Photo: Elon Musk / Debbie Rowe, Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
By: JBizNews Desk 🌎
Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars on the U.S. midterm elections, but the record expenditure yielded little for the world’s richest man and leader of SpaceX and Tesla, Reuters reported Thursday (Nov. 5, 6:03 a.m. ET).
Just three of the 43 Republicans Musk backed for the House of Representatives won on Tuesday night, while 33 lost and the rest had not been called by late Wednesday, according to Reuters. Of the seven Senate Republican candidates he backed, six lost and one race, in Alaska, remains undecided, with the Democratic candidate narrowly ahead in the count so far.
In Texas, where SpaceX and Tesla are headquartered and where Musk plans a chipmaking venture, he came up empty after spending almost $230 million on the Senate contest, $5 million on the governor’s race and $500,000 on the lieutenant governor vote, Reuters reported.
Musk spent $445 million on federal races alone, according to the nonpartisan campaign-finance watchdog OpenSecrets, and tens of millions more through nonprofit groups that disclose less about their donors than political action committees, a person familiar with his campaign spending told Reuters. Millions more went to state and local elections that do not have uniform disclosure rules, local media outlets reported.
Shares of SpaceX and Tesla fell 3.9% and 3.3% respectively on Wednesday on investor concerns that a Democratic-controlled Congress would tighten scrutiny of Musk’s Starlink satellite service and his AI data-center projects, Reuters reported.
Democrats have said investigations into Musk and his businesses top their agenda, with expected scrutiny of his companies’ contracts, his work running the Department of Government Efficiency, involvement in Ukraine and contact with Russia, according to Reuters. The incoming chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, plans to introduce legislation closing the “Musk loophole,” referring to a provision in campaign-finance law that allows individual executives to spend unlimited personal money on political campaigns even though their companies are banned from doing so.
Musk’s political action committee, America PAC, and his attorney Alex Spiro did not respond to requests for comment, Reuters reported.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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