Musk makes light of defeats after record spend on Republican candidates

Elon Musk has joked online about the Republican defeat in the US midterm elections after spending nearly half a billion dollars to bolster the party’s campaigns. Republicans were decisively routed by Democrats in Tuesday’s polls, losing control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, while racking up losses in states long seen as Republican strongholds, such as Texas and Kansas. “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” the Tesla and SpaceX founder wrote on X, which he owns, on Wednesday.

His donations have mostly gone to his own Republican-leaning political action committee, America PAC, and to the Republican-aligned Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) super PAC. The SLF used Musk’s $158m in donations in September to support Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, who lost to Democrat James Talarico. Voters rejected Paxton’s plan to make Texas the centre of the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry by rapidly building data centres.

Talarico campaigned for tighter regulations on their development.