'Didn't work this time': Elon Musk reacts after Trump's Republican Party loses control of Congress in midterm elections despite him pumping nearly $500 billion

World's richest person Elon Musk has reacted after the Democrats swept the US midterm election, including in states traditionally considered long shots for the party. "Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time," Musk, who pumped hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2026 polls, wrote on the social media platform X, which he owns.

Big victory for Democrats

As the dust settled on the US midterm polls, Democrats snatched back control of the House as well as the Senate, delivering a massive rebuke to President Donald Trump's Republican Party.


Analysts say the the results reflect the voters' deep frustrations with the president over the Iran war, high gas prices, and concerns over corruption in government. Democrats handed embarrassing defeats to their GOP rivals across the country, from Texas to Iowa to New Hampshire, including states where Trump had won comfortably in the 2024 election.

Musk, whose wealth is close to a trillion dollars, spent nearly half a billion -- an amount no individual donor has ever spent in a single election cycle, besides wealthy candidates funding their owns runs for office. A massive chunk of the money went to support Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, who lost to the Democrat James Talarico.

On X, Musk also cracked a joke about the results of the Texas governor's race, where anti-data center Democrat Gina Hinojosa won a stunning victory. "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now," the billionaire boss of SpaceX and Tesla wrote.

Stocks of both Tesla and SpaceX plunged during after-hours trading as early results from the US midterms started to come out.

High stakes election for Musk

Musk, who is a close ally of Trump and put a large amount of money into his 2024 presidential campaign, had a lot on the line in Tuesday's elections.

Democratic leaders had indicated that if they earned back control of the Congress, they would probe Musk on several fronts, including his time as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and his companies' contracts with the federal government.

Ahead of the polling, Musk had appealed to his 241 million followers on X to vote for Republican candidates. "Vote red today!" he wrote.