Elon Musk has donated more than $276 million to Republican efforts ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections, The Verge reports.
The figure would place the world's richest person among the largest individual political donors in the country, and extends a trajectory that accelerated sharply in 2024, when Musk spent a comparable sum — largely through his America PAC — to support Donald Trump's campaign and allied Republican candidates.
Musk's influence in the midterms is not only financial. He owns X, the social platform he uses to broadcast to tens of millions of followers, and SpaceX, whose Starlink service has become infrastructure for governments and militaries — including, contentiously, wartime Ukraine. Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and Neuralink all operate in areas shaped by federal rules and contracts: AI, satellites, self-driving vehicles and defence.
That overlap is why the number matters beyond horse-race politics: the person funding campaigns is also the person whose businesses the winners of those campaigns will regulate and buy from.
Critics argue that this concentration of individual spending strains the intent of campaign-finance limits; supporters frame it as ordinary political speech by a citizen. Either way, the totals are unprecedented for a single individual, and with the midterms still weeks away, they are likely to keep climbing.
