Joe Biden cast an early ballot in the 2024 US presidential election on Monday and hit out at Elon Musk’s daily $1m cash giveaway to voters.
With little more than a week to go before the US officially goes to the polls, the outgoing president voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. He voted at the state of Delaware Department of Elections close to his home outside Wilmington with hundreds of other early voters.
Earlier this month, Mr Musk, the world’s richest man and a vocal supporter of Republican candidate Donald Trump, announced he was offering a daily chance to win $1 million to registered for signing a petition supporting the Constitution and the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
Asked after casting his vote what he thought about Mr Musk’s controversial scheme, Mr Biden said the giveaway was “totally inappropriate.”
The Philadelphia district attorney’s office has already filed a lawsuit, accusing the tech billionaire and his America Pac group of attempting to influence voters in the US presidential election with hopes of winning the cash prize.
Mr Biden, who renounced the Democratic Party candidacy for the White House earlier this year, also hit out at Donald Trump’s rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday as “simply embarrassing”. Speaks made a series of controversial remakrs, with comedian Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage"
The outgoing president added his encouragement for voters to take part in the tightly-contested poll, saying: “This election is so important.”
Mr Biden chatted with voters as he waited in line to cast his ballot, and helped push a woman in a wheelchair who was ahead of him.
He waited in line for about 40 minutes before he cast his ballot. He handed his identification to the election worker, who had him sign a form and announced: “Joseph Biden now voting."
As the president cast his ballot behind a black drape, some first-time voters were announced and the room erupted in cheers for them.
Mr Biden on Sunday also slammed Musk for hypocrisy on immigration after a newspaper report that the X CEO once worked illegally in the United States. South African-born Musk denies the allegation.
He told a campaign event in Pittsburgh: “That wealthiest man in the world turned out to be an illegal worker here.
“No, I’m serious. He was supposed to be in school when he came on a student visa. He wasn’t in school. He was violating the law. And he’s talking about all these illegals coming our way?”
The Washington Post reported that Musk worked illegally in the country while on a student visa, because he worked on his start-up in Palo Alto, California in 1995 instead of enrolling on graduate courses at Stanford University.
But Musk denied the claim in a post on X, which he bought in 2022, writing: “I was in fact allowed to work in the US.”
The entrepreneur has thrown his backing behind Trump for the 2024 race, appearing on stage with him at campaign events, where he warned voters that “this election is going to decide the fate of America.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Mr Biden endorsed after dropping out, is vying to become the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to serve as president.
Polls show she has a tough battle in key battleground states to prevail, with many showing a neck-and-neck race between her and Trump.
