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Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, will not face criminal charges in Wisconsin for promising $1 million checks to voters during the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke, a Democrat, who was tapped as a special prosecutor to review the case, wrote in a letter Tuesday that he did not believe a jury would convict Musk of a crime.
“I have routinely worked with campaigns and candidates from both parties and nonpartisan elections to correct any potential violations of election/campaign laws,” Gruenke wrote. “In this case, without the famous name attached and the large dollar amounts involved, it is a simple case of a poorly worded statement that was corrected and brought into compliance with the law.”
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the Democratic nominee for governor, said during a campaign stop in Madison he was “befuddled” by the decision.
Crowley, who said he had not read the reasoning behind the decision, was confused how Musk’s promises ahead of a 2025 event in Green Bay did not violate state laws.
Wisconsin law prohibits a person from offering, promising, giving, or lending anything of value to someone to convince the person to go to the polls, vote, or refrain from voting. The Wisconsin Elections Commission in July found that Musk likely broke the law and referred complaints to the Brown County District Attorney’s Office, which earlier this month referred the case to Gruenke as a special prosecutor after identifying a conflict of interest.
“We are talking about someone who publicly talked about giving a million dollars to folks to actually go vote, which is absolutely against the law here in the state of Wisconsin,” Crowley told reporters outside a health clinic in Madison.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor, did not immediately respond to questions from Wisconsin Watch Tuesday afternoon.
Crowley on Tuesday did not say whether he would support additional legislation to strengthen the state’s election bribery laws.
“I would assume that our laws are very clear as far as the fact that we cannot give more than $1 to make sure that people are voting,” he said. “I think the laws are extremely clear.”
Democratic state lawmakers last year proposed bills seeking to expand the state’s election bribery laws to prohibit payments to voters for signing petitions during an election, like in the Musk case. The legislation died without receiving a hearing in the Republican-controlled Legislature.
The context
About $144.5 million was spent on the 2025 election between now-Justice Susan Crawford and former Attorney General Brad Schimel, making it the most expensive state supreme court race in U.S. history. Musk spent about $30 million of that total, which included giveaways to conservative voters.
The issues stemmed from social media posts Musk made in March 2025. The first post promoted an event in Wisconsin in which Musk said entrance would be “limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court Election” in addition to providing million-dollar checks to voters “in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.”
Musk hours later shared a message that entrance was limited to people who signed a petition “in opposition to activist judges” and the million-dollar checks would be provided to spokespersons for the petition.
Gruenke said he did not believe a jury would convict Musk given that nothing was given to individuals for voting.
“Even if I could convince a jury that the original post was still a bribe, I do not believe that a jury would convict Elon Musk of a crime after considering the intent, the second post, and the fact nothing of value was ever given to anyone for voting for an incident occurring in March of 2025,” Gruenke wrote.
Musk still faces a civil lawsuit in Brown County Circuit Court brought by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign regarding bribery allegations tied to the 2025 state Supreme Court race.
