Elon Musk tried to buy an election. Several elections, in fact. In total, the world’s richest man has pumped about $474 million into Super PACs working on behalf of Republican candidates across the country in the 2026 election cycle, with most of it focused on Texas. But on Tuesday night, in this state and virtually every other battleground, he lost — and he lost big.
Musk’s plan for the midterm elections was simple: pump huge sums of money into super PACs that could overwhelm the election with relentless ad spending, sending voters a constant barrage 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 that money could buy in the democratic process. Tuesday night, it failed.
As of this morning, the current vote total increases Talarico by 13 points. In Michigan, El-Sayed overcame rampant racism and Islamophobia to win by about eight percent. Sherrod Brown won back a seat in Ohio. Gina Hinojosa will become the first Latino governor of Texas. So many congressional districts have been flipped that Democrats could hold as many as 81 majority seats in the lower house. They will certainly lead the Senate, with at least 53 seats and perhaps more to come. Shares of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk’s two largest companies, began falling as soon as markets opened this morning.
Musk, after seething and catastrophizing for weeks, tried to laugh it off. “I guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” he wrote at 1:13 a.m. today.
By 9:30 a.m., he was again posting mundane tweets about Qualcomm technology in its Starlink systems and the new shopping feature in its Grok AI. But Musk will not be able to escape the shame of defeat so easily. With majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats now have enormous latitude to weaponize Congress’ investigative powers. Democrats in the House of Representatives have been indicating for weeks that if they were able to regain control of these powerful weapons, they would turn them directly to Musk.
“Elon Musk and his DOGE acolytes have sowed chaos, ruined careers, and played a significant role in illegal grant cancellations and public employee firings,” 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 past two years. The number of conflicts of interest is staggering.”
Tesla and SpaceX rely heavily on their relationships with the government, both through direct contracts for things like launching satellites and through tax breaks offered by the federal government and individual states for electric cars and energy products.
Part of the reason Musk received such a spanking is because Democrats in Texas and across the country specifically planned his deluge of money. Shortly before Election Day, Texas Democratic strategists said rolling stone that Talarico’s entire campaign strategy was structured around limiting the potential damage of a massive cash drain, primarily by building the candidate’s own channels of communication 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 numerous AI-powered attack ads calling out candidate names, but he couldn’t buy Republicans better candidates themselves (and in Texas, at least, it did the opposite — Musk’s money was a major factor in the openly corrupt and scandal-prone Ken Paxton’s ousting of incumbent stalwart John Cornyn in the Republican primary earlier this year).
But Musk’s real defeat, at least symbolically, was his total rejection by his adopted country. 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’ conservative leanings, they argued, made it a friendlier place for their brand of cutthroat capitalism and bold free speech. The beauty of America, of course, is that no amount of money can ever truly insulate you from the will of the people, who have made Texas as blue as California, at least for now.
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