that campaigns typically do to help their preferred candidate win.
Musk handed out $1 million checks to two people in Wisconsin, trying a move that he previously deployed in swing states for the 2024 presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Musk supported Trump in that election and was rewarded with the opportunity to decimate the federal government, taking a chainsaw to the federal workforce (more than 300,000 got the boot) and unlawfully dissolving programs like USAID.
The Attorney General of Wisconsin, Josh Kaul, filed a lawsuit before Musk personally visited Wisconsin in 2025 in an attempt to stop him from handing out the $1 million checks, something the erstwhile trillionaire advertised on his social media platform X. But the courts rejected that lawsuit.
Musk’s original tweet announcing he would be visiting the city of Green Bay was deleted and revised, presumably because it would have run afoul of the state’s bribery laws.
“On Sunday night, I will give a talk in Wisconsin,” the now-deleted tweet from 2025 read. “Entrance is limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court election. I will also personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote. This is super important.”
After deleting that tweet, Musk created a new one and sought to “clarify” what he meant, writing: “To clarify a previous post, entrance is limited to those who have signed the petition in opposition to activist judges. I will also hand over checks for a million dollars to 2 people to be spokesmen for the petition.”
Crawford won the Wisconsin Supreme Court race by 10 points but liberals believe it’s important Musk not be allowed to continue his campaign of bribery in future elections. But it remains to be seen whether criminal charges will be brought against Musk and what kind of consequences he could ultimately face for such blatantly unethical acts.
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The launch of Hamlet was quite personal for Sunil Rajaraman.
Back in 2022, he ran for city council in a small California town. He lost, but the moment forever changed the way he saw the place — and local governments, for that matter.
“I was trying to become a better candidate,” he recalled to TechCrunch. “I wanted to understand how my city actually worked, what decisions had been made, why, who said what. And I couldn’t figure it out. It’s a total black box, and almost intentionally opaque.”
Since COVID, towns across the nation have started recording and posting their city meetings online. That gave Rajaraman an idea: a company that helped people understand what was happening in local governments. That same year, in 2022, he launched Hamlet to do just that.
“We use AI to process thousands of hours of city council and planning commission meeting videos and turn them into intelligence they can actually use,” he said. He said these videos are better than meeting minutes because those documents are just someone’s interpretations of what happened. “The video doesn’t lie.”
At first, he thought it would be a media company, but then real estate developers and political action committees started reaching out. Rajaraman realized that private companies have to deal with local governments, too, and they also want more insight into what is happening in those city council meetings.
For enterprise customers, the company helps track agendas and alerts them when relevant topics are addressed across target cities. It also synthesizes what happened after meetings, so they don’t have to watch hourslong videos, and it lets them search the video archive to see, for example, when and how a competitor was mentioned in a local government setting.
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Hamlet has raised around $10 million in venture funding to date, from backers including Slow Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Banana Capital, and Kapor Capital. “We want to become the ‘Bloomberg’ of this space, so to speak,” Rajaraman said.
On Friday, Rajaraman announced he is expanding the company to launch Hamlet TV as a way to help keep regular citizens informed of what is happening inside their governments. The streaming channel is on TikTok, YouTube, AppleTV, and Instagram, and will spotlight important moments from council, commission, and school board meetings.
Rajaraman said his company has processed thousands of hours of government meetings for government customers.
“We’ve seen meetings that have lasted 15-plus hours without recess,” he said. He and his team started curating funny moments from those meetings, and they thought it was a good idea to use humor to get people more invested in the U.S. democracy. “If you show people procedural videos, they are just not going to care. But if you show them the funny stuff, they’ll watch.”
The most surprising thing he and his team have seen so far on Hamlet TV has been someone dressing up as a cockroach to address their city council about a pest problem. But it’s not the funny stuff that surprises him, he said. “It’s how consequential these meetings are and how invisible they remain.”
He cited an example from earlier this year when the Tucson city council rejected Amazon’s $3.6 billion data center. He said that the decision came after months of planning, but only a few people likely watched those videos to understand why it happened.
This isn’t Rajaraman’s first time running a business — or a media outlet. He co-founded the analytics platform Scripted and was twice the Entrepreneur in Residence at Foundation Capital. He also ran a publication called The Bold Italic and then sold it to Medium.
He knows Hamlet TV probably won’t be a moneymaker and reiterated that he’s doing this to get people more involved with the state of the country’s democracy. He also plans to give away the Hamlet tool to local journalists for free. “Data is great, but context matters so much,” he said.
Next, the Hamlet company is looking to work with government affairs, advocacy organizations, and renewable energy developers. “Democracy works better when people are watching,” he said. “We’re trying to make watching possible.”
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