Elon Musk’s Midterm Spending Surpasses Expectations: A New Record Set

Elon Musk has poured more than $76 million into his personal political committee, America PAC, in just the first two weeks of October, according to a pre-election report filed with the Federal Election Commission. This spending brings his total donations to Republicans this election cycle to over $445 million, making him the largest known individual donor in the midterms. Nearly $43 million of this has been spent in the final stretch of the campaign, with the PAC holding nearly $47 million in cash as of the latest report. The Texas Senate race has been the biggest single recipient of this spending, drawing $15.2 million in the last two weeks alone. This is double what the PAC spent on the race all summer. The spending has been largely directed against Democratic candidate James Talarico, with $12.4 million spent to attack him and $2.8 million spent to promote Republican Ken Paxton. Since the latest report, the PAC has spent an additional $9.1 million against Talarico, bringing the total spending against him to nearly $28 million, which is about 40 percent of everything the PAC has spent on candidates this cycle. The PAC has also shifted its spending toward online ads, spending $11.4 million on digital ads in the same two weeks, which is close to what it spent on mail and texting combined.

Musk has given more than $165 million to America PAC since July alone. Daily filings since then show $9.1 million more against Talarico, bringing the PAC’s spending against him this cycle to nearly $28 million, about 40 percent of everything it has spent supporting or opposing candidates. The Texas race remains a toss-up, with a recent poll showing Talarico at 48 percent and Paxton at 46 percent, within the poll’s 3-point margin of error.

The stakes for Musk reach well beyond Texas. If Democrats win the House, the 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.”