Just how much are Donald Trump’s high-tech boosters now funneling into his campaign? We may never know for sure, given our contemporary “dark money” scene. But we do have some numbers on the broader billionaire scene that can help us understand the overall political impact of fortunes built on everything from computer chips to poker chips.

We know, for instance, that billionaire heiress Miriam Adelman, the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has deposited $100 million into her Preserve America super PAC. Railroad heir Timothy Mellon has bestowed an even more stunning $150 million upon his Make America Great Again PAC operation.

Elon Musk — before October — had dumped some $75 million into his America PAC. Just-released filings show that Musk added an additional $44 million into that PAC over the first half of October and another $2.3 million into the pro-Trump Sentinel Action Fund.

What do all those millions buy? Plenty of ad time, of course, on TV and computer screens. But billionaires like Musk aren’t just buying eyeballs. They’re also doing their best to return America to the good old original Gilded Age days when our super rich could simply buy whatever votes they needed. Elon Musk has been leading the way to this brazen new vote-buying era.

A little over two weeks before Election Day, Musk — “the quintessential robber baron of America’s second Gilded Age” — began running daily lotteries open only to registered swing-state voters who signed a petition in support of free speech and the right to bear arms. The daily prize: $1 million.

Paying people to induce them to vote or get registered, USA Today points out, just happens to be “an offense punishable by prison time,” and that legal prohibition holds for “anything of monetary value like liquor or lottery chances,” holds a U.S. Justice Department election-crimes manual.

After four daily winners — and a warning from the Justice Department — Musk put his daily lottery prize on hold. But if he should resume his lottery, the daily million-dollar prizes certainly won’t make much of a dent on Musk’s personal fortune. Musk ended October 23 worth $237 billion.

Other pro-Trump billionaires, meanwhile, are devoting millions to the day afterNovember 5. The Wall Street Journal earlier this week revealed that a “secretive network of GOP donors and conservative billionaires” has spent the years since the 2020 presidential election “laying the groundwork for a more organized, better funded and far broader effort to contest the outcome.”

Groups linked to billionaires like the Wisconsin shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Hobby Lobby founder David Green, the Journal reports, “have been scrutinizing voter registrations on an industrial scale and working to slow down the vote count” and “bury local election officials in paperwork and lawsuits.”

To add to the post-election chaos, the Journal adds, one of these billionaire-backed groups is even offering monetary rewards to “anyone reporting election fraud or abuse.”

Another Trump-boosting group, the EagleAI Network, is bombarding election officials with long lists of registered voters that it claims need investigating. These lists, charges Ben Hovland, the chair of the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission,  amount to a “weaponization” of open-records laws, a “resource drain” that has “real-world consequences” for the work of local election offices that administer America’s elections.

We may well end up this election year with a broken election system. Who will deserve the blame? That will ultimately belong to the billionaires who assure us, at every opportunity, that they wish nothing more than to make America great again.