Sometime before this week’s filing deadline, people who work for Elon Musk provided the New York Times with a number nobody had seen. Since July, the tech trillionaire put more than $276 million into Republican groups and his own super PAC. The Federal Election Commission will publish it Thursday, but Musk’s representatives released it Monday, three days early, revealing just as much, if not more, than the dollar figure.
This may come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the often mercurial relationship Musk has with both Donald Trump and the GOP. It was just a year and a half ago that Musk sat at a conference in Qatar and said, “In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future. I think I’ve done enough.”
But not really? Musk gave $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund in a single quarter, the most that a super PAC has ever taken from one person and more than its Democratic rival raised from everybody. He put $76 million into his own America PAC, which funds nearly 3,000 paid canvassers on doors last week in seven Senate states, and gave $10 million to Ken Paxton’s PAC in Texas when Paxton was being badly outspent by James Talarico (who currently leads the polls). Trump’s advisers reportedly asked Musk to do this in the spring, per the Times. Trump called him “our modern-day Thomas Edison” just last Thursday.
Republicans and conservative media figures have spent years warning voters about how progressive billionaire George Soros buys American politics. CNN’s Audie Cornish asked her Republican panelists, including Ashley Davis, to opine on Musk’s reported $366 million donation Tuesday morning, and the former Bush aide deflected by naming others. “It’s not just Elon spending all this money,” she said. “We all have George Soros going, spending all of a lot of money. We also have Bloomberg.” Cornish explained she would have put Soros’s name on screen if he had spent $366 million, to which Davis replied that we don’t actually know how much Soros and Mike Bloomberg (who is Republican) have spent. The Times reports that no Democratic billionaire is spending anywhere near what Musk is spending.
The party that made Soros a villain is three weeks out from a midterm election in which its Senate majority is being underwritten by the richest man alive. A man who owns and operates the most influential social media network, X, and whose SpaceX contracts and DOGE work House Democrats have already said they want investigated for alleged corruption. The best that Republican surrogates can manage in defense is that Democrats have rich friends too. (None of them wrote a $158 million check in a single quarter.)
On Monday night, Laura Ingraham went with the old “best defense is a good offense,” treating the massive donation number as good news for her side. “One man, Elon Musk, putting in $276 million in these last months. Now compare that to the Democrats who are lagging behind in fundraising.” Drudge went further Tuesday and took the bigger figure for its top headline, MUSK SPENDS $366 MILLION TO KEEP REPUBLICANS IN CONTROL. That’s the check as the right’s media sees it, money in the bank.
Democrats are closing their campaign argument by focusing on corruption and the cost of living, per the Times. In Ohio, where Trump spoke Monday night, a recent CNN poll has three in four likely voters saying his policies made things more expensive. A nine-figure check from the world’s richest man is an absolute GIFT to that argument, written by a man trying to keep the people making it out of Congress.
What makes the disclosure odd is how quiet Musk has been politically since he left the disastrous DOGE experiment. The Times described him as being notably hands-off this cycle, apart from this massive donation receipt his people literally handed to the NY Times, which is a pretty clear signal unto itself. And if Paxton or Jon Husted wins their election, even by a razor-thin margin, Musk will take credit for having bought it.
The Republican Party gets the massive cash infusion but also the stench that comes with. Hard to pivot away from the narrative that they’re working in service of the billionaire tech oligarchs, when they’re on the receiving end of NINE-figure donations from the same mega-wealthy beneficiaries of the GOP’s signature tax-break and anti-regulatory policies.
Is this relationship symbiotic, parasitic, or merely co-dependency? Republicans get the dollars, but Democrats get evidence in support of their closing argument.