Is it wrong for Elon Musk to offer voters $1m a day to get Trump elected? That’s a tough one | Marina Hyde

For a guy who has spent his entire life making "I am very rich" the keystone of his personal brand, there is something quite poignant about watching Donald Trump get financially cucked by Elon Musk on stage every night. Musk is much younger, much richer, and has had a much more successful series of hair transplants. But needs must, it seems.

As you might be aware, Musk has recently decided to update the tired dystopian fiction trope in which impoverished citizens are forced to compete in deadly gameshows where the winner gets a life-changingly glittering prize, and the losers are killed for sport. In Elon's rebooted version, the richest man in the world is giving struggling voters the chance to win a million dollars if they sign a "petition" in favour of free speech and the right to bear arms.

You get $47 (£36) just for signing up - $100 in Pennsylvania, for some reason! - and only registered voters can apply. As long as they leave their names - and addresses, for some reason! - they're all good to enter the lottery pit. Also, it's not fictional but real, and it's happening in swing states every single day from now until the election in two weeks' time. On Saturday, Musk presented his first state-of-the-art cardboard cheque for $1m to a man at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. On Sunday, it was the turn of a woman at a town hall in Pittsburgh. On Monday, his Pac (political action committee) launched a drive against election interference, because hey - above all, he's an ironist.

Like so many of the previous new lows of this campaign, once this tactic manifests itself you immediately find yourself thinking: of course. Of course, of course. Of course Musk, 53, would become a dark mirror version of MrBeast, and use the YouTube giveaway playbook to go viral in the election endgame. It's at once completely shocking, and also an October not-even-a-surprise. Perhaps the only mirthless smile it can raise is when you consider the utter yesteryearing it represents for Hollywood.

It felt quaint even at the time, but do recall George Clooney spouting off last year about how indispensable Hollywood could be to political campaigns. "I always just say," George just said, "look, everybody keeps coming into Hollywood for cash, and they don't come to us for the one thing we do better than anybody, which is tell stories." Mm. And yet here we are, with the dark stars of the election bypassing the gold-standard magic of a movie industry everyone can see is in crisis, and taking their inspo from YouTube, which isn't.

Anyway, in scenes also some-way-past familiar: the old good-chap structures of political life are revealed as simply unable to cope with bad chaps who decline to play by the unwritten rules. In fact, even the written rules seem to be in doubt. Is Musk's stunt legal? Those scrambling to respond to this question are once again falling back on the old "uncharted territory" descriptor. Alas, if you were hoping we could get a couple of cartographers out of bed for this one - like, yesterday? - then prepare for disappointment. What we have instead are leisurely headlines such as "Elon Musk's pledge for daily $1 million giveaways draw legal questions".

The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, opined on Monday of the giveaways that "I think it's something that law enforcement could take a look at". "Could take a look at", questions being "drawn" - I can't help feeling the vocabulary choices here indicate the sort of mid-tier to-do list priority that no doubt the relevant cops/jurisprudence professors will get around to solving in a few weeks' time. No particular reason you'd want to rush this one. Is there?