Or did he spend too much?
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All he could do was smile and say “cheese.” Not only was the $25 million Elon Musk poured into Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election not enough to produce a MAGA victory, it was also a pathetically negligible crumb from Musk’s loaf.
With a net worth last given by Forbes as $362.5 billion, Musk committed a paltry 0.007 percent of his stash to a race he told the world held its (the world’s) future and the fate of “all Western civilization” in the balance.
Now to most of us $25 million sounds like a healthy head of lettuce. We might send a hundred bucks to the candidate of our choice if we were feeling reasonably flush.
But perhaps, with Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” looming, Musk wasn’t feeling particularly flush (Trump has, for what it’s worth, liberated Musk from $24.3 billion since I began working on this piece late last week) and decided some belt-tightening was in order — so he tried to buy Wisconsin on the cheap. And it turns out that Wisconsin, like Greenland, was not for sale — not for a piddly $25 million anyway. Well there goes the future of Western civilization!
So why did Musk cheap out on Wisconsin?
Elon Sacks a Piece
Musk now says he “expected” to lose. When you’re playing gazillion-dimensional chess, he says, “there is value in losing a piece for positional gain” (c’mon Elon, how about just admitting you hung a rook?).
And for good measure he is blaming — wait for it — Democratic “big money donors” such as George Soros ($2 million) for the triumph of the liberal candidate Susan Crawford and the consequent maintenance of the court’s left-leaning majority.
That’s pretty rich — as it were — coming from the guy who tossed in more than 10 times that much. And yes, just to be clear, while the Crawford campaign was able to outraise her opponent, Brad Schimel, the Trump-endorsed candidate was the beneficiary of a boatload of SuperPAC money from super-rich donors, like Musk, that swamped Crawford’s small-donor advantage.
For those unfamiliar with the vagaries of American campaign finance, SuperPACs (PAC stands for Political Action Committee, and Super stands for gobs of money) are the SCOTUS-approved vehicle for getting around all limitations on the amounts a given individual or corporation can spend on an election.
In a line of disastrous, mostly 5-4 decisions tracing back to the 1970s — at which time, believe it or not, there was serious consideration of instituting a system of public financing for presidential, and possibly all, federal elections — a conservative court majority first decided that campaign contributions enabled more “speech” and therefore enjoyed robust First Amendment protections from regulation.
Then they ruled that those SuperPACs could take in unlimited amounts from any donor, as long as they didn’t coordinate too much with the campaign itself, a restriction that naturally has turned out in practice to be meaningless.
And finally, to make the rout complete, it turns out that in many circumstances the gobs of money could be “dark,” meaning that the donor could remain anonymous and avoid any partisan blowback, such as bad press or product boycotts, directed at their “speech.”
Massive egos have a way of emphasizing the positive, and one can imagine Musk illuminated by the glow of his success in buying Pennsylvania and the presidency for Trump, threatening to primary every Republican who dares sing a wrong note in the Trump-MAGA choir, and thinking a silly little Wisconsin court race would be a piece of cheesecake.
So we wound up with a circus of what might politely be termed influence buying: House races costing a couple hundred bucks per vote; state judicial races weighing in, like this one, at an estimated $90 million; hundreds of millions poured in every election cycle by faceless megadonors (but of course the candidates can recognize their faces); officeholders spending a good part of each day on the phone “dialing for dollars;” and the inevitable rise of the oligarchs.
And the obscenity of it all has only intensified, election by election: In 2016, for example, $6.5 billion was spent on the federal elections (president and Congress); in 2020, that number exploded to $15.2 billion; in 2024, it was $15.5 billion — some $291 million of it, that we know of, infamously ponied up by Musk.
A Very Nice ROI
Musk parlayed that offering — which came to a mere 0.1 percent of his wealth at the time — into what many regard as a co-presidency, running amok with his DOGE chainsaw while entrusted with self-policing his myriad and massive conflicts of interest.
He has not proven popular. But massive egos have a way of emphasizing the positive, and one can imagine Musk illuminated by the glow of his success in buying Pennsylvania and the presidency for Trump, threatening to primary every Republican who dares sing a wrong note in the Trump-MAGA choir, and thinking a silly little Wisconsin court race would be a piece of cheesecake.
