Elon Musk spent $445 million to help Republicans. Their losses put his businesses in the crosshairs

Los Angeles Times · Jesse Bedayn and Barbara Ortutay · 2026-11-05 21:12 UTC

Elon Musk spent at least $445 million to try to help Republicans keep control of Congress.

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Elon Musk spent at least $445 million in a gambit to help Republicans keep control of Congress, an amount roughly equivalent to someone on a $100,000 annual salary saving every penny for 4,450 years.

To the world’s first trillionaire, it’s a pittance, but the billions of dollars’ worth of business his companies do with the federal government is not. And on Tuesday night, a Republican Party that had embraced Musk lost again and again, ceding control of Congress to a Democratic Party leery of the world’s richest person and keen to put his companies and his work at the White House’s advisory team, which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, under a microscope.

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