Elon Musk Loses Texas Senate Race

Mother Jones illustration; Matt Kaminsky/Zuma; Joel Angel Juarez/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. James Talarico won the most expensive Senate race in American history on Tuesday, becoming the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas in 32 years and bringing the party one seat closer to control of the upper chamber of Congress. The 37-year-old state representative defeated the scandal-plagued Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, by placing corruption at the center of his political program. Paxton was “the most corrupt politician in Texas,” Talarico said on the stump, and he linked the affordability crisis riling up voters to a political system dominated by big-money donors—and one trillionaire in particular. To a highly unusual degree in a race of this stature, Paxton was a passive actor in his own campaign—someone whose unsavory presence made the race competitive, but who lacked the means or the ability to shape the proceedings in a different direction. After defeating Sen. John Cornyn by a two-to-one margin in the primary runoff in May, he seemed to more or less stop working. Paxton gave barely any interviews and refused to debate, and quite frankly, it is hard to imagine how 90 minutes in a television studio with a few journalists and one of the most gifted Democratic communicators I have seen in years could have possibly helped his cause. Save for a hapless bus tour that was originally scheduled to end at—I’m not kidding—the Alamo, the pro-Paxton campaign itself was largely conducted on the airwaves and by outside groups, and those groups were in turn almost exclusively funded by Elon Musk. Do you know him? While Talarico was one of the strongest Democratic Senate candidates in years, and Paxton one of the weakest Republicans at maybe any level, it is hard to overstate what just happened. Musk spent at least $212 million on this race. That’s not a typo. $212 million. It was $150 million the last time I went to look it up. Some of that money went into ads with the indelible catchphrase, “When missing posters go up, Ken Paxton takes them down.” Much of it went into attack ads and mailers assailing Talarico, alleging that he wants to ban meat and force gender conversion surgeries on minors. Musk has vast business interests in the state, where he lives on a compound outside Austin, controls his own town outside Brownsville, and is angling to take over an entire state park. In the final weeks of the race, Paxton’s office sued one of Musk’s top rivals, Sam Altman and OpenAI, accusing them of imposing insufficient safeguards on ChatGPT. “Talarico wants to open the borders and legalize everyone to gain a permanent majority to end democracy in America,” Musk wrote on X, the global communications platform he also controls. But Musk’s money couldn’t buy the seat, in part because Talarico’s campaign, from the beginning, was predicated on the idea that people like Musk would try to buy the seat. The fact that Paxton was dependent on an internet-poisoned mogul for—again—$212 million in support only reinforced the point. “For five decades now, billionaire megadonors have been buying politicians in both political parties, and then those puppets turn around and rig the rules of the economy in favor of those megadonors at our expense,” Talarico told a crowd in San Marcos. “They’ve been stealing from the American people for five decades with their bribes, with their bailouts, with their billionaire tax cuts.” The Round Rock seminarian is not a Bernie Sanders-style socialist (no matter what the advertisements said). He took an intensely pragmatic approach to border security and fossil fuel production in this race. But he offered a clear-eyed, full-hearted, populist framework for politics in a state, that thanks to Musk and the AI boom, has become the epicenter of oligarchic world-building. And in the final days of the race, Talarico increasingly went after Musk directly. “Elon Musk wants our land,” he told voters. “He wants our water. He wants our tax dollars. He wants his very own personal United States senator. He is trying to buy Texas.” Texas, it turned out, was not for sale. Not even for $212 million.