How Elon Musk Threw Away Nearly 1/2 $ Bill On His Interference on Midterms
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| Elon Musk has become by far the Republican Party’s biggest megadonor, spending nearly $500 million during the 2025-26 midterm election cycle.Jason Henry for The New York Times |
Theodore Schleifer extensively covered Elon Musk’s political work in the 2024 and 2026 elections.
The world’s richest person had face-planted — and was now trying to turn back time.
Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars during the midterm cycle, the most in any election period for a donor who wasn’t a candidate himself.
Elon Musk’s campaign donations
A segmented bar chart showing where Elon Musk's campaign giving went during the 2026 midterm cycle.2023-24
$290 mil.2025-26
$474 mil.America PAC
$216 mil.Senate Leadership Fund
$168 mil.Congressional Leadership Fund
$30 mil.Other Republican groups
$44 mil.State groups
$16 mil.
Source: Federal Election Commission.Lily Boyce/The New York Tiimes
He hoped to defend Republican control of Congress and rescue Ken Paxton, the party’s embattled nominee for Senate in Texas. Instead, Democrats won shockingly large House and Senate majorities, and Mr. Paxton was trounced by James Talarico, who seemed to bother Mr. Musk like no other Democratic candidate.
When the devastating result became clear, Mr. Musk deleted an X post that had encouraged Republicans to turn out, and tried to joke his way out of how badly the night had gone for him. “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” he wrote early Wednesday.
It was a stunning failure. Now the onetime trillionaire is all but certain to face investigatory scrutiny and financial pressure with newly empowered Democrats in control of Congress and top state offices in Texas, where he lives and operates many of his businesses. Mr. Musk, who moved there from California in part to escape the regulatory environment, will soon be represented by a senator who has said he wants to “tax trillionaires out of existence.”
The political influence of Mr. Musk, who has become by far the Republican Party’s biggest megadonor, is now in serious question.
How he arrived at this point is a story of an unpredictable tycoon who was never in denial about Republicans’ predicament this year, but who was also characteristically starry-eyed about his ability to help the party beat the odds.
In interviews, nearly 30 people with insight into Mr. Musk’s political operation — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations — recounted how he came to spend so much on the midterms, how tensions grew between his team and President Trump’s advisers, and how his varied and often last-ditch strategies fizzled.
There is now some finger-pointing in Mr. Musk’s broader orbit about who is responsible for what went wrong and whether he should have spent so much, particularly in Texas. Some advisers to Mr. Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, had argued internally that the group should be more focused on persuasion (winning over new voters) than on turnout (encouraging past Republican voters to cast ballots again).
But in private conversations, Mr. Musk has rejected that argument, saying that spending money to persuade Americans to vote for a certain candidate is a waste. Plenty of other groups spend money on that. The real return on investment, he has told people, comes from getting out the vote with door-knockers — something that Mr. Musk believes he is better at than anybody else.
Many elections come down to turnout. But not this one.
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| President Trump in the foreground, with Mr. Musk standing behind him with his arms crossed. |
Mr. Musk served as an adviser to President Trump and led his cost-cutting effort in Washington before the two men fell out over the president’s domestic policy bill. By early this year, they had warmed back up again.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
An Erratic, Frustrated Billionaire
If Mr. Paxton had won in Texas, according to two people with knowledge of his planned victory speech, he intended to issue a big thank-you to Mr. Musk.
The public message of appreciation, of course, went undelivered.
Mr. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, went through a politically tumultuous 2025. He served as a powerful adviser to the Trump White House before the two men fell out spectacularly over the president’s domestic policy bill. By early this year, he and Mr. Trump had warmed back up to each other, but it was unclear even to Mr. Musk’s advisers whether he planned to lift a finger to help Republicans in the midterms.
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Mr. Musk began the year in a mood that did not seem aligned with Senate Republicans. He whipped up a frenzy against Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, because he had not forced through a major bill of voting restrictions. At a meeting in January at a Tesla factory near Austin, Mr. Thune tried to walk a patient Mr. Musk through why he didn’t have the votes to pass the measure, two people with knowledge of the discussion said. The meeting seemed to go well. But Mr. Musk continued his online rampage.
In private conversations, Mr. Musk was all over the place about whether he wanted to spend heavily on politics.
