Musk spent big on Republicans in the midterms. He has little to show for it

Elon Musk poured millions of dollars into boosting Republicans in the midterm elections, but the tech mogul's vast wealth was no match for the blue wave that battered the GOP on Tuesday night.

Despite spending more than $442 million this cycle — a massive sum that eclipsed his support for President Trump in the 2024 election — Republicans lost ground across the country, even in territory considered relatively safe for the party.

The GOP's drubbing underscored the limits of the world's richest man in shaping the political map and raises questions about how his business empire will fare under Democratic leaders in his home base of Texas and on Capitol Hill.

"Other than the Republicans, Elon Musk is probably the biggest loser of last Tuesday," said Cayce Myers, a Virginia Tech public relations professor who has focused on political campaigns.

Musk pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2024 presidential race and became a major figure in Trump's second term, even leading the cost-saving crackdown that led to sweeping cuts and layoffs in the federal government. But after pouring millions into a Wisconsin race that didn't pay off last year, Musk said he'd scale back political spending .

That pledge didn't hold for long, and Musk started midterm spending in late 2025 . By Election Day, he was the top donor by a mile.

"You have to have money to be competitive. No question," Myers added. "But money cannot guarantee outcome."

Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas-based Republican strategist and CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, said "all of the money in the world cannot move voters when they have their minds made up." He also suggested the impact of Musk's spending in getting voters to turn out for Trump in 2024 was "overstated," noting that "money has diminishing returns in politics."

The billionaire's political losses Tuesday were starkest in his home state of Texas, where Musk spent at least $168 million boosting embattled Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton.

Paxton fell to Democrat James Talarico in the Texas Senate race — and Democrats flipped more than a half dozen other statewide roles, including the governor's office and the attorney general post, turning the state's top roles blue for the first time in decades.

The Texas Senate became the most expensive nonpresidential race on record, according to AdImpact data just before Election Day, with nearly $575 million spent on the Paxton-Talarico fight. In the general election stretch, pro-Paxton donors spent more than double the money that was spent by the pro-Talarico camp, with a major boost from Musk.

Musk also gave $5 million to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's (R) reelection bid, according to campaign finance records, only for Abbott to lose to Democrat Gina Hinojosa — a state lawmaker who pledged to put a pause on data center expansion and won a court order last week seeking access to emails between Abbott's office and Musk.

Meanwhile, Paxton will be replaced as the state's top prosecutor by Democrat Nathan Johnson, who promised on the campaign trail to investigate grants to Musk's Starlink and SpaceX.

Democrats also broke into the GOP's trifecta control over the Texas state Legislature, flipping the House .

"He could have spent $0 and probably seen the same result," Steinhauser said. "This was a national wave election of historic proportions."

"Nobody was really prepared for it to be this big," he continued. "He could have spent $0. He could have spent $450 million in Texas and across the country, and it probably wouldn't have moved the needle very much."

The unexpected changing of the guard throughout Texas raises new questions about Musk's standing. Musk fled from California to Texas to escape left-wing politics and regulators .

"For Elon, the math ain't mathing," said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "All this to try to keep Texas red, but did he spend it essentially for nothing?"

"The thing that Musk, I think, needs to be worried about is that regulatory structure of the state of Texas is about to change, with an attorney general who's going to be aggressive against the Trump administration and against Elon Musk," Taylor said.

Musk himself seemed to read the results that way. "Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn't work this time," Musk wrote on the social platform X , which he owns.

"Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now," he said in another post, seemingly referencing SpaceX's recent push to develop orbital data centers.

Musk and his companies are also expected to be targets beyond Texas as Democrats take control on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) suggested on X last week that he'd investigate Musk's links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, after Putin touted the tech mogul as a "real genius."

Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) posted that Musk " must answer " for the cuts and firings undergone by the Department of Government Efficiency. Others have signaled they'll probe his companies' multibillion-dollar government contracts .

Stocks in Tesla and SpaceX fell by hundreds of billions of dollars in combined market value in the two days after the midterms amid investor concerns about new hurdles for the billionaire's companies under Democratic leadership, CNBC reported.

But Steinhauser was skeptical about how hard Democrats will go after Musk himself.

"I think the Democrats will be careful about overreach," he said. "There will be some questions about investigations and things like that ... but I don't think they're planning to just go after him personally in the way that maybe some might expect."

Texas-based Republican consultant Vinny Minchillo argued that "the business of Texas is business," regardless of the party in power.

"On one hand, listen, he spent a lot of money to support the Republicans, but on the other hand he's got a gigantic plant in Austin that employs a lot of people, puts a lot of money into the economy, and the SpaceX project does the same," Minchillo said of Musk.

"There was talk here that: Are the Democrats going to go after Elon Musk somehow? I'm hoping they're smarter than that."

Democrats might take aim at Musk and other billionaires' ability to spend so much on elections.

Talarico, for one, has accused Musk of trying to "buy his own personal U.S. senator" and called after the election for campaign finance reform.

"Somebody should not be able to spend that much money in politics, and I hope that we see reform that prevents that from happening," said Luke Warford, a founding partner at the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund.

At the same time, Warford forecast that Musk's business empire will remain a major player in the Lone Star State as the new crop of Democrats takes power.

"Elon is a person who brings a lot of innovation to the state," he said, "and so I think it's going to be really interesting to see how it plays out."