One million dollars a day sounds like a lottery, and that is precisely how the plaintiffs say it was sold. In the weeks before the November 2024 US election, Elon Musk's political action committee, America Pac, promised that randomly chosen people who signed a petition supporting the US constitution would receive $1m. This week, in a federal court in Austin, Texas, Musk and the committee told a judge that they have agreed to settle two related class actions built on that promise. The numbers behind the dispute are simple, but the settlement terms are not yet known.

The filings contained no figures, and the lawyers involved either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for information. Any deal must also be approved by the court before it takes effect. The two cases were brought by Arizona residents, who argued that voters in seven swing states had been misled into signing the petition. Those states were closely contested, which, the plaintiffs suggest, made each signature and each piece of voter data especially valuable.

Musk and America Pac have denied the allegations. The timing matters. America Pac was founded to support Donald Trump, who won a second term in November 2024. In June, a federal judge ruled that Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX and owns the social media platform X, would have to testify in the lawsuits.