Elon Musk gave more than $76 million to his personal political committee, America PAC, during the first two weeks of October as it works to lift Republicans in the final stretch of the midterm campaign. The figure comes from a pre-election report the group filed with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday evening.
In that same period, the PAC spent nearly $43 million and went into the last leg of the campaign with almost $47 million in cash on hand, the filing shows.
The Texas Senate race absorbed most of the new spending. The PAC put $15.2 million into the contest, twice what it spent there over the entire summer. Of that, $12.4 million went to attacking Democratic candidate James Talarico and $2.8 million to promoting Republican Ken Paxton.
Daily filings submitted since then show another $9.1 million directed against Talarico. That brings the PAC's spending against the Democrat this cycle to nearly $28 million, roughly 40 percent of all it has spent supporting or opposing candidates. The group has also moved toward online advertising, spending $11.4 million on digital ads in the two-week window, close to what it spent on mail and texting combined.
According to WIRED's analysis of FEC filings, Musk has given more than $445 million to Republican political groups this election cycle, making Musk the largest known individual donor in the midterms. More than $165 million of that has gone to America PAC since July alone. The PAC declined to comment.
Musk, whose companies include Tesla and SpaceX and have operations based in Texas, has also been weighing in on the race online. On Wednesday, Musk wrote on X that "there is something deeply wrong with Talarico," called the candidate "a creep" and claimed, without evidence, that Talarico "would vote to take away your kids and transition them." Earlier this month, Musk amplified a false claim that Talarico had been treated at a mental health facility.
Talarico responded the same day: "There is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal US Senator."
The contest remains a toss-up. An Emerson College poll of 1,000 likely Texas voters, conducted October 17 to 19, put Talarico at 48 percent and Paxton at 46 percent, within the poll's 3-point margin of error.
The stakes for Musk extend beyond Texas. If Democrats win the House, the lawmakers in line to chair its committees have signaled they will investigate Musk's role in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the federal contracts held by Musk's companies, and what California Democrat Zoe Lofgren called an "astounding" number of conflicts of interest. Democratic control of both chambers of Congress would create still more difficulties for Musk.
Silicon Valley Democrats have identified a further line of scrutiny: 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 said the next Congress "will closely scrutinize federal funding awarded to Mr. Musk's businesses."
