Elon Musk spent at least $474 million of his fortune attempting to buy Republicans a favorable outcome in the 2026 midterms, including nearly $100 million through his America PAC, which tried to pick winners in 44 separate races. So far, he’s posted a record of 3 wins and 29 losses, with 12 yet to be called, according to CNBC. Even if he goes 12-and-oh down the stretch, and he won’t, he’d still finish with nearly twice as many losses on his ledger as wins.
Wired offered an even more devastating analysis of the money spent: More than 99 cents of every dollar spent by Musk went to a race his chosen candidate lost. Even a generous interpretation of Musk’s spending would consider pouring gasoline and dropping a match on it to be only a slightly worse return on investment. To make matters worse for the world’s richest man, his companies took a hit on the stock market Wednesday, wiping out an estimated $120 billion in value, per Bloomberg.
All that has set a lot of people out thinking of better ways for Musk to spend his money (though it is worth noting that while it’s very funny and satisfying to watch a rich asshole with a fascist fetish waste his money, his 2026 midterm spend amounts to about .06% of his net worth, so he’s not exactly about to go broke the way some folk who trapped themselves in an X politics bubble and poured cash into betting on Republican candidates on prediction markets will).
Screen Slate, New York City’s independent film guide, pitched that Musk could have taken that money and shot an actual, live-action version of his anti-woke The Odyssey—though we have no idea how much Musk spent on his AI-generated take. We’ve only gotten seven minutes’ worth of material from it so far, and that took Musk’s team months to make, so you can imagine the token burn rate might rival his political spending.
He could have made the anti-woke Odyssey on 70mm IMAX with real people, twice https://t.co/ouFp0UQnDl
— Screen Slate (@ScreenSlate) November 4, 2026
That’s at least a more specific take than Anne Applebaum offered, who suggested broadly that Musk spend that half-a-billion on “the arts.” And while that’s a nice idea and all, please review what Musk considers to be “art” before encouraging him to produce more of it. The guy spent the lead-up to Tuesday’s elections posting about the Star Wars prequels.
Imagine if Elon's $500 million had been spent on education or healthcare. Or the arts. Anything.
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) November 4, 2026
Some other solid pitches included options that would have improved the quality of life for Texans’ regardless of the outcome of elections. Benn Johnson, musician and growing tech critic, suggested Musk could have wiped out most, if not all, outstanding medical debt for the state’s residents. Nonprofits that buy up and erase medical debt can cancel about $100 in debt for $1, so it’d only take about $150 million to wipe out the more than $15 billion in medical debt hanging over Texans’ heads.
That $446 million he spent could've bought every medical debt portfolio in Texas and cleared it.
It could have given a small home or condo to every single homeless person in Austin.
Instead, it bought attack ads for a candidate who couldn't even bother showing up to a debate. https://t.co/E2Ml91FPg4
— Benn Jordan (@bennjordan) November 4, 2026
Scott Barber pitched funding guaranteed school lunches for children. About a $20 million appropriation from the Texas legislature did the trick this past year, so Musk theoretically could have kept kids fed through about the next two decades.
Elon Musk could have spent that 450 million dollars making sure every kid had a lunch at school.
— Scott Barber (@thescottbarber) November 4, 2026
Other suggestions were…less compelling, though interesting given they seemed to come from Musk-aligned posters. One person suggested Musk simply give that money to X creators, suggesting he could have given posters $50,000 a piece. It’s like a non-meme version of the “He could have given $1 million to every American and still had money left over” type posts.
Elon musk spent $500 million and all wasted. Imagine if he had gifted it to 10,000 X creators instead. Each of them would have gotten $50,000. https://t.co/5Y97DLQO6a
— Moments (@momentmemori) November 4, 2026
The pitch is a good reminder of just how easily people in Musk’s position could give life-changing amounts of money to others without even realizing that it’s gone. But we can probably find a better way of determining who gets it than “posts on X and pays for a blue checkmark.”
