Elon Musk could have kept the Senate in Republican hands for far less than he spent losing a single race, according to economist Justin Wolfers.
“Musk spent $200 million+ trying to win one Senate seat in Texas,” Wolfers wrote on X on Saturday, alongside a video breaking down the numbers. “Spread across the close races instead, roughly $130 million might have kept the whole Senate Republican.”
In the video, Wolfers ran the math on what it would have taken for Republicans to hold the chamber. “The answer is it would have cost about $130 million,” he said.
More than $200 million in Musk-backed money went toward electing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to the Senate. Democrat James Talarico beat him by 12 points.
As Raw Story previously reported, Wolfers argued in his Platypus Economics newsletter that Texas “is a terrible place to try to buy a Senate seat.” He estimated that if Musk had instead targeted close races in Alaska, Mississippi, Maine, Kansas, Iowa and South Carolina, he would have needed to flip only about 124,000 voters.
Wolfers assumes, conservatively in his view, that roughly $1,000 in political spending can change one voter’s mind. By that math, Musk’s Texas money moved the race only about 4 points, far short of Talarico’s 12-point margin.
Wolfers calls the scenario “a little bit contrived,” since it assumes a donor would know exactly where to put the money. But he warns the underlying logic holds: buying control of the Senate likely costs hundreds of millions, while for someone like Musk, whose businesses depend heavily on federal rules, the payoff could run to tens or hundreds of billions.
Musk spent a record $474 million on the midterms. According to Wolfers, Musk was "dumb enough" the money "behind a bad candidate."