Musk Spent $474 Million on Midterms and Lost. What Does He Still Buy?

Elon Musk donated at least $474 million to Republican candidates ahead of the 2026 midterms — and watched the marquee races he backed go down anyway. That figure, first reported in donor tallies of the cycle, is nearly double what he spent before the 2024 presidential election. Roughly $200 million of it went to election efforts in Texas alone.

The Texas bet failed decisively. Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott were both trounced by Democratic opponents, as Fortune reported. Shares of SpaceX and Tesla — both headquartered in Texas — fell on Wednesday following the news. Musk's other spending included $30 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the primary super PAC backing House Republicans, plus $44 million to other Republican groups and candidates working to elect federal officials.

He wasn't alone at the top of the donor table. a16z's Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz gave $116.4 million, and OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman and his wife Anna gave $50 million, placing them among the party's biggest midterm donors alongside Musk. Musk did not respond to Fortune's request for comment.

What does $474 million actually buy?

The clearest takeaway for practitioners: money didn't move the win-loss column. "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.

But Virginia Commonwealth University political science professor Alex Keena argues the spending still shapes the fight. "Those of us who study campaign money have been sort of realizing this for the past decade: It's not about helping someone win," Keena told Fortune. "That messaging domination, it's just not going to happen with money. Instead…first and foremost, money is affecting what we're talking about."

In practice, that means donations dictate which topics a party publicly pursues — climate change, data centers, economic reform. By that standard, Musk can still bend the Republican agenda. The scale of his giving also signals continued commitment to President Donald Trump, a potentially decisive ally as Musk races to complete a SpaceX-Tesla merger that Democrats have signaled they would heavily scrutinize.

"He basically gets to steer a political party," Keena said. "This is one of the biggest influences of money. It's not just about who wins. It's about setting the agenda and what types of issues we talk about."

Why his influence may be shrinking

The agenda-setting argument has a ceiling, and Democrats just raised it. While Trump has threatened to "veto everything" a Democratic majority passes, Democrats can leverage subpoena powers — which don't require the president's signature. Officials want to investigate Musk's public companies and his role in the federal government, including the Department of Government Efficiency gaining illegal access to sensitive data while failing to achieve one of its stated goals: decreasing the federal deficit.

"We definitely have a lot of questions about Elon Musk's role in DOGE and it is something we plan to investigate," Sara Guerrero, a spokesperson for top Oversight Committee Democrat Rep. Robert Garcia of California, said last month.

Casey Michel, author of United States of Oligarchy, told Fortune that Musk's DOGE operated effectively as a fourth branch of government that could leverage political power for private-sector gain. A Washington Post analysis published last month found two dozen former DOGE staffers had leveraged government connections to back or found startups that raised more than $500 million in venture capital and funding. After Musk's official departure from DOGE in May 2025, his companies minted an estimated $10 billion in government contracts, led by SpaceX.

That public display of power may have soured Republican voters. "I'm struggling to think of a clearer example of what happens to an oligarch when they place themselves front and center in a political system like we saw with Musk over the last two years," Michel said. "This makes clear at the end of the day that Musk's financing is no longer the asset that it once was in 2024, but is now a very clear liability both to those who are receiving it, like the Ken Paxtons of the world, but also to himself."

Will Musk write big checks in 2028?

Probably — because he can. "This is like him deciding to go get Starbucks on the way home from work," Keena said. Jennifer Heerwig, a political sociology professor at SUNY Stony Brook University, noted that income is a significant predictor of political giving. "Assuming that he remains the world's richest man, I wouldn't find it shocking to see him again entering politics and making huge donations to super PACs," she told Fortune. "Whether or not he'll do it at the same scale, I think, remains to be seen."

Musk has flip-flopped before. In May 2025, he said he could cut back on political spending — then clarified he'd donate if he saw a reason. "I'm going to do a lot less in the future," Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum. "I think I've done enough." With Democratic subpoenas looming and a SpaceX-Tesla merger on the table, the 2028 price of his influence — and its returns — is now the open question.