Elon Musk in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, last Saturday.
Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Last weekend, about 1,500 people packed a Marriott ballroom in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania, seeking advice. Many of them wore red MAGA hats, but this was not purely a campaign event. Although the richest man in the world had come as a replacement for Donald Trump, Elon Musk was received as a mix of Tony Stark and Tony Robbins.

After an hour-long delay to watch the Penn State football game (the crowd applauded Trump’s announcements and booed Kamala Harris’s), Musk emerged to a Athlete jams–stylish soundtrack and enthusiastic applause. He then delivered a brief, incoherent monologue in which he expressed concern that he might be the target of assassins, declared that “journalism is dead,” reflected on the terraforming of Mars, where “we will be illegal aliens,” and at one point said, “ “You really have to do it.” Give it to the ancient Sumerians” in reference to their invention of writing. On another occasion, he punctuated his comments with the apt statement: “Wild times, man, wild times.” There wasn’t actually a speech to support Trump, although he did encourage people to vote early in person and return their outstanding absentee ballots.

His speech was simply the prelude to a two-hour question-and-answer segment. The crowd was amazed that someone worth quarter billion dollars I would come to Lancaster, of all places. People like Grant Nagle of Reading had queued for hours to meet him, asking him how to inspire their children’s curiosity and offering him technological innovations. “Just trying to get to Mars is really cool. I think having a goal like that is really inspiring to people,” Nagle told me, wearing a SpaceX T-shirt. When his chance came, he asked Musk, “What’s the most useful and powerful piece of advice you’ve ever received?”

At first, Musk thought silently for ten seconds. Then he exclaimed: “Hey! Yes, in fact, he votes Republican,” much to his own amusement before attempting to genuinely answer the question. He went over the answer slowly and out loud, talking about the importance of studying physics, and finally answered: “Aim to make fewer mistakes.”

Mary Ressler, a Hempfield teacher, approached Musk with hope. He said his daughter suffered from mental health issues and had lost two brothers to suicide. With his history of innovation, he thought Musk could make a difference: “He has the connections and even if he doesn’t have the answers. “I could create a think tank on mental health.” He was soon handed the microphone and asked, “What can you do to fix our broken mental health system in the United States?”

He immediately asked him for suggestions, but he seemed focused mainly on pharmaceuticals. He lamented that “things get approved and (doctors) go crazy” prescribing them. After Ressler added her concern about prisons serving as de facto mental health facilities, Musk incongruously asked her if there were any pharmaceuticals she thought should be approved, then said, “I think some of the drugs that are prescribed are quite sketches”. He further observed that “nature abhors a vacuum. “People need to believe in something, and the decline of religion has led people to seek new religions, secular religions.” He added: “Woke is essentially a secular religion, but it is very fervently believed” and sighed deeply.

The daily delivery of a million-dollar check to a swing-state voter who signed his petition to protect the Constitution gave the event an almost medieval feel, like when the king’s supplicants lined up to ask a favor. As I read the name of Saturday night’s winner, there was a loud shout of “QUAAAAAT!” It came from the side of the room as a woman suddenly learned of her new stroke of luck.

The draw has drew attention from the Department of Justice, the Philadelphia district attorney and election law experts, who have suggested that it is an illegal bribe. Standing on stage with the winner and an attendee holding an oversized check, Musk said he was just a troll. “People wonder what happens with the million-dollar prizes. Well, we need the mainstream media to talk about it, and I knew they would complain a lot about it…they would be in all the newspapers and TV stations complaining like crazy.” Talking to himself, he said, “Great, that will spread the word.”

Among the requests for advice were some traditional questions for a political rally, such as one about tariffs. Two far-right provocateurs attempted to get Musk, who has long been ambiguous about the nature of his faith, to say whether he accepted the divinity of Jesus Christ. Musk downplayed them, saying, “I believe in the teachings of Christ. I believe in Christian principles.”

The most acute question was about January 6. Reading his phone, patiently and accurately, a young man asked Musk about Trump’s failure to accept the 2020 election results and the “violent interruption of the vote count” as the room filled with boos. . As they grew louder, he asked, “What would you say to calm the concerns of young voters like me who fear that voting for a second term of the Trump presidency will lead to Democratic backsliding?“

Musk interrupted the boos by saying, “I think it’s a fair question,” before immediately moving into a lengthy defense of Trump and his debunked claims of voter fraud during the last presidential election. “The media tries to characterize January 6 as some kind of violent insurrection, which is simply not the case. “That is false…January 6 was in no way a violent insurrection,” Musk said. He then went further and said that the protests in Washington that culminated in the attack on the Capitol “had some merit.” He concluded by saying that “those who say Trump is a threat to democracy are themselves the threat to democracy.”

The last question of the night came as the clock struck 11 p.m., by which time the crowd had thinned. “What are your methods for identifying objective truth and what is your preferred epistemological framework?”

“I would really recommend that you study physics,” he replied.