Elon Musk's $76 Million Boost for Midterms

In the first two weeks of October, Elon Musk’s personal political committee, America PAC, received more than $76 million to support Republicans in the midterms. This spending brought the PAC’s total cash holdings to nearly $47 million as the campaign entered its final stretch. The Texas Senate race was the biggest recipient of this spending, drawing $15.2 million, double what the PAC spent there all summer. The spending included $12.4 million to attack Democratic candidate James Talarico and $2.8 million to promote Republican Ken Paxton. Since then, the PAC has spent another $9.1 million on Talarico, bringing its spending against him to nearly $28 million, about 40 percent of everything it has spent on candidates this cycle. The PAC also shifted toward online ads, spending $11.4 million on digital ads in the same two weeks, which is close to what it spent on mail and texting combined.

Musk has given more than $445 million to Republican political groups this election cycle, according to WIRED’s analysis of FEC filings, making him the biggest known individual donor in the midterms. More than $165 million of that has gone to America PAC since July alone. America PAC declined to comment.

Musk has been posting online about the Texas race, calling Talarico a “creep” and claiming that he “would vote to take away your kids and transition them.” Talarico shot back that “there is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal US Senator.” The Texas race remains a toss-up, with an Emerson College poll showing Talarico at 48 percent and Paxton at 46 percent, within the poll’s 3-point margin of error.

If Democrats win the House, the lawmakers in line to lead its committees have signaled they will investigate Musk’s role in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his companies’ federal contracts, and what Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, called an “astounding” number of conflicts of interest. Unified Democratic control of Congress would pose even more problems for him. Silicon Valley Democrats have also added another target on Friday: restrictions on SpaceX’s Starshield satellite service in Ukraine. In a letter to the White House demanding an investigation, Representatives Sam Liccardo, Jimmy Panetta, and Ro Khanna vowed that the next Congress “will closely scrutinize federal funding awarded to Mr. Musk’s businesses.”