Musk Pours Over $76M Into Midterms to Aid GOP

Elon Musk personally funneled over $76 million into his political committee, America PAC, during the first two weeks of October, pushing his total backing of Republican candidates past $445 million this election cycle. This latest contribution, detailed in a pre-election report filed with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday, cements his position as the single largest known individual donor in the midterms.

The committee has spent nearly $43 million in the first two weeks of October and entered the campaign’s final stretch holding nearly $47 million in cash. More than $165 million of that has flowed to America PAC since July alone.

A significant portion of the spending is concentrated in the Texas Senate race, where the committee allocated $15.2 million, a figure double what it spent there all summer. Of that, $12.4 million was used to attack Democratic candidate James Talarico, while $2.8 million went toward promoting Republican Ken Paxton. Additional filings show another $9.1 million spent against Talarico, bringing the total spent on him this cycle to nearly $28 million, which accounts for about 40 percent of everything the PAC has spent supporting or opposing candidates.

The PAC also shifted toward online ads, spending $11.4 million on digital ads in the same two weeks, close to what it spent on mail and texting combined. America PAC declined to comment on the report.

Musk, whose companies Tesla and SpaceX are based in Texas, has also been posting online about the race. On Wednesday, he wrote on X that “there is something deeply wrong with Talarico,” then called him “a creep” and claimed, without evidence, that he “would vote to take away your kids and transition them.” Earlier this month, he amplified a false claim that Talarico had been treated at a mental health facility. Talarico responded: “There is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal US Senator.”

The Texas race remains a toss-up. An Emerson College poll of 1,000 likely Texas voters, conducted October 17 to 19, found 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, lawmakers in line to lead its committees have signaled they will investigate his role in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his companies’ federal contracts, and what Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, called an “astounding” number of conflicts of interest. Unified Democratic control of Congress would pose even more problems for him. Silicon Valley Democrats added another target on Friday: 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 vowed that the next Congress “will closely scrutinize federal funding awarded to Mr. Musk’s businesses.”

As the midterms approach, the flood of cash and online posts underscores how directly Musk has tied his fortune to the outcome of races that could shape how his companies are regulated and scrutinized for years to come.