Elon Musk responded to the Democratic sweep in the US midterms with a sarcastic post on X. “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time 🤷♂️,” he wrote, as results showed Democrats taking control of both chambers of Congress.
The line appears to play on a story from September. NPR reported that text messages in director Alex Gibney’s forthcoming film Musk show Musk bragging, shortly before the November 2024 presidential election, that he would “unleash the anomaly in the matrix.”
The texts were exchanged with his former girlfriend Ashley St. Clair. When she pressed him, NPR reported, he said he had 10,000 lasers in space, which NPR identified as an apparent reference to SpaceX. A representative for Musk declined to comment to NPR. Musk’s new post does not say what it refers to.
The joke came after an expensive night for his side. Newsweek’s analysis of federal filings, current to October 14, found Musk had given more than $445 million to Republican causes this cycle. Other tallies put it near $474 million. That made him the top donor of the 2026 midterms, with nearly three times the next-largest donor’s total. America PAC alone received $216 million from him.
Texas was his biggest bet. Newsweek reported that Musk spent more than $200 million backing Republican Ken Paxton in the Senate race, and that Democrat James Talarico won, the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate race since 1988. Al Jazeera’s reporter in Austin said the messaging from Musk and Paxton had cast Talarico as too “radical” for Texas.
Nationally, the Associated Press called the House for Democrats, and Al Jazeera reported that the party also won the Senate. Among the Senate results, Democrat Troy Jackson defeated Republican Susan Collins in Maine.
Musk had framed the stakes in sharp terms. On January 1, he posted on X that “America is toast if the radical left wins.” He had spent about $290 million to help Trump and Republicans in 2024, Mediaite reported then.
President Donald Trump, for his part, told Fox News that the Democrats “did a good job,” and he blamed Fox News for the Republican losses.
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