Let’s All Point and Laugh at Elon Musk

In 2024, Elon Musk obliterated the all-time American record for a single season of political spending from an individual, laying down some $277 million to put Donald Trump into the White House. In 2026, he obliterated his own record again, spending a reported $474 million at least, all of it on behalf of the Republican Party. (Given his net worth, this is the equivalent of about $116 for the median worker.)

Well, the results are in this year, and Musk achieved nothing perceptible whatsoever. Democrats won the biggest midterm blowout since 2010 or maybe even 1974. Votes are still being counted at time of writing, but Democrats gained between seven and nine seats in the Senate, and maybe 40-ish in the House. As the newspaper clichés went, it was a stunning rebuke—and particularly for the richest person in the world. Turns out you can’t just buy the American government wholesale.

One might argue that Musk’s spending improved a margin of defeat that otherwise would have been even worse. But that doesn’t track with the fact that in Musk’s overwhelming priority, Texas—where he spent $224 million—Republicans did far worse than they did elsewhere.

The reason for the focus on Texas, by the way, is that Musk reincorporated Tesla in the state in a fit of pique after a Delaware chancery court shot down one of his gargantuan pay packages. SpaceX is now incorporated there as well. Musk then successfully lobbied Texas Republicans to do a wholesale rewrite of the state’s corporate law to benefit him personally.

In other words, Musk already bought the Texas government, and he wanted it to stay bought. Texas voters did not comply.

In the Senate race this year, most counties across the country were between 10 and 20 points more Democratic than they were in 2024. But in Texas, as my colleague David Dayen points out, the swing in many key counties was between 30 and 50 points, particular in heavily Latino counties where Trump had made large inroads. In the Senate race in Michigan—historically a much more liberal place than Texas—Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won by eight points, as against Democrat James Talarico’s 12-point margin. Democrats also won every statewide Texas race, several critical judicial elections, and may take the Texas House.

No doubt there are many idiosyncratic differences between all these states. But it’s also the case that Sen.-elect James Talarico made Musk the centerpiece of his campaign in the final weeks. One of Talarico’s closing ads made the point with brutal effectiveness. Musk is “almost singlehandedly bankrolling the effort to install Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate,” it said. “Elon wants to buy up our land. He wants to buy up our water. And now he wants to buy his own personal U.S. senator. He knows that if his millions drag the most corrupt politician in Texas across the finish line, Ken Paxton will owe him everything.”

As Davide Mamone pointed out in the Prospect, Texas’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa made similar points in her victorious campaign. And she is going to look closely at Musk’s corrupt deals to get state money for broadband build-out for Starlink, along with data center deals that Musk may also be involved with.

Talarico’s campaign also referenced a fact that I suspect also plays into Musk’s failure: the sheer quantity of advertising he was paying for. “Do you keep seeing these attack ads against James Talarico? Look a little closer. The same super PACs are paying for nearly all of them.” Ads are generally kind of annoying, political ones even more so, and seeing the same one repeatedly more annoying still. A Texas friend recently told me that on the cheaper streaming services, they have commonly been showing the exact same ad over and over and over again in every commercial break for an entire episode of TV. There’s a reason that ordinary commercial advertisers do not buy up literally the entire ad inventory for a particular show—at some point you risk backlash, if not Molotov cocktails being hurled through the windows of your corporate headquarters.

Now, that is not to say that Musk’s hilarious faceplant removes any need for campaign finance regulation or disproves the danger of extreme wealth concentration. He is deranged, despicable, and unlikable even for a hyper-billionaire, and that is saying something. Other oligarchs with even a modicum of subtlety—the ones who don’t throw Nazi salutes on live television—can toss their wealth around much more effectively. In California this year, for instance, a deluge of oligarch spending and dirty tricks seems to have defeated a ballot initiative to impose a one-time tax on billionaires, though the full result is not yet confirmed.

What’s more, Musk is also directly associated with the worst excesses of the most despised industry in America: AI data centers. As I have previously detailed, these have become a bipartisan hate object at startling speed. Even projects that attempt reasonably generous compensation to the surrounding communities have been overwhelmingly rejected.

And Musk does not offer generous compensation to anyone except the politicians he wants to purchase. In Tennessee and Mississippi, he barged through local and federal air regulations alike to construct an AI data center powered by deafening, filth-spewing portable gas turbines. (Unlike a modern grid-connected gas power plant, these have little or no controls to reduce noise and air pollution.) And what is the point of all those additional child asthma cases Musk is creating? Grok, the AI model whose unique selling point compared to ChatGPT or Claude is that you can use it to create child pornography or deepfake nudes.

Naturally, this facility is located in the poorest and Blackest part of Memphis. Justin Pearson, a Black House candidate running in a horribly gerrymandered district in that area and running firmly against the Musk data center, appears to have overperformed the 2024 presidential count there by more than 20 points, though he may have come up just short.

So it’s not much surprise that a political cause Musk loudly and publicly associated himself with went down in flames, just like a Cybertruck on autopilot. But we still desperately need confiscatory taxation on billionaires, and strict new campaign finance reform. Let’s reform the billionaire-owned Supreme Court so we can get these dang oligarchs and politicians off our phones and televisions.