He was unnerved by his first foray into midterm-cycle spending, a 2025 judicial election in Wisconsin in which he spent $47 million only for his candidate to lose. Mr. Musk’s lesson was that he should not make himself the face of his campaign efforts.
His mind also seemed elsewhere, on A.I. and SpaceX. Early this year, he told a billionaire peer that he was not terribly optimistic about the Republican Party’s political standing or its chances in 2028. Throughout the year, he did not seem to want to talk much about the midterms, beyond voicing concern that a left-wing politician like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York could eventually become president.
He could be erratic. In January, Mr. Musk donated $10 million to support Nate Morris, a long-shot candidate for the Senate in Kentucky — a move that blindsided his own team, which had no heads-up. Several people close to Mr. Musk thought the donation to Mr. Morris, a friend of Vice President JD Vance’s, was a mistake, and Mr. Morris dropped out before the primary.
In May, as Mr. Musk rode aboard Air Force One on a trip to China, James Blair, Mr. Trump’s top political adviser, told Mr. Musk he hoped the billionaire would help Republicans in the midterms again, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion. Mr. Musk, whose super PAC spent hundreds of millions in 2024 to return Mr. Trump to office, said that yes, he was in for Round 2 — and told Mr. Blair to send him ideas.
Mr. Blair sketched out a request for a Musk-led door-knocking program costing about $100 million. The Musk team was taken aback. Such money might be pocket change for Mr. Musk, who is worth hundreds of billions, but it was far more than America PAC had been prepared to spend.
Mr. Musk eventually assented — and went even further, authorizing spending for a program beyond door-knocking that would cost $100 million to $120 million.
But at times the Musk team grew frustrated with the Trump team, according to three people with knowledge of the interactions. The Musk crew was deferential but sometimes felt resentful or used by the Trump operation. The Musk team also believed that the polling from Mr. Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., was inconsistent and that the group was too slow to engage in races.
Asked for comment, an America PAC official said the relationship was strong.
Mr. Musk’s budget for his super PAC eventually grew to $150 million or $160 million — because of Texas.
The state wasn’t even on the initial list of six Senate races that Mr. Musk had in mind. But over the summer, Mr. Musk’s advisers began to tell close allies that he planned to allocate an eye-popping amount to Texas, primarily to help the state’s Republican candidates for the U.S. House.
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| An inflatable figure of resembling Elon Musk near a person wearing a Ken Paxton mask who is holding up a fake blank check from Mr. Musk to Mr. Paxton. |
Ken Paxton’s heavy financial support from Mr. Musk in the Texas Senate race became a line of attack for Democrats. Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
All-In on Texas
Mr. Musk’s team saw how Texas was trending politically, and he found himself at a crossroads. He hardly knew Mr. Paxton well, and the two barely speak, according to two people with knowledge of their relationship. But he grew preoccupied with Mr. Talarico. Should he spend a fortune to beat him?
In mid-August, Mr. Paxton’s team was desperate and needed cash immediately. He had struggled mightily to raise money and was facing the strongest Democratic fund-raiser in the country, who had been pounding him with negative ads.
An extraordinary plan came together. The head of Mr. Paxton’s super PAC, Sam Cooper, hosted a fund-raising call alongside Mr. Paxton and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a fellow Republican. In dire terms, Mr. Cooper urged some of the party’s biggest Texas donors to give money to save Mr. Paxton before it was too late.
Listening, with some alarm, was Mr. Musk’s top political adviser, Chris Young. Soon after, he began negotiating with Alex Latcham, the head of the Thune-aligned super PAC for Senate Republicans. They agreed to split a $15 million ad reservation to help Mr. Paxton — and then things snowballed. They swapped spending proposals, and Mr. Young got Mr. Musk’s sign-off to send another $158 million to Mr. Latcham’s group for a Paxton rescue mission that began in mid-September.
Despite cutting some of the biggest checks ever recorded in American politics, Mr. Musk operated during those negotiations with the remove that defined all of his midterm engagement. Mr. Thune, too, was effectively absent: He was informed afterward that his Texas money problem, so to speak, had been solved. In private conversations with donors, Mr. Thune mostly stayed mum about Mr. Musk’s role.
