Joe Miller in Atlanta, Michael Taffe in New York and George Hammond in San Francisco Published November 4 2026 Silicon Valley billionaires who courted Donald Trump and donated more than $600mn to Republican candidates suffered heavy losses in the US midterm elections. Voters anxious about AI and Big Tech helped Democrats win large majorities in both houses of Congress. Donors including Elon Musk, who alone dumped more than $470mn into various House and Senate races, gave Republicans a huge fundraising advantage going into the vote -- the most expensive in US history.
Nearly half of Musk's spending went to support Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Texas Republican who lost to Democrat James Talarico on Tuesday. Like Paxton, other Republicans competing for Senate seats in battleground states lost, as did several House Republicans. Tech executives spent hundreds of millions of dollars but their efforts proved to be nothing more than a paper tiger, said Sacha Haworth who heads the non-profit Tech Oversight Project. "Americans rejected their corruptive influence and any candidate associated with them." The money didn't work, said one political operative who had co-ordinated Big Tech spending in the months leading up to the midterms.
Elon Musk spent half a billion dollars and lost every race he showed up in. A majority of US voters cited AI data centres as a crucial or major factor in determining their vote, according to an NBC exit poll. But tech billionaires' lavish campaign spending also ran into a wall of voter anger at rising inflation and the Iran war.
This led to the monolithic vote swing towards the Democrats, the political operative added. The wave was so big that it trounced the spending on tech, they said. Alongside Musk, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz spent more than $90mn on the midterms, while Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss co-founders of the Gemini crypto exchange spent more than $5mn.
Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife Anna gave $25mn to Maga Inc and $25mn to Leading the Future, the main pro-AI PAC. AI and crypto industry-aligned billionaires also spent heavily in an unsuccessful effort to prevent Democrat Sherrod Brown from returning to the Senate. Fairshake a Super Pac established to support crypto-friendly candidates spent more than $50mn on ads against Brown.
Republican Darline Graham in South Carolina was backed by $2.5mn from the Pac but ultimately lost in an upset giving Democrats a Senate seat in the state for the first time in decades. Dozens of data centre moratoriums were passed across the US as voters voiced opposition to infrastructure that underpins the AI boom. Senior Democrats including Greg Casar leader of the progressive bloc in the House of Representatives are already calling for the party to use its new powers in Congress to force AI bosses to testify under oath next year.
Each of their spending comprises a tiny fraction of their wealth for Musk it was the equivalent of a millionaire contributing $400. After the scale of the Democrats blue wave became clear Musk deleted an X post in which he had encouraged voters to Vote red today!.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing