Musk Pumps $76 Million Into Committee Backing Texas Senate Bid

Elon Musk transferred more than $76 million to his political committee, America PAC, during the first two weeks of October, giving the group a large cash reserve for the final stretch of the midterm campaign. The filing shows the committee spent nearly $43 million over those two weeks and entered the campaign's last leg with close to $47 million on hand. The money is intended to help Republican candidates.

America PAC filed the pre-election report with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday evening. Musk has given more than $445 million to Republican political groups during this election cycle, according to a review of FEC filings, making him the largest known individual donor in the midterms. More than $165 million of that total has gone to America PAC since July. The committee declined to comment.

The committee's spending has concentrated on the Texas Senate race, where it put $15.2 million into the contest. That figure matches twice what the group spent in the state over the entire summer. Within that amount, $12.4 million went toward attacking Democratic candidate James Talarico, while $2.8 million promoted Republican Ken Paxton. Daily filings submitted since then show another $9.1 million directed against Talarico, bringing the cycle's spending against the Democrat to nearly $28 million. That figure accounts for roughly 40 percent of what the committee has spent supporting or opposing candidates.

The committee also shifted money toward online advertising, spending $11.4 million on digital ads during the two-week window. That amount is close to what the group spent on mail and texting combined. Musk, whose companies include Tesla and SpaceX and have operations based in Texas, has also posted about the race on X. On Wednesday, he wrote that "there is something deeply wrong with Talarico," called the candidate "a creep," and claimed, without evidence, that Talarico "would vote to take away your kids and transition them." Talarico responded the same day: "There is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal US Senator."

The contest remains a toss-up. An Emerson College poll of 1,000 likely Texas voters, conducted October 17 to 19, put Talarico at 48 percent and Paxton at 46 percent, a difference within the poll's 3-point margin of error.

The stakes for Musk reach beyond Texas. If Democrats win the House, the lawmakers in line to chair its committees have signaled they will investigate Musk's role in the Department of Government Efficiency, the federal contracts held by Musk's companies, and what California Democrat Zoe Lofgren called an "astounding" number of conflicts of interest. Democratic control of both chambers of Congress would create additional scrutiny. Representatives Sam Liccardo, Jimmy Panetta and Ro Khanna said in a letter to the White House that the next Congress "will closely scrutinize federal funding awarded to Mr. Musk's businesses."