Why it’s a huge deal that Elon Musk took his political money gun off the table
He was an ever-present threat. You made it backfire.
This week, Elon Musk announced that, “In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future.” How much? "I think I've done enough."
It looks like your work in this spring’s Supreme Court race fueled a sea change in American politics.
It’s never a great idea to take Elon Musk at his word. But even the act of publicly backing away from his previous position—where he was regularly promising to fund primary and general election campaigns against anyone who got in Trump’s way—is a huge shift.
In light of Elon Musk promising to back off funding elections, let’s review the path to this moment. There’s value in celebrating wins.
From Election Day last fall all the way through April 1, Elon Musk cast a dark shadow over all of American politics. He’d spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Trump—and the threat that he would open his checkbook again was the Trump team’s biggest weapon to bully lawmakers to fall in line.
“Trump team warns Republicans to support Cabinet picks or face primary funded by Musk,” ran the ABC News headline in November.
“GOP senators terrified of crossing Trump, facing Musk-funded challengers,” said another headline this February.
Even as Musk was ripping through the federal government with his chainsaw this winter and spring, Republicans—in cabinet meetings, CPAC audiences, and GOP Senate retreats—were cheering Musk on publicly and terrified of crossing him privately.
For everyone else, the possibility seemed very real that an extremist with hundreds of billions of dollars to his name would be able to simply buy whatever election outcome he wanted. Musk would turn his unlimited funds into unlimited power.
The Supreme Court race made this fear concrete.
Day after day, as April 1 approached, Elon Musk would pour more money into the Supreme Court race. At first, “just” $670,000. Then it was $1.6 million. Then $2.5 million. And then it kept going up, and up, and up—to numbers never seen before in a judicial election. Most press accounts cite a $25 million price tag.
But the real number could be far higher—because, for example, none of those figures include Musk’s payouts of $100 to an undisclosed number of people for signing, or recruiting others to sign, his petition against activist judges. If that tactic racked up 100,000 signatures, each referred by someone else, that would add another $20 million. And this was just one of Musk’s thinly veiled bribery tactics. We’ll probably never know the real number.
If his plan had worked, Musk’s domination of American politics would have been total.
But then Susan Crawford—and you, and all of us—fought back.
“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls,” Crawford said at every campaign stop, “I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world.”
Crawford fought back. At her debate, she even called her opponent “Elon Schimel.” WisDems fought by her side. Allied groups across Wisconsin fought with everything they had. And volunteers and donors in Wisconsin, and nationwide, threw themselves into the fight.
More than 200,000 individuals chipped in, adding up to enough to go toe-to-toe on the airwaves and online with the Schimel-Musk-Trump machine. The Crawford campaign used those resources with awe-inspiring effectiveness. Meanwhile, more than 10,000 people volunteered with WisDems, reaching out to voters roughly ten million times—astonishingly, a greater total volume of volunteer effort than Wisconsin saw in the 2022 midterm elections. Allied groups, from the America Votes coalition to Empower, organized many millions of additional voter contact attempts, and groups like A Better Wisconsin Together made sure the message reached every glowing screen in the state. (For a more full account of those who helped drive the work this spring, see my note from April.)
The results reflected the effort.
Even though Musk’s money fueled a GOP turnout surge that would have defeated any previous candidate who ran for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Crawford’s turnout numbers were so vast that she would have defeated any November Republican nominee for Governor—Tim Michels in 2022; Scott Walker in 2018 or 2014 or 2010; Tommy Thompson in any of his four landslides, or any other.
As The Washington Post wrote, “In Wisconsin, Democrats executed this anti-Musk playbook flawlessly and successfully tied the unpopular Musk to the Republican Party writ large.”
Musk chose the wrong state in which to demonstrate his power. And the fallout was immediate.
The day after the Wisconsin Supreme Court fight, multiple outlets ran stories like this one from Politico: “Trump Tells Inner Circle That Musk Will Leave Soon.” As the story explained, Musk “increasingly looks like a political liability.”
Suddenly, he wasn’t in cabinet meetings. He stopped his incessant posting about politics. And now, the ever-present threat of Musk’s money bomb appears to be defused.
We should recognize that Musk is still very much on the scene, wreaking havoc and going on international trips with Trump, and could change his mind at any time about political spending.
But this moment is nonetheless worth marking. Trump saying “follow my orders or Elon Musk will come for you” was a menacing bludgeon.
You and Susan Crawford and our movement took that weapon off the table.
Given how many other threats our democracy continues to face, it would be easy to let this fade from memory. But it’s worth recognizing how existential the stakes in the Musk fight felt just a few weeks ago, and to celebrate the collective power that we built to fight back.
Per the New York Times, “the Wisconsin race may have been a turning point.”
You helped make that happen.
I’m grateful.
With your help, WisDems will continue to fight on and help Democrats win elections up and down the ballot.
Your donation will help fuel our year-round organizing. Chip in here.
It’s unfortunate that so many of us no longer know what to believe. So far this looks like a win for us, Ben. Thank you for sharing some hope.
Musk is lying and he isn’t gone. Susie Wiles just wants him off television.