Elon Musk’s Lawyer Seeks Seat in Congress

As Republicans hold a rare midterm convention in Dallas, it may be less about speeches and more about securing as much high-roller donor cash as possible for the party’s effort to distract the American public from the cold reality of incompetence, corruption, and economic mismanagement in front of their faces. One event held on Tuesday night was emblematic: a “meet the incoming freshmen social” featuring 33 candidates seeking office in the House.

The sponsors of the event? America PAC, the super PAC created by Elon Musk that spent close to $300 million in 2024, and Chris Gober, who is running for Congress in Texas’s Tenth District.

Why would America PAC team up with a single individual candidate? Because Gober isn’t just anyone; he’s been Elon Musk’s lawyer for a decade. In fact, Gober helped set up and was chief counsel for America PAC, which he defended in litigation when Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner sued the group, calling Musk’s $1 million payments to voters in Pennsylvania before the 2024 election an unregistered lottery that violated state election law.

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Gober has served as a partisan political lawyer since serving in the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department in the Bush White House, helping move the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. He’s served as a top attorney for the Republican National Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee, Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, and the Republican Party of Texas, as well as representing dozens of Republican candidates for Congress and statehouses across the country, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now running for U.S. Senate.

He helped build the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank chaired and run by future administration cabinet members Brooke Rollins and Linda McMahon. He also runs a political compliance firm that helps candidates navigate election law.

His most recent law firm, Lex Politica, has practically the entire Republican campaign ecosystem as clients. Gober explicitly sought for the firm to become “synonymous with the conservative movement,” as he told The New York Times.

But the association with Musk—who Gober has said “change[d] the way that I practice law”—pushed the ambitious attorney in other directions, including founding a lobbying and advisory firm for startups involved in artificial intelligence, the data center build-out, and defense technology. Lex Politica has also represented the U.S. nonprofit outlet of the Viktor Orbán–supported Danube Institute.

Gober appears to have helped SpaceX secure a 25-year, 100 percent tax abatement for a controversial “Terafab” semiconductor fabrication project that sits within his Texas district. The AI-backed super PAC American Mission helped him with $747,000 in outside spending to make it through a crowded primary, where Gober advanced with 51 percent of the vote, just enough to avoid a runoff. Gober also loaned himself over $1.6 million.

Entering Congress would give someone at the nexus of Musk, AI’s growing ubiquity in commerce and warfare, and global MAGA politics another foothold on power in Washington. And he’s already looking past November and running against the broader left; on his website, he warns of how “radical progressives will stop at nothing to weaponize the federal government against conservatives.”

Though he hasn’t updated the news section of that website since February, Gober does have an opponent in the general election, Democrat Caitlin Rourk, a former intelligence officer in the Texas Army National Guard. The district went 60-38 Trump in 2024, but in 2018 Democrats came within four points of flipping it (the district had a different shape then but a similar partisan lean). Rourk thinks the stakes are too high to let Elon Musk’s lawyer sail into Washington without a fight.

“He says he doesn’t want to help insiders. I’m like, dude, you are their enabler,” Rourk said. “He built his career on making money for himself and special interests, I’m committed to making D.C. better and solving problems.”

GOBER HAD SIGNIFICANT CONTROL over the shape of the districts in the state he’s running in. His law firm was hired by Texas Republicans last year, as he was in 2021, to oversee the gerrymander that President Trump sought to boost Republicans. In testimony during a trial about the legality of the maps, the actual mapmaker, Adam Kincaid, acknowledged that requests from Gober specifically influenced the way he drew the maps.

“Substantially?” plaintiff’s lawyer Mark Gaber asked Kincaid in cross-examination. “I mean, I don’t know how to frame ‘substantially,’ but there were significant requests that I had to consider, yes,” Kincaid replied.

“And did you honor many of those requests in drawing your map?” the attorney asked.

“As many as I could, yes,” Kincaid said.

It’s not known how Gober affected the lines of his own district, but a downtown Austin apartment building where he owns a penthouse sits just inside the border. The oddly shaped Tenth District has a sliver of Austin (including the downtown area and home to people like Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, who maxed out to Gober) and then moves to the east, taking in Brazos County, where Gober went to college (Texas A&M), along with Houston’s northwestern suburbs and some deep-red rural areas.

Gober’s financial disclosure, which shows a net worth between $32 million and $107 million, lists over a dozen different business entities, including a stake in Lex Politica worth up to $50 million. The disclosure says that if elected, Gober’s Lex Politica shares would be purchased by two other partners at the firm, but not in full until December 2027, nearly a year into his first term, and he would still participate in the firm’s health care and 401(k) plans, though without employer contributions.

One of the more interesting parts of Gober’s business network are two companies, Maven Advocacy Partners and Maven Defense Solutions, founded as “strategic advisory services” firms in Austin. Gober values the firms between $2 million and $10 million.

