before an action takes place.
The standard for a court stepping in and issuing an injunction (which is what was sought, in this case to prevent Musk from handing out $1 million dollar checks) is generally to prevent irreparable harm. The general way I told my students studying for the bar exam to think about it - if you can throw money at it and fix it, it generally isn't irreparable harm. It's a pretty tough standard to meet. Here, the court (after the fact) could force the recipients to return the money to Musk. Especially since he only momentarily framed the payments as payments for voting (rather than for signing a petition), even if the court decided that what he was doing would do irreparable harm, paying for someone to sign a petition (or to act as a spokesperson for the PAC - his final framing) doesn't obviously violate a statute barring paying someone to vote. So there's a double hurdle.
The lower court declined to issue an injunction, as did the appellate court. In state court systems (and I believe Wisconsin operates this way), that is generally the end of the line unless the Supreme Court chooses to take an appeal from the appellate courts. They generally don't, unless there is a split in the circuit, or they really really think the Appellate Court got it wrong.
And here, apparently, the AG didn't even frame as an appeal - but as an original jurisdiction action. Generally the highest court in any jurisdiction (state, federal) rarely rarely takes the first stab at something (that's what original jurisdiction means - that they aren't reviewing a decision someone else made, they are deciding it on their own from scratch).
So it isn't that they refused to do their job. It is that people looking at, especially people looking at it who don't understand how courts work, don't like the outcome.
If the AG still believes that Musk violated the law - now that the action is complete he can be charged with an actual violation of the statute.
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