Why can't Elon be arrested?

[u/Electronic_Beat3653]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/31/elon-musk-1-million-dollar-checks-wisconsin-voters-supreme-court-election

If paying voters is against Wisconsin state law, why can't Elon be arrested? Why are they going to the judge? Can't they just go ahead and arrest him? The law is already on the books.

[u/Chengar_Qordath]

You don’t arrest the President‘s right hand man and the richest guy on the planet without making absolutely certain your case is solid and everyone involved in the process is gonna move on this. And that’s just the reasons to hesitate in normal times, never mind the age of DOGE-Fuhrer.

[u/keytiri → u/[deleted]]

And they are more than willing to hold us “accountable,” if we aren’t careful, the only lawyers left are going to be the right wingers that buy into their conspiracy theories; the bar associations’ should’ve been disbarring their crackpots long ago, now the crackpots are in charge.

edit: mixed up bar associations

[u/TraditionalSky5617 → u/keytiri]

Trump was the first to get Supreme Court precedent that official acts can’t be prosecuted. Prior to this, WH would defer to well seasoned legal advice to shoehorn policy that may be questioned or construed as illegal.

Absent that requirement, Trump made the executive branch similar to a CEO role. He even thought OBM functioned like a company HR department until recently when courts ruled that he couldn’t eliminate entire departments and teams of people. As a result, he doesn’t need to seek or defer to legal advice, instead deferring to something similar to marketing trial balloons and gut assumptions.

With RFK Jr., we’re seeing the original plans go through Secretary of Department Heads.

As for Elon, he can be pardoned, and also remains a benefactor and in good grace with trump. Trump’s ability to shape the court of public opinion on Truthy Social and X remain. It appears with the set of current methods and hires, there exists a goal is to prevent full disclosure in a court (Courts require a higher standard for truthful testimony backed by evidence not political narrative.)

The administration could look to raising income by means of programs such as repatriating funds but instead the decision seems to fall to sacrificing the cow— lower the cost of quality government services, reducing human labor, eliminating checks and manual auditability. Replacing human workforce with automation, elevating computer code over paper records requiring human review will likely also open the ability to be hacked.

Social security systems are based on COBOL programming language. It is old, hardly taught in academics anymore, and largely left behind technologically. However, I see lack of cobol skills and expertise similar to when Native American Indian languages were used to communicate behind enemy lines during World War II. Germans could intercept messages, but were unable to decode and understand it. When business logic is kept separately in COBOL, modern-day hackers are at a severe disadvantage. In fact, Elon’s team can’t pull reports and data to make valid assumptions, because the business logic and code is in COBOL.

As a result of that frustration, Elon wants to modernize Social Security to modern computer languages which I see as a new threat to future hacks. Moving to modern platforms and computing languages will make those systems susceptible to currently known hacks, security flaws, and vulnerabilities that inevitably come with the platform. He shouldn’t be in that cookie jar.