11/07/2026
WORST INVESTMENT EVER: the world's richest, saddest man dumped at least $474 million to help Republicans.
We all saw how that turned out.
It's more than any donor not on the ballot has ever spent in a single election. It still wasn’t enough.
His biggest bet was Texas. He poured about $224 million into his adoptive home state, most of it propping up Ken Paxton for Senate. Paxton lost to James Talarico by 12 points, making Talarico the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate race since 1988.
And it wasn't close.
Musk also slipped Greg Abbott about $5 million in the final stretch. Abbott lost too, to Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned against Musk.
So the man who moved his companies from California to Texas to get away from Democrats now has a Democratic governor and a Democratic senator.
And it wasn’t just Texas. Musk-backed Republicans lost Senate races in some 10 additional states.
Talarico had a simple message for the world’s richest man: “Texas is not for sale.”
Musk took it about as well as you’d expect.
He appears to have started quietly deleting his posts urging people to vote Republican, and at around 1 a.m. he posted that data centers in space were “looking pretty appealing right now.”
Now a Democratic Congress gets to take a hard look at his federal contracts and his time running Trump’s DOGE.
Half a billion dollars, and the only thing he bought was a Congress that can investigate him.
