AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

With the presidential election just two weeks away, we look at the richest man in the world, one of Donald Trump’s biggest financial backers, tech billionaire Elon Musk. He has poured an additional $75 million into his pro-Trump super PAC. And at a campaign town hall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Saturday, Musk pledged to give away $1 million to voters who sign his super PAC online petition in battleground states. He pledged to give this every day, $1 million away, until Election Day.

ELON MUSK: I have a surprise for you, which is that we are going to be awarding a million dollars to — randomly, to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election.

AMY GOODMAN: To be eligible for the $1 million, petition signers must be registered to vote and live in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. Many say this is illegal. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was asked if Musk’s sweepstakes was legal during an interview with Meet the Press Sunday.

GOV. JOSH SHAPIRO: I think there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race, how the dark money is flowing, not just into Pennsylvania but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians. That is deeply concerning. … I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at. I’m not the attorney general anymore of Pennsylvania; I’m the governor. But it does raise some serious questions.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, a new investigation by The New York Times looks at Musk’s influence over the federal government, with two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla, accounting for at least $15.4 billion in government contracts over the past decade.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Eric Lipton, who co-authored the Times investigation headlined “U.S. Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk. A Trump Presidency Could Give Him Power Over Them.”

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you start off by responding to this promise that Elon Musk has made, a million dollars a day to voters in battleground states who sign his super PAC petition, Eric?

ERIC LIPTON: I don’t really know the legality of that proposal. I suspect — I have to imagine that there lawyers that examined that before he made that proposal and that promise. But, you know, the fact of the matter is that’s a trivial amount of money for Elon Musk. He’s the richest person in the world. He’s presumably the richest person in the history of the world. So, that’s a pretty small amount to invest in this, in the final days of this election campaign. And he has, you know, literally billions of dollars at stake of his own business operations, both in terms of contracts that he has with the federal government and millions of dollars at stake in terms of the many investigations that are ongoing of his company. So, that’s kind of like pocket change — 

AMY GOODMAN: Right.

ERIC LIPTON: — relatively speaking, for him.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, the significance is, it may be trivial for him, but for people who would receive it, that’s the question. Is it a payoff?

ERIC LIPTON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: But, Eric —

ERIC LIPTON: Right, and I can’t — I can’t address the legality of that. That’s up to lawyers and regulators to address.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about this piece that you’ve just done. You’re a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. This investigative report is quite remarkable. Lay out his empire and the — but, most importantly, also, the contracts he gets from the U.S. government, and what a Trump presidency — he’s, of course, supporting Trump big time — would mean for him.

ERIC LIPTON: I don’t think that it’s reasonable to presume that he would get necessarily more contracting dollars if Trump were president. He is already incredibly popular because of SpaceX almost exclusively, really, the bulk of it. And it’s because his business has been so successful at transforming access to orbit and also communications in orbit. And so, both with NASA and the Department of Defense, they’re spending billions of dollars to buy services from him, because he’s delivering things that other companies aren’t delivering. So, on that side of the ledger, you know, I think he’s going to continue to see an increase in business with the federal government because of the services that SpaceX is providing.

But the real question is on the investigative side, because Elon Musk is so determined to get things done, and, ultimately, his real goal is to get humans to Mars, that he often likes to kind of, you know, cut corners when it comes to regulations. He wants to bulldoze his way through. And so, he has an incredible array of disagreements with federal agencies that oversee his operations, both from Tesla and from SpaceX. And so, it’s really all — you could go through the acronym soup of the United States government, and just about every major agency has some pending investigation, in many cases involving repeat offenses and multiple fines or ongoing investigations.

And so, the thing that is most, potentially, problematic is if he is in fact going to be appointed by Trump to be the head of some efficiency committee that’s going to examine federal regulators and the powers that they have and also examine their budgets. How is it possible that he could be simultaneously the subject of multiple investigations, the recipient of billions of dollars in contract, and the guy that’s going to be deciding how to curb regulatory powers and how to reduce the expenditures for these agencies? It’s just way too many roles that creates obvious potential or real conflicts of interest.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you — last year alone, Elon Musk’s company secured $3 billion in contracts from 17 federal agencies. Do you think we’re talking about, to say the least, an overdependence on Musk’s companies, which are private companies? And talk more about, you know, Tesla, about SpaceX, and how it’s intertwined with the government.

ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, the bulk of that money really is going to SpaceX. There’s a relatively small amount that goes to Tesla. And most of that money, the biggest chunk of it, it goes for launch. And the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, the two reliable rockets that Elon Musk and SpaceX have, are just the workhorses both for NASA and for the Department of Defense and for the intelligence community. And, you know, it’s a combination of factors, that he has been so successful in designing and engineering design on his rockets and the reusability of parts of it that no one else can really match him. And, you know, Lockheed and Boeing, and they have a consortium that’s called United Launch Alliance, that’s really struggled to get a new rocket going, still is not ready for national security launches.

So, the Department of Defense, in particular, is really reliant upon SpaceX. And I’ve written about this separately in another story earlier this year, just how completely dependent the United States currently is on him. And, I mean, it’s partially — it’s not as if they’re giving him contracts because of who he is; they’re giving him contracts because he can reliably get the NASA satellites and Defense Department and intelligence satellites into space.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could talk about, for example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opening five investigations into Tesla safety issues, and also Tesla’s ongoing legal battles with the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, including cases where the company tried to block rulings punishing Musk for anti-union tweets?

ERIC LIPTON: Right. I mean, there are so many of these investigations, I have a little cheat sheet that I kind of built as I was kind of scouring the reach of the federal government to look at all the dockets and pull together information about each of these.

But, yes, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has five different ongoing active investigations relating to things like unintended acceleration, steering wheel detachment, steering loss, and, of course, most popularly, the self-driving and the fatal accident involving self-driving. And so, that’s just at one division of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Over next door at the FAA, they recently fined SpaceX about $600,000 based on their conclusion that SpaceX had improperly conducted two launches last year out of Florida that were not compliant with safety requirements. So, that’s two divisions of DOT.

There’s also a — the transportation also was investigating — this is the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, another division of transportation — so now it’s the three different agencies in the one Cabinet department — fined Neuralink, which is building implants into brains to help people who are either disabled to see again or maybe to walk again, but Neuralink was shipping hazardous materials without a hazardous materials permit. So, that was another investigation and fine.

So, I mean, that’s just one federal agency, but it goes on and on. There’s over a dozen.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric —

ERIC LIPTON: The Department of Justice is investigating — 

AMY GOODMAN: — we’re going to have to leave it there, but I want to thank you —

ERIC LIPTON: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: — for being with us. Eric Lipton, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, investigative reporter at The New York Times. We’ll link to your piece, “U.S. Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk. A Trump Presidency Could Give Him Power Over Them.”

That does it for our show. A very happy birthday to Robby Karan, and wishing you all health! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.