How Elon Musk and Big Tech Poured Millions Into the Midterms, and Lost

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I think it’s pretty incredible that two years ago, America PAC was this new force in Republican politics. Everyone was starting to play to the sort of America PAC donation situation, and it pulled in not just money from Musk, it pulled in money from big VCs like Shaun Maguire. And in 2024, as we reported, their ground game wasn’t exactly super strong, but it was just the willingness to pump money in. Similar to how VCs make things work, you pump money in until your team wins. And just to watch that strategy really crash and burn, but I think we saw some early indications that, particularly in the months post DOGE, that Elon himself became a really toxic thing for Republicans to start attaching themselves to.

Leah Feiger: Oh, absolutely.

Vittoria Elliott: And so then it became this sort of monkey’s paw situation where it’s like you can take the America PAC money and then you get tarred with the Musk brand. And those two things, maybe at best they cancel each other out, but it seems like actually the Musk brand is more toxic than he and his candidates could buy their way out of.

Leah Feiger: I 100 percent agree with you. Hugo, you were very involved in the WIRED tracking project where we built a live tracker of Musk’s political spending. Can you take us through a couple of the candidates that he put all of this dough behind and how they ended up doing?

Hugo Lowell: Yeah, look, in total, Musk’s America PAC spent about close to $500 million actually, half a billion dollars this midterm cycle, him alone. I mean, if you conceptualize that sort of spending, the way to think about it I think is he effectively ran a shadow Republican national committee. That is the scale of that contribution. And were it not for that money, by the way, some of these losses might’ve been even greater. Tori talked about the ground game that America PAC financed, that has been a big focus both in ’24 and also in this cycle. Obviously his biggest focus was Texas. That is his home base. That was where he spent the most amount of time, the most amount of money and the most amount of resources, and it basically got him nothing. I mean, Ken Paxton lost by such a wide margin that hanging onto James Talarico’s coattails was Gina Hinojosa in the governor’s race. So I think the way to look at Musk’s spending, if you talk to Republican operatives and people in Trump world, is to think about it in terms of what is this money actually buying him? For him, it’s a rounding era. Half billion dollars to Elon, it’s kind of pocket change, which is kind of incredible to think about, but that is the case. And so what is the net effect he gets from this? And it is probably the fact that he can play kingmaker now running into 2028. And if he decides to back a particular presidential candidate, I’m sorry to say this, we already just finished this election, but ’28 is around the corner. If he decides to back a particular candidate, no one else is really going to be able to compete with him on the money front because if he sinks another half billion, if not more, in the next cycle, who else has that kind of money to play with? It’s insane.