The Egg on Elon Musk’s Face Cost More Than $440 Million

Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, went on a spending spree in the weeks leading up to the midterms. By Election Day, he had invested — and I use that word deliberately — more than $440 million into propping up the GOP to try to make its message and its candidates more palatable with voters during an election cycle in which their brand had become increasingly toxic.

Astoundingly, nearly half of that money — more than $190 million — was spent on one campaign: Ken Paxton’s effort to make the leap from an impeached state attorney general to being U.S. senator for Texas. Musk was, in broad daylight, like the gilded age oligarchs of the late-19th century, essentially trying to buy himself a senator.

Many rich candidates have in recent years self-funded their candidacies or intervened in initiative campaigns — Michael Bloomberg put in more than $1 billion into his go-nowhere presidential campaign in 2020, Tom Steyer spent upwards of $200 million in his recent futile attempt to become the California governor, and a cluster of billionaires, led by Google’s Sergei Brin, put obscene amounts of money into opposing the billionaires’ wealth tax initiative before voters in California this election. This year, the Texas race seems to be the first time a single non-candidate donor has put this much money into a particular marquee contest.

Musk — who relocated to Texas during the pandemic in a fit of pique against California’s public health mandates — has a large and growing business footprint in Texas, and a desire to take over more land both for his space launch business and his data centers; he therefore needs political figures from the state not only on his side but in his pocket, as Democrats began gleefully pointing out in the final month of the campaign.

The SpaceX titan isn’t, of course, alone in his mega-donations. The Brennan Center for Justice has reported that in the 2026 election cycle, 40 mega-donors altogether ponied up an astounding $2.5 billion, the large majority for GOP candidates. But the scale of Elon Musk’s financial outlay does put him in a league of his own. Individually, in 2026 Musk gave more than twice as much to candidates as did the entire cryptocurrency industry — which has also not been shy about buying political loyalties as its footprint has increased in size.

Most of Musk’s money was channeled through the Senate Leadership Fund, the coordinating fund the GOP ran for its Senate candidates. This move allowed Paxton, whose entire career has been a pinball exercise caroming from one corruption scandal to the next, to flood the vast Texas media market with attack advertisements in the weeks leading up to the election. The Republican candidate’s campaign promptly used this money to lean ever further into anti-trans messaging, saturating the airwaves with ads accusing Democratic candidate James Talarico of being an extremist for transgender rights.

Then, as the governor’s race in Texas tightened, with Democrat Gina Hinojosa making an unexpectedly strong run to break the GOP stranglehold on the state’s top office, Musk also began injecting millions of dollars into Greg Abbott’s re-election campaign.

But Musk’s ambitions weren’t limited to the Lone Star State. In this election cycle, the oligarch gave tens of millions of dollars to super PACs supporting vulnerable GOP candidates in House races around the country and funneled millions more to gubernatorial and attorneys general campaigns, recognizing that a Democratic victory would likely harm his corporate ventures and reduce the flow of money from government contracts.

In New Hampshire, Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, pumped $1 million into supporting Republican candidate John Sununu for a Senate seat that the GOP identified early in the campaign season as a possible pick-up. In New York, the trillionaire’s PAC put hundreds of thousands of dollars into efforts to salvage GOP Congressman Mike Lawler’s campaign in the competitive 17^th congressional district. Singlehandedly, Musk seemed intent on showing, throughout election season, just how much financial sway the oligarchy can have on U.S. politics. And, as he injected more money into the elections, at the same time he warned his opponents — who have been talking about investigations into his business practices and his work at the “Department of Government Efficiency” — that he was preparing to go to war against them. The tycoon also allocated over $100 million for a get-out-the-vote ground operation.

Like Bloomberg and Steyer’s ill-fated campaigns, however, as the election season entered its final weeks, polling suggested Musk’s interventions could actually backfire. In an era of anti-oligarchical, anti-Big Tech fury, Musk has become something of a poster child for all that is wrong in the U.S. economic and political systems. His money is seen as tainted, and his interventions are perceived as little more than an effort to bribe the electorate.

In Texas, Talarico and Hinojosa knew they couldn’t compete dollar for dollar with Musk, but they also knew that voters were souring on his brand. At one campaign rally after the next, they hammered home the point that Musk was trying to buy Texans’ loyalty. Talarico also took to X to denounce Musk’s intervention and repeatedly accused the tycoon of “trying to buy Texas.” It was a skillful move that could only work — as it so clearly did — in a populist moment defined by rage against economic elites. In all the other major races into which Musk poured money — New Hampshire, New York’s 17^th congressional district, and others — the Democrats won as well. All told, more than 98 percent of Musk’s dollars led to zero political gain.

Instead of Musk buying a Senate seat in Texas, he helped trigger an absolute political earthquake. Texas electing both a Democratic senator and a Democratic governor — on the back of huge Black and Latinx voter turnout, and making huge inroads into the state legislature — is as significant as California turning blue in the wake of the anti-immigrant campaigns and legislation of Republicans in the 1990s. It may ricochet through the country’s body politic for decades. And, for that, at least in part, Democrats have Musk to thank. His shameless attempt to buy a Senate seat is probably the most self-defeating expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. political history.

Musk warned that he would go to war against his opponents if he lost. Now, he has no choice — for Democrats have just been given an overwhelming mandate, and answering it will require them to drive oligarchs out of the political arena.