Mr. Musk was now firmly in the persuasion game he had dismissed: Mr. Latcham’s super PAC ran ads to try to win over voters by focusing on transgender and crime-related issues.
The Musk team thought that its spending for Mr. Paxton had worked and had chipped 10 percentage points off Mr. Talarico’s favorability numbers.
Some allies of Mr. Musk were also nervous about what would happen to his companies if Gov. Greg Abbott and other top Republican state officials were to lose re-election. So the billionaire spent $12.5 million on state politics, too. All that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick needed to do to get his $500,000 was simply call Mr. Young and ask.
Mr. Abbott, Mr. Patrick and all the other Republican statewide candidates in Texas lost.
“Elon tried to spend a whole bunch of money in his home state and not only lost the Senate, but the governorship and all the rest,” Reid Hoffman, a major donor to Mr. Talarico and a business rival of Mr. Musk’s, said in an interview. “Clearly, his ability to spend money to win an election has been multiply disproven.”
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| A happy crowd in front of a James Talarico sign. |
Mr. Talarico ended up winning by a bigger margin than expected, 12 percentage points. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Did Musk Make a Mistake?
As Election Day approached, Mr. Musk’s advisers feared a blue wave and were skittish about being blamed. They came to see the midterms as an inescapable referendum on Mr. Trump and his second-term actions, especially his decision to go to war with Iran. How much power did they really have?
Mr. Musk’s team believed that its turnout operation could act like a special-teams unit in football — helping Republicans gain a few extra percentage points that could make the difference in a close race.
Mr. Musk expressed to at least one friend that he thought of his turnout work as effectively a civic duty and not political at all.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s super PAC sent texts to voters that used A.I. to create personalized videos of Mr. Trump using their first names to encourage them to turn out. (“We need voters like you, Kathleen.”)
The operation that Mr. Musk assembled was enormous, bigger than what he had in 2024. Thousands of paid canvassers were dispatched to knock on millions of doors of Republican-leaning Americans who were seen as less likely to vote yet could be encouraged to do so. But as Republicans’ polling grew uglier in the final weeks, America PAC began knocking on the doors of likelier and likelier voters, drifting away from its original job.
Some Republicans wished that the Musk field operation had begun earlier — it did not kick fully into gear until around Labor Day.
Around then, Mr. Musk’s super PAC decided to scale up drastically in Texas. The group knocked on roughly 1.7 million doors there over the final three weeks of September. But it may have been too late: In some key Texas markets, the super PAC did not meet all of its door-knocking targets, in part because it could not find enough labor, according to people with knowledge of the figures.
Asked for comment, the America PAC official said the group had routinely raised its target numbers.
The Musk operation tried to do things as cost-effectively as possible — paying some canvassing firms about $4.50 a door, a relatively low amount, with canvassers earning their pay per door rather than per hour. Those firms in turn paid most canvassers roughly $2 or $2.50 per door.
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| A photo from Mintt, a mail-tracking firm, shows a flier from Mr. Musk’s super PAC that says “James Talarico is for they/them.” |
A handout photo from Mintt, a mail-tracking firm, shows a flier from Mr. Musk’s super PAC. In Texas, the Musk operation focused heavily on transgender issues, viewing them as a liability for Mr. Talarico.Credit...Mintt
Slides from one America PAC training presentation for door-knockers that were obtained by The New York Times pulled back the curtain on its approach.
The trainers made no mention of Mr. Musk, telling canvassers only that America PAC was an “independent organization” that was “working to make sure that people who love America get out to vote in the November election to defend our American values and weaken the far-left agenda knocking on our door.”
The super PAC also used digital tools to try to crack down on fraud among its canvassers, a rampant problem in the industry. The slides warned that if canvassers “in any way cheat or commit fraud, we will report you to local law enforcement and assist them in your prosecution.”
In Texas, these door knockers focused heavily on transgender issues. Mr. Musk’s team saw this as essential to turning out right-wing voters against Mr. Talarico, but some advisers thought that focus was a tactical mistake.
Last Friday, in America PAC’s final internal poll of the Senate race, Mr. Talarico held a six-point advantage over Mr. Paxton.
On Tuesday, after more than $210 million in spending from Mr. Musk to help Mr. Paxton, the results finally arrived. Mr. Talarico won by 12 points.
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