Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and former intimate of President Donald Trump’s, ever-so-slightly eroded his 14 (that we know of) children’s inheritances during the 2026 midterm elections, spending $474 million (of his estimated $901.7 billion bankroll) on Republican campaigns across the US. But as election day continued across the country, the prolific user of his own social media platform, X, remained relatively restrained.
“Vote red today,” was an early tweet, interspersed between abundant promotions of his company’s AI agent, Grok Bot. A shared tweet featuring Michigan Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was simply captioned with the raised eyebrow emoji.
And that was the most Musk had to say about the midterms on Tuesday, despite what the New York Times reports is the most that “any donor has ever spent in a single election cycle,” barring former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s spend on his own 2020 election campaign, which cost him over $1 billion.
And as the blue wave continued, Musk started removing tweets, instead of adding them. Early Wednesday morning, around the time James Talarico took the stage to celebrate his win in Texas, Musk removed the missive he’d had pinned to the top of his account, an October 29 post listing his “biggest concern…if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028,” with open borders, a larger Supreme Court, and statehood for DC and Puerto Rico as his primary fears. “That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election,” he concluded. “Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.”
Per the Times, Musk’s spend is likely to exceed the $474 million currently reported, as any donations made after October 14 have yet to be counted. Of that current figure, $216 million went to his own super PAC, America PAC, with $212 of that going to support US Senate hopeful Ken Paxton. An additional $168 million went to the pro-Republican Senate Leadership Fund, and $30 million went to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the primary super PAC for House Republicans. An additional $16 million to state-focused political efforts in Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin, while $44 million went to federal Republican groups or candidates.
That’s a lot of money to most of us, but by early Wednesday morning, Musk appeared to be taking the expenditure in stride. “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” he tweeted at 1:12 a.m. ET, followed almost immediately by “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” punctuated by the shrug emoji.
