17 better ways Elon Musk could have wasted $446 million

The Verge · Elizabeth Lopatto · 2026-11-04 21:45 UTC

Elon Musk flushed about half a billion down the toilet on the midterms. He could have gotten his own film version of The Odyssey off the ground with that budget.

One of the basic problems of spending too much time on social media is that you are cooking your brain by reading posts from a pack of attention-seeking lunatics. If your social media of choice is the site formerly known as Twitter, and it is your main source of contact with the outside world, you may delusionally throw away nearly $500 million dollars on midterm elections, just like Elon Musk.

In particular, $47 million of that money from Musk’s America PAC was aimed at defeating Texas Democrat James Talarico, who trounced Musk’s preferred Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, with 55 percent of the vote. Talarico even made Musk’s influence a central part of his campaign ads, with the slogan “Texas is not for sale.”

How did Musk get this so wrong? I blame the bubble of X. My former colleague Casey Newton, who has (with some well-earned shame) slunk back to X, explained that he did so because it was the site that was most influential with the AI crowd. In some sense, this is exactly the problem. The agentmaxxing loons of AI influencing are wildly out of touch with normal people. There is, right now, one very important bipartisan position in the United States, and it is: Fuck a data center.

Read the full story at The Verge · All coverage of this story