‘He basically gets to steer a political party’: Elon Musk is $474 million poorer post-election, but it may not have deterred his influence on 2028

Elon Musk’s nearly half-a-billion dollar bet on Republican midterm victories is a day late and many dollars short, but whether the world’s richest person’s political investments were all for nought remains to be seen.

The tech billionaire donated at least $474 million to Republican candidates ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, nearly twice what he donated ahead of the 2024 presidential election. That sum included around $200 million to election efforts in Texas alone. 

Yet Musk had little to show for it: Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott were both trounced by Democratic opponents. Shares of SpaceX and Tesla, which are both headquartered in Texas, were down on Wednesday following the news.

Musks’s other donations included $30 million the the Congressional Leadership Fund, the primary super PAC back of House Republicans, as well as $44 million to other Republicans groups and candidates working to elect federal officials. He joined a16z’s Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ($116.4 million) and OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman and his wife Anna ($50 million) as the party’s biggest donors for the midterms.

The shock of the hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending without the intended results was a clear example of the risks associated with political donations.

“I think this might just be the biggest defeat for big money in politics in American history,” Logan Phillips, founder of the election forecasting site Race to the White House, told Fortune. 

Musk is certainly acquainted with this risk—and while he may not have seen the election outcomes he poured unprecedented amounts of money into, the jury is still out on if he has lost the good and influence of key Republicans, or if he’s laying the groundwork for the 2028........

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