PHILADELPHIA — In his brief appearance in Delaware County on Thursday, Elon Musk delivered several false or unproven statements, among them the assertion that Vice President Kamala Harris is a “puppet” under the control of associates of the late Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself awaiting trial on charges of child sex trafficking.

Musk was speaking at a pro-Donald Trump town hall, the first in a series of such events he’s holding across Pennsylvania through Monday. His appearance was sponsored by Musk’s America PAC, which is spending $45 million a month to support the Trump campaign.

Without evidence, Musk said at Ridley High School that Harris and President Joe Biden are being manipulated by mysterious higher-ups:

“It’s just obvious that Biden is not in charge. It’s obvious that Kamala is not in charge … As far as I can tell, it’s not just one puppeteer, there are many. But it would be interesting to see the overlap between Epstein’s client list and Kamala’s puppeteers. I bet there are a lot of names on both lists.”

Musk’s remarks echoed opinions he shared earlier in the month in an interview on X with right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson.

Because of her purported position as one of many individuals under some mastermind’s control, Musk suggested that Harris is an unlikely target for assassination “because it’s pointless,” he said “What do you achieve? Nothing, you just bought another puppet.”

Carlson, a longtime conspiracy theorist, concurred: “It’s deep and true, though.”

Trump has said that if he’s reelected, he might release a list of individuals associated with Epstein, who was ruled to have killed himself in prison in 2019.

Musk responded that some people who are either financially supporting or publicly praising Harris — including billionaires Reid Hoffman and Bill Gates — are pushing for a Harris victory merely to save themselves from being exposed by Trump, who himself has “partied” with Epstein and was photographed with him multiple times during the 1990s and 2000s.

“Some of those billionaires behind Kamala are terrified of a Trump win,” Musk told Carlson.

Hoffman, cofounder of Linked In, has joined Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and others for the launch of “Business Leaders for Harris,” encouraging others to support her White House bid.

Hoffman once visited Epstein’s Caribbean island Little St. James — also known as “pedophile island” — where Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly abused underage girls, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile, Gates met with Epstein many times, The New York Times has reported. Although his ex-wife Melinda French Gates made a reported $13 million donation to Harris, Bill Gates has not officially endorsed a candidate, but praised Harris in a July interview.

Along with the unsupported statements about Harris and Epstein, Musk recycled older debunked claims about voting for the Ridley Township crowd.

He incorrectly said that Dominion Voting Systems had been used in Philadelphia during the 2020 election.

“There’s some very strange things that happen that, that are statistically incredibly unlikely,” Musk said. “So, there’s always a question of, like, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they’re used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, but not a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”

Dominion machines hadn’t been used in Philadelphia, the company explained in a statement released Friday. It has, however, been part of elections in Armstrong, Bedford, Carbon, Clarion, Crawford, Erie, Fayette, Fulton, Jefferson, Luzerne, Montgomery, Pike, Warren, and York counties.

Dominion was found to have been falsely accused by Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and others of rigging the 2020 election. The company was paid $787 million by Fox News to settle a defamation lawsuit related to its repeated airing of false claims.

In its statement, the company refuted baseless and false claims about the integrity of the election system or accuracy of the results in Pennsylvania.

However, the statement went on, “despite numerous election security experts and U.S. Attorney General William Barr affirming there is no evidence of widespread fraud in this election, disinformation persists.”

Asked by a member of the town hall audience about alleged election cheating, Musk added to his torrent of misinformation by denigrating mail ballots, something Trump has continued to do despite assurances from Republican Party leaders that such voting is safe — and encouraged.

Musk combined his criticism with the long-discredited notion that noncitizen voting is a significant problem in America.

“When you have mail-in ballots and no, no sort of proof of citizenship,” Musk claimed, “it becomes almost impossible to prove cheating, is the issue.”

Such false claims damage democracy, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Utilizing the lie that large groups of noncitizens vote, certain politicians are working to enact restrictive voting policies, the center said.

“These conspiracy theories are not harmless rhetoric,” the center concluded.

Also at the event, Musk said America should “only do paper ballots” during elections. “I’m a technologist,” he said. “The last thing I would do is trust the computer program.”

As CNN and other outlets have reported, more than 98% of U.S. voters live in jurisdictions that already have fully auditable paper trails.

Musk’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

(Staff writer Fallon Roth contributed to this article.)

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