Musk's more than $150 million Texas Senate effort appears to have backfired

Democrats plan to examine Musk’s DOGE tenure and SpaceX’s Ukraine role

The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s attempt to rescue Ken Paxton’s troubled Texas Senate campaign appears to have backfired. Musk, a Texas resident, spent more than $150 million on the race alone, fueling a barrage of television ads highly critical of Democratic winner James Talarico, and in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election the spending helped fuel enthusiastic Talarico supporters who said Musk’s involvement had put them off.

Talarico’s win over the Republican Paxton was, according to the Journal, the most bruising defeat of the night for Musk, and it made Talarico the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas in 32 years. It came as Democrats gained control of both the House and Senate after Musk had poured more than $440 million into races supporting Republican candidates — a result the Journal described as a stunning blow to his political power. Columnist Tim Higgins wrote that the outcome showed money can’t buy everything, even for the world’s richest man.

Even before the election, Democrats had signaled that, if put into power, they planned to use their expansive authority in Congress to target the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive along with President Trump. They want to examine Musk’s role in cutting government spending during the early days of the Trump administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and how he may have limited Ukraine’s use of SpaceX’s satellites in its war with Russia. One prominent Democrat has even called for nationalizing SpaceX. The Journal reported that a government takeover of Musk’s companies is an unlikely outcome, but said such rhetoric — cheered on in some corners — underscores the animosity Musk has stoked among Democrats after helping put Trump back in office two years ago.

Musk appears to realize that battles are ahead. He posted on X ahead of the election, amid Democrats calling for investigations: “Live by the sword, die by the sword.” He added: “Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.”

The political fights arrive as SpaceX and Tesla consider a merger, following SpaceX’s historic record-setting IPO and a string of high-profile milestones from building a cloud business to showing off a flying car. In recent days, Trump has even suggested he would consider a pardon for allies such as Musk. The Journal reported that the risk for Musk and his companies is that he becomes distracted by political knife fights on Capitol Hill at a sensitive moment. Market data displayed with the report showed Tesla shares down 2.85% and SpaceX shares down 3.21%.

In recent weeks, Musk said he got carried away the first time around, to the frustration of some of his investors and customers. “What I should have done, I think, was be more in the background,” he said last month in a podcast with Walter Isaacson, his biographer. All of which, the Journal reported, helps explain why Musk stayed off the trail this fall and looked more like a traditional deep-pocketed donor. He spent more than $444 million on the midterms — significantly more than the close to $300 million he spent in 2024.

While he wasn’t out campaigning, Musk used his social-media bully pulpit, especially against Talarico. He made or retweeted around 60 posts naming Talarico, including one that called him “Pure evil.”

In a victory speech in Austin that alluded to Musk without naming him outright, Talarico said: “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas.” As results rolled late into the night, many turned to Musk’s own social-media network, X, to see how he might respond. Eventually, he joked: “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time.”

Talarico had carefully embraced Musk as a foil during campaign stops in Fort Worth, Texarkana and Tyler, at times appearing to run against Musk rather than Paxton. “Elon Musk wants our land, he wants our water, he wants our taxpayer dollars and he wants his very own personal United States Senator,” Talarico said in Tyler to a crowd of almost 2,000 supporters. The Journal described the audience’s visceral jeers at the mention of “Elon” as telling: over the course of the night, Talarico said “Elon” almost as many times as he said his actual opponent’s name.

In the race’s final days, the Journal reported, Musk had in many ways become the face of what troubled voters: they said they were unhappy with income inequality, the rise of artificial intelligence and Big Tech’s influence on the White House. At the Fort Worth event, Phil Pruitt, a 29-year-old office manager who once supported Trump and counted himself a fan of Musk, said he felt differently now and was put off by the amounts of money Musk was putting into the race. “These tech bros have this attitude where they know everything and that’s just, like, completely what I’m not for,” Pruitt said. “The thing I’m most passionate about is just really caring for people.” He added: “Politically-wise, just where we are at now, there’s no empathy.”

For most of his adult life, Musk wasn’t considered political. That changed with the pandemic and how he later felt Democrats mistreated him, and he relocated SpaceX’s and Tesla’s headquarters to Texas from California after skirmishes with Democrats in the Golden State. His very public embrace of Trump — shortly after the failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., during the 2024 campaign — helped attract excitement to the campaign. Musk acted as if he were on the ballot, holding campaign events of his own across Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, and drew large crowds that included many young men who said they were inspired by Musk and wanted to hear about his plans for Mars and how he could take his business know-how to Washington.

Other tech leaders eventually followed Musk’s lead and tried to curry favor with Trump. Some of the biggest names in tech — Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai — joined Musk on stage at Trump’s inauguration in 2025. But Musk held a special spot: for an unprecedented few months, he was something of a fixture at the White House as “First Buddy” while overseeing DOGE, often photographed palling around with Trump and seeming to almost take up residence in his government office as he cut programs such as the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In the end, Musk’s efforts to cut government spending failed to live up to the hype, and his antics in Washington, including waving a chain saw around at an event, became a distraction as the perception of his actual political influence began to fade, the Journal reported. He failed to recapture his 2024 success in a 2025 Wisconsin state supreme court election, where his heavy involvement was seen as a political liability. By the spring of that year, Musk had a very public falling out with Trump, only to be later brought back into the fold — after which his money began helping Republican midterm races.

Now, Musk will see how much empathy Democrats have for him, the Journal concluded.