$500 Million Bought Elon Nothing
· The Atlantic
Here are a few things $474 million can cover: roughly 77 million Big Macs, about 12,814 Tesla Model 3s, or approximately 2,724 years of a U.S. senator’s average salary. If you’re Elon Musk, it could also buy you one deeply disappointing evening in November.
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This year, Musk became the single largest non-candidate donor in any election cycle ever. His contributions to campaigns and organizations account for about one-quarter of all campaign donations Republicans received in 2026. More than $168 million of that money went to super PACs supporting the Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who lost yesterday to James Talarico, the first Democrat to be elected to the Senate in Texas in 38 years. Musk gave $216 million to his own political action committee, America PAC, much of that going toward canvassing operations and advertising. Other donations went to either individual Republican candidates or organizations at both state and federal levels. In almost every instance, that money failed to buy the richest man in the world the results he wanted.
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What does this mean for Musk? One could see it as a repudiation of the near trillionaire—a suggestion that he and the causes he stands for have become a toxic political influence. Though he was helpful in Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, he has fumbled politically over the past two years, including with his disastrous run advising the Department of Government Efficiency. In 2025, he backed a failed state-supreme-court campaign in Wisconsin. Musk’s money in Paxton’s race may have backfired, signaling to Texans that a tech oligarch was trying to buy an election. At the very least, Musk’s influence seems to have galvanized Talarico. He made Musk and other rich donors a centerpiece of his campaign. During his victory speech last night, Talarico said the state sent a message to “every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor,” and “to the people at the top: We will not be conquered.”
Musk was just the most prominent member of an entourage of Silicon Valley executives and investors who have enthusiastically supported Trump in his second term. In Trump and the MAGA movement, this Tech Right coalition saw opportunities for favorable legislation on issues such as crypto and little to no regulation on AI buildout and safety. Culturally, MAGA offered this cohort a permission structure for loud and proud anti-wokeness. Impressed by their money and perceived power, Trump let Silicon Valley leaders into government operations, making them czars or lieutenant colonels in the Army. Through DOGE, Musk and other unelected tech workers briefly took control of government agencies, data, and personnel management in an unprecedented bureaucratic coup.
All of this seems to have rubbed many Americans the wrong way. Yesterday, the country voted in opposition to nearly every data-center ballot initiative and pro-data-center candidate. A majority of Americans in exit polls expressed deep concern about government corruption and also artificial intelligence. This election cycle, Musk appeared to represent almost every faction America has indicated that it is tired of right now. He is the oligarch class, data centers and AI, MAGA politics and cronyism all rolled into one man. Now Musk and the tech leaders will have to recalibrate their politics for a Congress that may be actively hostile to their interests. Perhaps it’s already started; Musk, who just a few weeks ago threatened retribution if Democrats sought to investigate him, deleted his X post saying “Vote red today!” after results came in on yesterday evening.
From another angle, you could interpret the results as a refreshing example that massive influxes of donor money have diminishing returns—especially during midterm elections for a deeply unpopular administration and Congress. It’s possible that all the money in the world may not have been enough to help a candidate as deeply flawed as Paxton. Whatever your spin, it seems that Musk’s historic spending was a test—of Musk’s influence, his likability, him as a stand-in for the tech and AI industry, or simply the power of his net worth. On these fronts, the results are unflattering, even embarrassing.
Back in May of 2025, Musk told Bloomberg that he was “going to do a lot less” political spending in the future. Clearly something changed. What did Musk think he was buying with the unprecedented contributions? There are the obvious financial motivations, especially for his spending in Texas—SpaceX, Tesla, and Musk are all based in the state. A Republican-controlled Congress might have also helped Musk’s businesses procure more government contracts; Republicans, taking cues from the Trump administration, would have been far less proactive in trying to regulate the AI industry, which would be ultimately beneficial to Musk’s interests. There’s the ideological motivation—Musk’s constant posting suggests that his right-wing, anti-immigration, and anti-woke politics are deeply held. Then there are the vanity and power dynamics: By almost single-handedly propping up Republicans this cycle, Musk would not only have ingratiated himself with GOP lawmakers but proved himself to be a kingmaker.
Perhaps the biggest motivation for him supporting the GOP is his own potential vulnerability to government oversight and accountability. Many Democrats in Congress have explicitly raised the idea of opening investigations into Musk’s companies and contracts. There’s also the real possibility of a Democrat-controlled Congress investigating Musk’s time at DOGE. (This scenario recently prompted Trump to tell a podcaster that he would grant pardons to Musk and other DOGE associates.)
For all these reasons, it matters that Musk’s money couldn’t buy him these elections. But still, one shouldn’t take Musk’s political defeat last night to suggest that he has lost his centrality in many of the world’s biggest and most consequential issues. Regardless of last night’s outcome, it should alarm you that Musk has so much money that he can independently stand up what Wired referred to as a “shadow Republican National Committee.” And that he can do this by spending about one-20th of 1 percent of his net worth. Put another way: Musk’s 2026 political donations are the equivalent of someone worth $1 million donating roughly $500.
I’ve previously described Musk’s wealth as a chaos agent with no great comparison. To Musk’s credit, he’s used it shrewdly, rolling his companies into one another, which blurs their individual financials and increases their market value. He purchased Twitter, a politically influential platform that’s never had a good business model, and immediately alienated advertisers. At the time, I suggested that Musk was making a huge mistake, which was true in a business sense but ultimately irrelevant to Musk’s actual interests in transforming the platform into a political weapon. The bottom line didn’t matter; he could eat the losses or transfer them to another of his companies’ balance sheets. What mattered was Musk’s ability to influence and become one of the central figures in an important area of political and cultural discourse. The Twitter purchase was also helpful in establishing a narrative around Musk in certain right-wing spheres, where he became a hero as a free speech warrior eradicating the “woke mind virus.”
In this way, Musk’s political donations echo his intent in purchasing Twitter. Donating to Republican candidates who used part of that money to buy ads is another way of influencing the discourse—what voters see when they turn on the TV or look at their phone or open their mailbox. Just as important to Musk is the message that money sends: the suggestion that he could purchase impunity for what amounts to pocket change. Or that even though he is a divisive figure, he is indispensable to the future of conservatism in the U.S. As we’ve learned over and over, Musk is a master of spectacle and getting people to believe and invest in the story he is telling about the future. Perhaps Musk saw his donations as a means of cementing himself as a main character in an election where he was not on the ballot.
No one can know what the future holds for Musk. As other tech CEOs have already acknowledged, it might include constraints or potential regulation; Musk is already posting about the appeal of taking his data centers to space. But one way to look at last night’s results is that voters did what investors and many politicians have never been able to bring themselves to do: They rejected Musk’s story of himself as a larger-than-life figure who can use his wealth to turn his every whim into a reality.