The former is a registered federal lobbyist working for a number of energy and defense companies. These include Radiant Nuclear, a microreactor company for data center energy use founded by a SpaceX alum; SAGINT, a “digital asset infrastructure” concern that provides blockchain-based receipts for global trade; 9 Mothers Defense and Perseus Defense, both of which build counter-drone systems with AI; Terraflow Energy, an energy storage company for data centers; Kela Defense, a defense tech firm founded by the former head of Palantir Israel; Vision Products, which makes battlefield night vision and virtual reality systems; and PS LAX, a private airport terminal for billionaires at Los Angeles International Airport. Maven earned $900,000 from lobbying in 2025 and 2026. (Oddly, the National Wildlife Federation spent $50,000 with Maven Advocacy Partners to lobby in 2025, though it terminated this year.)

Maven Defense Solutions has a similar regulatory and lobbying focus for firms involving national security, while also striking deals with investors and merging partners. Former senior officials with the Defense Department, State Department, and CIA are on staff. Its list of clients is not disclosed. Maven Defense did not return a request for comment.

In an interview with a local radio station, Gober was asked about investment in his district and prominently mentioned the industries his firms have lobbied for: energy, advanced manufacturing, and defense tech. He supported increasing the defense budget, yet talked down the legacy military contractors for not delivering as efficiently as defense tech startups. He even suggested that the government should provide incentives to people who develop defense technology.

Gober’s run for Congress comes as upstart defense tech firms seek to upend old-line military contractors and infuse machine learning into weapons of war. He is someone who could sit on military-focused committees despite direct associations with Palantir and SpaceX, and the potential conflicts of interest that may imply.

SPACEX’S $55 BILLION, 433-ACRE TERAFAB was announced in May, with Grimes County as the location. A Wyoming-based shell company connected to Elon Musk then purchased several parcels of land in the rural county, including the entire Navasota River, a pump station on the river, and Gibbons Creek Reservoir, another major source of water. The shell company now holds over 3,200 acres in the county.

A week later, the Grimes County Commissioners Court approved the 25-year, 100 percent tax abatement for the project, despite public hearings where residents sharply opposed it. Most of the meetings were behind closed doors, and county officials were reportedly flown to visit other SpaceX sites during the deliberations. One source close to the situation told the Prospect that Gober met with one of the county commissioner judges prior to the agreement on the tax abatement.

“That stinks like good old-fashioned corruption,” said Nathan Johnson, who is running to replace Paxton as attorney general of Texas and who has promised to investigate Musk over SpaceX receiving 99 percent of broadband build-out funding in the state. “The county commissioners are in a difficult spot to turn this down. SpaceX says we’re going to build here or somewhere else … Elon has control, what are they going to do, turn down the money? We should have laws to stop this.”

Rourk has visited the county to participate in listening sessions with residents worried about the strain of the massive fabrication plant on the local community. “Especially where there are data centers in agricultural communities, people feel left behind,” she said. “They feel lost but don’t feel like Democrats are a home for them … I have to go in and show people I don’t have horns.” She added that “being really authentic has been the greatest way to build trust.”

Parts of the district are fast-growing, like Pflugerville, a bedroom community for Austin with new apartments stretching for miles. Rourk’s campaign estimates that new residents by themselves have increased the Democratic vote share district-wide by a full percentage point. Rourk has been knocking on doors there and throughout the district. The Texas A&M campus has seen massive voter registration drives powered by Senate hopeful James Talarico’s campaign, and Rourk could benefit from that as well.

Gober “has no name ID,” Rourk told me. “Of all the doors we’ve knocked on, only two people knew who he was.” Obviously, pointing out Gober’s ties to Musk, the MAGA movement, and the defense-industrial complex could be one way to define him. But in a district with a strong rightward lean, Rourk sees a need to explain how she would be different.

Born and raised in D.C., Rourk was determined to enter public service after moving to Texas with her husband. She has moved between the military and the private sector, working full-time with the Texas National Guard. Seeing the National Guard politicized by Trump and in Texas was “heartbreaking” to her. “It has degraded the trust from the American people for these people who are supposed to be their neighbors in uniform,” Rourk said. “We’re using military members, one of the few remaining trusted institutions, as political pawns.”

Rourk said that she’s seen shifts among voters in Texas, people thinking mass deportations have gone too far, and tired of endless imperial adventures. “When we hit the doors in Texas this summer … the number one issue besides affordability was the war in Iran,” she said. Running against someone who lobbied for military clients could be an advantage.

“The way I’ve looked at it, I have to leave everything on the table and build a real serious competitive campaign to win this race,” Rourk said. “If my opponent gets elected it’s really scary.”