Musk’s $168 Million Fuels Paxton’s Senate Bid

Elon Musk sent $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which passed the same amount to a political action committee supporting Ken Paxton’s Senate bid, campaign-finance filings released Thursday showed. The large sum from one donor now sits at the center of a Texas Senate race, while Paxton, as state attorney general, regulates Musk’s businesses in Texas.

Musk made the donations in two installments: $75 million on Sept. 9 and $83 million on Sept. 23. The Senate Leadership Fund sent each amount to Texas PAC the next day. The fund had set up the group to support Paxton’s campaign.

How the money moved

The New York Times reported that the money sent on to Texas PAC wasn’t necessarily Musk’s. Senate Leadership Fund officials had publicly said they were seeking new donations to finance a pro-Paxton operation. But the report said that without Musk’s contributions, such a large amount was unlikely to have gone to Paxton.

The contributions ranked among the biggest ever recorded in American politics, according to the report. Rarely, it said, had an individual donor been effectively tied to such a large commitment for one candidate. The campaign filings offered more detail about the sequence than the newspaper had reported on Monday, when it first described Musk’s contributions to the Senate Leadership Fund and how they could help Paxton.

Musk also gave $10 million to a separate super PAC supporting Paxton. That money allowed the group to start running television ads in late August. The combined $168 million in reported contributions to the two pro-Paxton groups has helped Paxton stay financially competitive, even as his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, vastly outraised him.

A race drawing major spending

Musk, the world’s richest person and a Texas resident with major business interests in the state, has been the biggest known midterm donor. He lives in Austin. Paxton and Musk have been allies in state politics, and Paxton’s office regulates Musk’s Texas businesses.

This is one of the year’s most expensive and high-profile contests. Republicans in Texas have grown increasingly worried about the race. They fear losing a statewide election in Texas for the first time in more than three decades. The reported donations have helped Paxton compete financially against Talarico, who has substantially outraised him.

Musk has shown little public or private enthusiasm for midterm candidates and has rarely posted on X, his social media site, about Republican nominees. In recent days, though, he has posted negatively about Talarico multiple times. Talarico has criticized the political influence of billionaires like Musk on the campaign trail.

The filings show how Musk’s money reached groups supporting Paxton, and how much those groups received. They also lay out the connection between a major donor’s political spending and a state race involving an official who regulates that donor’s businesses. The account doesn’t report a change in state authority or a transfer of government power; it describes campaign contributions, the committees that received and distributed them, and their role in financing Paxton’s bid.