An Elon Musk-funded super PAC is putting out fake pro-Harris ads

If you’re a swing state voter, you may have seen ads claiming that vice president Kamala Harris wants to institute a mandatory gun buyback program and make it easier for undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. These ostensibly pro-Harris ads are the product of Progress 2025, a campaign designed to look like the Democratic answer to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — but they’re actually funded by a group called Building America’s Future, a pro-Trump super PAC that is in turn funded by Elon Musk.

Building America’s Future is expanding an ad campaign targeted at undecided voters in swing states, 404 Media reports. Over the past week, the PAC spent over $300,000 on a dozen Facebook ads, which are sub-targeted to 819 different audience segments. “Imagine a world where the American Dream has no borders,” reads an ad featuring a photo of dozens of migrants at the US-Mexico border. Another ad says Harris “wasn’t just a supporter of the Green New Deal” and claims she supports “a world without gas-powered vehicles.” 

The ads aren’t particularly subtle — they highlight and, at times, misrepresent Harris’s stance on controversial topics, including immigration.

According to documents obtained by OpenSecrets, Building America’s Future — which has reportedly received funding from Musk — registered to use Project 2028 as a “fictitious name” in late September. The group previously ran seemingly contradictory ads aimed at voters in different swing states. One ad, which was targeted at Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan, called Harris a steadfast ally of Israel and said her husband Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, is one of her advisers. Another ad targeted at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania claimed that “two-faced Kamala Harris stands with Palestine, not our ally Israel.”

Progress 2028 is one of the many ways Musk is using his fortune to influence the presidential election, especially in battleground states. Musk’s America PAC has been giving $1 million checks to randomly selected swing state voters, a stunt that several campaign finance experts say is illegal.

Musk personally distributed the first of these checks at a pro-Trump event in Pennsylvania and hasn’t let the Department of Justice’s warning that the lottery may be illegal — or a recent lawsuit filed by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner — stop him.