So Musk hit Wisconsin, went door-to-door, cavorted around the stage in his orange cheese hat, plunked down his $25 mil, and, presumably with Trump’s blessing, nationalized this state-level judicial election, gleefully turning it into a referendum on Trump’s — and his own — performance since January 20, with the aforementioned existential stakes.
And he lost. Big. Crawford’s margin hit double digits. Which — if Trump’s 1.5 percent winning margin in 2024 is the “landslide” he claims it was — is not exactly a squeaker.
$25 Mil: Too Little or Too Much?
That leaves us with this question: Did Musk just not spend enough — or did he perhaps spend too much?
Let’s do a thought experiment. Say Musk had gotten serious and ponied up, oh, 1 percent of his nest egg, which seems only reasonable given his conviction that the fate of the world was riding on it. That would be (by most recent valuation) about $3.6 billion, about 150 times what he actually spent — and perfectly legal, by the way.
Would it have mattered?
For that tidy sum, a rounding error on Musk’s check register, he could have handed every one of the approximately 2.36 million Wisconsinites who voted in the election a check for $1,500. Or employed enough staffers to knock three times on every door in the state. And bought up every minute of ad space on every radio and TV station in the state, to bombard the poor populace with clever messaging 24/7 for a year.
Would it have been enough? We can only speculate because the research on the great enterprise of translating bucks into votes is sparse and equivocal.
What we do know, however, is that the relationship between campaign expenditures and election results is not linear. You don’t get twice as many votes for twice as much money. Which is very fortunate given just how much corporate and mogul money is floating around out there.
In fact, there appears to be a powerful law of diminishing returns at work when candidates or their backers go all-out to buy elections. Michael Bloomberg, for example, the popular and well known former New York City mayor, spent a cool $1 billion on a three-month presidential run in 2020 and wound up winning American Samoa and 59 pledged delegates (out of 3,979) to the Democratic Convention. From another perspective, Congress and statehouses are stocked with candidates who got outspent, some quite dramatically.
We don’t fully understand why the complex intersection between money and electoral success works the way it does. Obviously, the secret ballot makes it very hard, if not impossible, to outright buy votes — though you might have some success paying likely supporters to show up at the polls and cast a vote.
But the most probable reasons for diminishing returns are saturation and annoyance. Voters seeing ad after ad, getting text after text, email after email, knock after knock can get turned off, even angry. They might stay home, or even vote the other way.
Campaigns try very, very hard to get their own voters out to vote, opposing voters to stay home, and the precious undecideds to come around. But even with modern micro-targeting, it’s a major challenge to get just the right message to just the right people; and, after a certain point, brute-force bombardment with more money and more messaging can be futile and indeed turn counterproductive.
So it’s not at all clear that 1 percent, or even all, of Musk’s money would have bought a win in Wisconsin. But what about less of Musk’s money, or none?
The warning signs were there. But Trump and Musk have made a habit of ignoring warning signs. Move fast, break things, move on, call it strategy!
There’s an argument to be made that that would have worked. Because back in February, before Trump endorsed Schimel and before Musk and his money descended on the state, most voters didn’t know much about the two candidates — but, among those who said they were enthusiastic and likely to vote on April 1, Schimel led Crawford in favorability by 9 points. Musk, for his part, had a minus 12 favorability gap and was chasing the all-time record for polarization, with 81 percent of Republicans viewing him favorably while 97 percent of Democrats were not fans. (Independents split two to one against him.)
So the warning signs were there. But Trump and Musk have made a habit of ignoring warning signs. Move fast, break things, move on, call it strategy!
Musk succeeded brilliantly in making the election about him (and, oh yes, the fate of Western civilization) — he even pulled the raffle trick that seemed to have worked in Pennsylvania back in November. And that certainly got out the vote — the record turnout approached the level we’d expect for full-fledged midterms — but unfortunately for Musk and MAGA, most of those voters were angry. At him, at his stunts, at his cavorting, at his money, at DOGE, at Trump, at the way things have been going the last few months.
So it’s reasonable to conclude that if anything could have altered the outcome it might well have been Musk spending less, or nothing, and keeping away from Wisconsin altogether.
Seemingly undaunted, however, Musk insists he still is planning on playing a major role in the midterms. One can imagine quite a few Democratic candidates in swing states and districts praying hard he doesn’t change his mind.
