Elon Musk responded with jokes on Wednesday after Republicans suffered sweeping defeats in the US midterm elections despite his spending nearly half a billion dollars to support their candidates. Democrats took control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s voting, with Republicans also suffering losses in longtime party strongholds including Texas and Kansas.
Writing on X, the social media platform he owns, the Tesla and SpaceX founder made light of the outcome. “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” he posted. Musk reportedly contributed $446m to support Republican candidates during the elections, making him the largest donor.
Most of that money went to America PAC, his own Republican-leaning political action committee, and the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican-aligned super PAC. The Senate Leadership Fund used $158m donated by Musk in September to back Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign in Texas. Paxton nevertheless lost to Democratic candidate James Talarico.
The Texas Senate contest included competing positions on the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Paxton proposed rapidly constructing data centres to turn Texas into the country’s AI hub, a plan voters rejected. Talarico campaigned for stricter regulation of data centre development. After the election, Musk returned to X with another joke: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now”.
Texas is also the headquarters location for Tesla, SpaceX and X, after the South Africa-born entrepreneur moved the companies there. In his victory speech, Talarico directly invoked Musk, describing his campaign as having defeated “goliaths” that included “the richest man in the world”.
Musk’s support for Republicans extended to the Texas governor’s race, where he gave $5m to incumbent Greg Abbott. That contribution also failed to secure a Republican victory. Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated Abbott, adding the governorship to the party’s election gains in the state.
The election spending came after Musk became a trillionaire in June when SpaceX went public. His contributions backed Republican efforts both to win the Texas Senate seat and to retain the state’s governorship, but Democrats prevailed in each contest.
Large political donations from billionaires have become an established feature of US elections since a Supreme Court decision in 2010. The ruling held that the government could not restrict political spending by corporations, unions and other groups when that spending was undertaken independently of candidates.
