Audience member: Hey Elon, my name is Jennifer Lucas, as you can tell I do not have a Pennsylvania accent but I do live here, I’m voting legally, I promise.
Elon Musk: Sure, I believe you.
Audience member: I’m from Southern West Virginia, okay, and honestly, I’ve had a lot of questions on my mind from education to the drug epidemic – it’s hit really hard – but one thing that I would really like to ask you about right now is lobbyists. If I buy vote, I go to jail, they buy votes on the floor, on the voting floor in DC, and that’s okay, right? That is affecting our voice as American citizens, so what can we do to ban lobbyists in DC so we can take our power back?
Elon Musk: Yeah, so I was actually part of making a movie called “Thank You for Smoking”. I don’t know if anyone’s seen that movie, but it’s a movie about political corruption and about lobbyists and political corruption. It’s worth watching “Thank You for Smoking” and you know that was… I’m actually the pilot in the movie in that plane, so it’s a very small role, but that movie explores the corruption that exists in DC due to all the lobbying that takes place, and the legislation is primarily written by lobbyists in fact, and then you know Congress basically rubber stamps what lobbyists write. I think we probably do need to take a look at what rules make sense, because obviously the point of the elected legislators is to legislate in the interest of the people, right? And so, if there’s legislation happening which is often the case that is not in the interest of the people, something’s wrong. So… and you do get these like regulatory capture situations where the companies in an industry end up controlling the regulators and preventing new entrance from coming into a market, making it difficult for new companies to come in anyway. I wanted to make that movie for a reason, which is to highlight that there is a lot of corruption in DC and we like to have less of it at least, and it’s tough, and this is also why I think the big government machine is so against Trump, because he doesn’t… he’s not beholden to all of these interests, so he’s not captured essentially, he’s not a puppet. So the sort of the big government machine is very worried about electing someone who’s not a puppet. So yeah, I mean I certainly advocate for better rules that limit the power of companies to lobby in DC or at the state level for that matter.
Bring Back Smoking Freedom 