WASHINGTON — After months of being outplayed by Democrat James Talarico on the airwaves, Republicans launched a massive rescue mission for Ken Paxton in September, spending more than $200 million to support their U.S. Senate candidate in Texas.
New campaign finance filings revealed that much of the ad campaign was funded by a highly motivated donor: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
Musk, who lives near the SpaceX Starbase facility in South Texas, appears to have invested nearly $190 million in the U.S. Senate race in his adopted state. His role in financing Paxton’s air support was revealed in reports filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission by the Senate Leadership Fund, the main Senate GOP super PAC and the biggest spender in the Texas Senate race.
On September 9, the first day of the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas, Musk donated $75 million to the SLF. The next day, SLF invested $75 million in a new entity called Texas PAC. The weekend after the convention, the new super PAC went on air with a positive spot about Paxton’s work on sex trafficking and a negative ad attacking Talarico as being for “them/them, not you.”
Two weeks after cashing his first check, Musk paid an additional $83 million to SLF, according to the group’s filing. Sure enough, the SLF deposited $83 million into Texas PAC coffers the next day.
Musk’s donations allowed Senate Republicans to take control of the airwaves in Texas. Using the Texas PAC as a vessel to book airtime, SLF has so far spent more than $159 million on television, radio and digital advertising, double what Talarico’s campaign spent, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.
The SLF supported Sen. John Cornyn in the primary, estimating that a Paxton candidacy would require between $150 million and $200 million to retain his seat — money that could come at the expense of other states. Although the prediction proved prescient, Musk’s investment was a game-changer.
“Thanks to generous investors who dedicated money to an affiliate, Texas PAC, we were able to step in and support Ken Paxton,” SLF Executive Director Alex Latcham told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “We will spend almost $200 million in this race. But again, thanks to Leader John Thune and the Republican caucus and our fundraising, we didn’t have to take resources away from other states to do this.”
The Tesla and SpaceX founder got involved in the race after his political team contacted the Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s main outside campaign group, to express Musk’s concerns about Paxton’s standing in the race, according to a person familiar with the conversations. This led to a deal between Musk’s Orbit and SLF: Musk would provide $10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, the main outside group bolstering Paxton, if SLF gave $5 million and the PAC raised another $5 million. Details of the conversation were first reported by Axios.
This windfall was absolutely necessary. Lone Star Liberty PAC had just $35,000 in the bank at the end of June, after emptying its coffers during Paxton’s hard-fought victory over Cornyn in the primary. Talarico, meanwhile, was continuing his furious fundraising pace and was prepared to continue dominating the political ad spending battle if help didn’t arrive for Paxton.
Talarico posted another record quarter amid Paxton’s SLF-fueled advertising boom, raking in $64 million between July and September — a record third quarter among all U.S. Senate candidates. The Austin Democrat has held onto the poll lead for months in nonpartisan public polling averages, an alarming sight for a Republican Party whose unbeaten streak in Texas statewide elections spans more than three decades.
With Musk’s donation and matching funds, Lone Star Liberty PAC spent $17.5 million on television advertising in early September, by far the largest pro-Paxton ad buy of the general election. By the end of the month, a handful of SLF-led outside groups had spent more than $217 million on ads in the Texas Senate race.
X is not part of Paxton’s Big Tech crusade
Paxton has not commented publicly on Musk’s support.
In the past, the attorney general has praised Musk for supporting Republicans in 2024. He spent hours at Musk’s home two days before that year’s election hearing. Musk recounted all his efforts to promote Republican candidates, Paxton said at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2024.
“Aren’t you all happy he’s on our side?” » Paxton said to applause. “I’m convinced that whatever he did, whatever science he did, it made a huge difference in this election.”
Paxton has also aligned himself with Musk through his role as Texas attorney general — and has largely avoided scrutinizing Musk’s companies as his office increasingly goes after big tech.
