17 better ways Elon Musk could have wasted $446 million

Judgment

Musk, and any donor tempted to copy him, now faces a priced tradeoff: $47 million of his $446 million midterm spending went to defeating James Talarico, who won with 55 percent. Future checks should be sized by district polling rather than by what X's AI-heavy timeline treats as consensus.

Basis

Elizabeth Lopatto reports in The Verge that Musk spent nearly $500 million — $446 million — on the midterms, with $47 million from his America PAC aimed at defeating Texas Democrat James Talarico, who trounced Musk's preferred Senate candidate Ken Paxton with 55 percent of the vote; Talarico made Musk's influence central to ads carrying the slogan "Texas is not for sale." Lopatto's mechanism is informational rather than financial: X, she writes, is the site "most influential with the AI crowd," so its owner mistakes that crowd's consensus for the electorate's, and the one bipartisan position she identifies is opposition to data centers — a proxy for anger at the tech industry. The cost of spending steered by timeline feedback is that the money buys opposition advertising instead of votes.