Racist billionaire Elon Musk is spending hundreds of millions of his personal funds in an effort to preserve the GOP’s congressional majority.
Through his America PAC, Musk has financed ads that have recently focused heavily on Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, transgender rights, and the domestic safety net.
Musk is the GOP’s biggest publicly identified donor in the 2026 midterms. In addition to his PAC, Musk has donated at least $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate.
So far, Musk has reportedly spent $366 million to prop up Republicans. Millions of those funds have been spent on ads on Meta’s Facebook, which allows advertisers to target specific states and congressional districts.
According to a Daily Kos survey, Musk’s ads in Meta’s ad library that began running on Sunday use imagery of Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in an attempt to motivate right-leaning voters to counter an expected blue wave.
One ad currently running in Ohio also continues Musk’s personal crusade against the LGBTQ+ community. Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Wilson is transgender, and Musk has claimed that a conspiratorial “woke mind virus” has somehow convinced young people to be trans.
The ad depicts what appears to be a drag queen applying makeup with the caption, “He made his plan to vote. Did you? Don’t stay home while the crazy liberals elect radicals.”
Another Ohio ad features a fictional group chat labeled “the boys” with a message encouraging the others to vote because “the socialists are gonna win.”
And in another ad, a video alleges that Ocasio-Cortez and “the socialists” intend to raise taxes by “$4 trillion”—an obvious lie meant to motivate opposition to Ohio’s Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown.
For context, Musk’s Tesla escaped paying taxes in 2022 despite making more than $7.6 billion in 2021.
Related | Whoops! GOP blows money airing attack ads in the wrong state.
In an ad targeted toward Wisconsin’s 3rd District, Musk’s PAC warns that Democratic candidate Rebecca Cooke—who is running against GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden—is working with Ocasio-Cortez to “open our borders,” a rehash of a debunked right-wing talking point.
Ocasio-Cortez also appears as a bogeyman in an ad targeting New Hampshire’s Senate race, begging voters to return their absentee ballots lest the scary socialist end up working with Democratic candidate Chris Pappas.
In Michigan, America PAC is warning voters that support for congressional candidate William Lawrence in the Seventh Congressional District would lead to a congress with “435 AOCs.”
And Ocasio-Cortez is also invoked in an ad targeting Arizona’s 6th District, where Democrat JoAnna Mendoza is running.
“Democratic Socialists like JoAnn Mendoza are on the verge of taking over America,” the ad claims.
The use of Ocasio-Cortez, who is one of the most popular political figures in the United States and a potential 2028 presidential candidate, definitely looks like retribution from Musk after years of her public criticism of his outsized influence and destructive right-wing views.
Musk has benefitted from his donations to the GOP and Trump. Last week, he was awarded the National Medal of Science—despite little to no evidence that he’s ever done anything worthy of the award.
And perhaps more consequentially, after Musk bankrolled Republicans in 2024, many ongoing federal investigations into his companies were halted.
But despite the massive ad spending and repeated fearmongering over “socialism,” the midterms still appear heavily tilted against the GOP.
Too bad for Elon.
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