In 2022, as Musk was looking to buy Twitter, Paxton opened an investigation into the social media company into how it reported the number of accounts on the platform that were fake or bots – investigating whether the service was inflating the number of its real users to increase its revenue value. At the time, Musk raised similar questions. He eventually bought Twitter and renamed it X.
In 2024, Paxton opened an investigation into the World Federation of Advertisers, an organization that represents marketers, to assess whether its members were conspiring to boycott specific social media services. TechCrunch reported that Musk’s X, which filed an antitrust suit against the group, was likely among the social media platforms.
Meanwhile, Paxton took on tech giants including Netflix, WhatsApp, Discord and Meta – probes he touted on the campaign trail.
“As attorney general, I prosecuted some of the biggest companies in the world…for taking advantage of our children by exposing them to dangerous and addictive content,” Paxton said after defeating Cornyn in May. “In Washington, I will not stop fighting to protect Texas children from Big Tech. »
But Paxton came under fire from critics who accused him of turning a blind eye to X and Musk. In January, a group of Democratic state representatives asked the attorney general to investigate the platform’s artificial intelligence agent, Grok, and its creation of exploitative content about children and women. Paxton has not publicly responded to the letter.
That same month, a group of attorneys general from across the country sent Musk’s company a letter demanding that it address its AI agent’s creation of child pornography. Paxton was not among the signatories.
Funding the GOP ground game
Musk’s political operations are also deeply involved in the Republican field game in Texas, from canvassing to mailings, across several key races. America PAC, which it invested with nearly $90 million last quarter, pumped $18.8 million into the Senate race through Tuesday, according to FEC filings, which cover efforts such as text messaging, emails and ads, but not in-person canvassing such as street walking and phone banking. More than 80% of that money went to anti-Talarico messages.
The tech mogul has significant business interests in the Lone Star State. Musk has moved the state of incorporation of many of his companies to Texas in recent years. Boring Company and X are headquartered in Bastrop, SpaceX is near Brownsville, and Tesla is now headquartered in Austin.
And it’s not just about the Senate race. Musk’s PAC has spent about $800,000 supporting Republican candidates in the five most competitive U.S. House of Representatives races in Texas. The largest share went to the 35th Congressional District, a San Antonio-area seat that Republicans redrew last summer with the intention of flipping, but which proved highly competitive.
Musk has spent hundreds of millions in 2024 supporting Republicans, including Donald Trump’s presidential bid. Trump rewarded Musk by appointing him to lead the controversial Department of Government Effectiveness initiative. The two men fell out publicly later that year, when Musk disparaged the president’s signature legislative effort and alleged that Trump was in Jeffrey Epstein’s files.
This situation does not seem to have dampened Elon Musk’s appetite for financing Republican political spending. The world’s richest man has already exceeded his 2024 political spending this cycle, with Texas the main focus of his operations.
Other Republican groups are also raising money thanks to Musk’s spending bonanza in Texas.
“Elon Musk understands what it means to live under far-left Democrats,” reads a fundraising email from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which notes that Musk spent $276 million in the midterms and directs readers to a WinRed fundraising page. “He fled an oppressive regime in California that crippled the state with a radical agenda before finding a new home in Texas. But now the same far-left Democrats who destroyed California are coming to take over Elon’s new home!”
While nowhere near Musk’s investment levels, some major Texas GOP donors have also pulled out of Paxton in recent months, according to new filings.
West Texas oil billionaire Farris Wilks, who supported Paxton in his campaigns in the state and directed millions to Radical Republicans, donated $250,000 to one of Paxton’s joint fundraising committees in mid-August, his first federal spending of the cycle.
Amarillo billionaire Alex Fairly, meanwhile, had maxed out Paxton’s direct campaign account with a $7,000 donation in the spring; in late August, he gave $274,300 to Paxton’s joint fundraising committee.
Paxton also received significant sums this quarter from Dallas Cowboys executives. Team president Stephen Jones and director of sales and marketing Jerry Jones Jr. donated $122,000 and $100,000, respectively. Their father, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, donated a six-figure sum in the second quarter.
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