HARRISBURG, Pa.—Elon Musk was greeted in Pennsylvania as a hero to those who want a smaller government while at the same time flexing the financial muscle that comes from being the world’s richest man.
Three days into his campaign trail, the billionaire deviated from his usual stump speech, handing out a $1 million check to a random attendee here Saturday evening and promising to give out many millions more before Election Day.
Musk mugged with a giant check in front of about 1,500 people who had come out to see him in the flesh, many wanting to know essentially the same thing: How would he cut government spending if Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House?
Such was the dichotomy of Musk barnstorming across Pennsylvania for Trump—but also looking very much like a candidate himself, even as he says he doesn’t want to be involved in politics.
The chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, in broad terms, was making the case to lead a proposed Department of Government Efficiency—or D.O.G.E. as he and his fans like to call it in a nod to the dog-theme cryptocurrency.
Shortly after Musk handed over the first check Saturday night, a woman stood to ask one of many questions from attendees to the tech titan (he spoke for roughly two hours). She, like many at town halls in the suburbs of Philadelphia on Thursday and Friday and in suburban Pittsburgh on Sunday, was focused on D.O.G.E.
“What are your strategies and priorities to curb government spending?” she asked.
Even before the event began, people in line to get inside the modern church building to hear Musk were talking about that very topic. To many there, his experience cutting through bureaucracy to launch rockets into space and dramatically reducing head count at Twitter-turned-X after he acquired it in late 2022 gives him the perfect experience to take on Big Government.
“Some of the things he’s done on Twitter—pretty controversial—but getting rid of 80% of the staff, I’m hoping that we can do that in government,” 38-year-old Brian Hunt, a nuclear engineer, told me Saturday as he waited to hear from Musk. “I want to learn about his vision.”
Several others echoed his sentiment. “It’s like, OK, you’re gonna go in there with a hatchet and fire half of the government? That’s awesome,” Luke Shaffner, 39, of Carlisle, Pa., said. “Love it.”
In a move reminiscent of how he doesn’t play by traditional norms in the business world, Musk’s surprise announcement about giving $1 million each day until the election reverberated throughout media coverage the next day. The money goes, he said, to a randomly selected person who has signed his petition supporting guns and free speech, part of his pro-Trump super PAC’s work.
The announcement was praised by some fans as brilliant for generating attention without having to resort to expensive television ads in a battleground state, while others saw it as a desperate last-minute gasp for attention.
“One of the challenges we’re having is like, well, how do we get people to know about this petition because the legacy media won’t report on it,” Musk said. “Well, this news, I think, is really going to really fly.”
His gambit can be seen as another sign of how seriously Musk is taking a Trump win over Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5.
His exact role in a possible Trump administration is murky at best, which is why it was the question being asked at his town halls.
Weeks after Musk publicly endorsed Trump, the former president said he planned to charge the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive with heading a government efficiency commission, effectively a task force.
“He’s a great business guy, and he’s a great cost-cutter,” Trump said during a Fox News interview earlier this month, saying Musk will be “Secretary of Cost-Cutting.”
There has been no suggestion that Musk would join the ranks of the government as an employee or give up his roles at his companies. Rather, Musk talked in recent days about how the potential role would be in addition to all of his other jobs.
“I intend to do a lot of work to improve government efficiency,” Musk told a crowd of about 1,200 at an event Friday night in suburban Philadelphia. On Sunday near Pittsburgh, he said it should be an easy job, if not for entrenched interests pushing back.
“They’ll be grumpy about it, but the American people will be very happy that their tax dollars are being spent in a much more sensible way,” he said.
How he might actually accomplish anything tangible remains to be seen, especially as Trump hasn’t articulated exactly what sort of powers Musk might have beyond reviewing areas for suggestions for “drastic reforms.”
Much of the initial attention had focused on Musk’s comments around cutting back on regulations, especially as he tangles with government agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, which, he says, are hindering his companies.
On the campaign trail, Musk spoke extensively about what he sees as the problems with too many regulations—“slow strangulation by regulation”—and eliminating them was often his salve when various issues were raised by voters.
But more than trimming rules, voters were, perhaps, more eager in recent days to hear his plans for where and how he would cut spending, especially in light of what he did at X, which was financially troubled when he took it over. Even after his ownership, X’s business has struggled, losing ad revenue amid the chaos around his changes and his contentious antics.
After four days on the trail, though, Musk didn’t get too specific on where the cuts might come, leaving some frustrated. Instead they heard Musk emphasizing a need to apply “common sense” to spending, prioritizing those expenses to benefiting Americans, being transparent about the cuts and floated a few ideas for how he might tackle the effort.
Artificial intelligence might be helpful, he said at one campaign stop, saying AI could be used to analyze government laws and regulations to better understand where money is being spent then simplified.
He also suggested government workers would be judged on performance and fired if they wasted money—a tactic that might work at Tesla but likely made much more difficult with a government workforce that has certain protections that makes it harder to eliminate some.
“If people simply know that if they waste a ton of taxpayer money, they’re going to get fired then that will immediately improve the situation,” Musk said Thursday.
A day later, at another event, Musk added that he wants to ensure a soft landing for those workers being shed, suggesting two years of severance.
“The point is not to be cruel or to have people not be able to pay the mortgage,” Musk said Friday. “It’s just we got to move people, we just have too many people in the government sector.”
Coming off a period of high inflation, Musk is framing efforts to cut government spending as a way of preventing the increased prices at the cash register that are on so many voters’ minds.
“Government overspending is taxation—it’s just a pernicious form of taxation that shows up in the rising price of goods and services,” Musk said. “The only answer is: dramatically cut government spending and have to be efficient.”
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com
