Elon Musk tried to buy an election. Several elections, in fact. All told, the world’s richest man pumped around $474 million into Super PACs working on behalf of Republican candidates around the country in the 2026 election cycle, most of it focused on Texas.
But on Tuesday night, in that state and basically every other battleground, he lost — and he lost big.
Musk’s plan for the midterms was simple: funnel massive amounts of cash into super PACs that could overwhelm elections with relentless ad spending, sending voters a constant deluge of negative information about Democrats like James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan in a blatant attempt to exert all the power and influence money could buy into the democratic process. On Tuesday night, it failed.
As of Wednesday morning, current voting totals have Talarico up by 13 points. In Michigan, El-Sayed overcame rampant racism and Islamophobia to win by around eight percent. Sherrod Brown regained a seat in Ohio. Gina Hinojosa will become Texas’s first Latina governor. So many House districts flipped that the Democrats may have as much as an 81-seat majority in the lower chamber. They will certainly run the Senate, with at least 53 seats and more, perhaps, to come. Shares of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk’s two biggest companies, started falling as soon as the markets opened on Wednesday morning.
Musk, after seething and catastrophizing for weeks, tried to laugh it off. “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” he wrote at 1:13 a.m. on Wednesday morning.
By 9:30, he was back to making mundane tweets about the Qualcomm technology in his Starlink systems and his Grok AI’s new shopping feature. But Musk won’t be able to wriggle out of the shame of defeat that easily. With majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats now have an enormous latitude to weaponize the investigative powers of Congress. House Democrats have been indicating for weeks that if they were to regain control of these powerful weapons, they’ll turn them right onto Musk.
“Elon Musk and his DOGE cronies stirred up chaos, ruined careers, and played a large role in illegal grant cancellations and firings of civil servants,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the Space, Science and Technology Committee, said in a statement last month. “He helped orchestrate the systematic destruction of government programs and services over the last nearly two years. The sheer number of conflicts of interest are astounding.”
Tesla and SpaceX depend heavily on their relationship to the government, both through direct contracts for things like satellite launches and the tax breaks that both the federal government and individual states offer for electric cars and energy products.
Part of the reason Musk got spanked so badly is that Democrats in Texas and around the country specifically planned for his deluge of cash. Shortly before election day, Democratic strategists in Texas told Rolling Stone that Talarico’s entire campaign strategy was structured around limiting the potential harm of a massive cash dump, mainly by building the candidate’s own communication channels with voters through social media and earned appearances, rather than being forced into the battleground of ad-versus-ad spending in the final days of the race. Musk’s money bought plenty of AI-powered attack ads calling candidates names, but it couldn’t buy the Republicans better candidates themselves (and in Texas, at least, it did the opposite — Musk’s cash was a major factor in the openly corrupt, scandal-prone Ken Paxton ousting incumbent stalwart John Cornyn in the Republican primary earlier this year).
But Musk’s real defeat, at least symbolically, was his utter rejection by his adopted home. Musk and many other tech moguls, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, have made a big show of moving parts of their businesses — and often their personal residences — from liberal states like California to Texas in recent years. Texas’s conservative leanings, they maintained, made it a friendlier place for their brand of cut-throat capitalism and edgy free speech. The beauty of America, of course, is that no amount of money can ever make you truly safe from the will of the people, who turned Texas just as blue as California, at least for now.
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