Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars on the US midterm elections, but the record outlay bought the world’s richest man almost nothing.
Just three of the 43 Republicans Musk backed for the House of Representatives won on Tuesday night, while 33 lost. The remaining seven races had not been called by late Wednesday, though Democrats were ahead in the tallies so far. Of the seven Senate Republican candidates he supported, six lost and one race was still hanging in the balance.
In Texas, where SpaceX and Tesla are based and where Musk plans a chipmaking venture, he came up empty despite spending almost $230 million on the Senate contest, $5 million on the governor’s race and $500,000 on the lieutenant governor vote. The Democrat who won the Texas Senate race, James Talarico, was targeted by $153.5 million of attack advertising paid for by Musk. “Tonight we beat Goliath,” Talarico told supporters in Austin, casting himself and Musk as David and Goliath.
Musk spent $445 million on federal races alone, according to the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets. The full scale of his spending may never be known: he put tens of millions more through dark-money nonprofit groups, which disclose less about their donors than political action committees, according to a person familiar with his campaign spending, and millions more on state and local elections that lack uniform disclosure rules.
His political action committee, America PAC, and his lawyer Alex Spiro did not respond to requests for comment.
The result leaves Musk exposed. Democrats have said investigations into Musk and his businesses topped their agenda, and with their newfound power they say they are adding campaign finance reform to their wish list. “A lot of Democrats see him as the Mr. Money Bags for their Republican opponents and that’s certainly going to color how they’re going to treat him personally,” said David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College. “He’s particularly at risk because he’s been part of the Trump administration and his companies have direct government involvement.”
Shares in SpaceX and Tesla fell 3.9 per cent and 3.3 per cent respectively on Wednesday, on investor concerns that a Democratic-controlled Congress would tighten scrutiny of Musk’s Starlink satellite service and his artificial intelligence data centre projects.
Democrats are expected to open a flurry of congressional investigations scrutinising Musk’s companies, their contracts, his work running the Department of Government Efficiency, his involvement in Ukraine and his contact with Russia. Some inquiries have already begun: Democrats on House and Senate investigative committees wrote to SpaceX, the Department of Defense and the White House last month about the company’s restriction of its Starlink satellite system in Ukraine during a critical point in its war against Russia. Others have questioned Musk about his AI chatbot Grok’s dissemination of sexualised images of women and children, conflicts of interest while he ran DOGE, and SpaceX’s federal contracts with NASA and the Defense Department.
The incoming chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Representative Robert Garcia of California, plans to introduce legislation closing what he calls the “Musk loophole” — a provision in campaign finance law that allows individual executives to spend unlimited personal money on political campaigns, even though their companies are banned from doing so.
Musk’s spending also helped drive total expenditure in this election cycle to a new record. Political advertising tracker AdImpact said the Texas Senate contest alone was the most expensive US non-presidential race ever, with roughly $573.2 million in total spending. Democratic candidates significantly outraised Republicans with small-dollar donations, making Republicans more dependent on wealthy donors; billionaire Michael Bloomberg donated $80 million to Democrats in the final weeks of the race.
Early on Wednesday, as the election results became clear, Musk posted on X: “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time.”
Sources: Reuters — “Musk has little to show for his record spending on Republican campaigns in US midterms” (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-has-little-show-his-record-spending-republican-campaigns-us-midterms-2026-11-05/)
