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‘Astonishing Stat’: Billionaires Gave Nearly 20% of Donations in 2024 US Federal Elections
"For a representative democracy like ours to work, citizens must have some confidence that, through... political engagement, they have a fighting chance to turn their priorities into government policy," said an elections expert.
Mar 09, 2026
Billionaires exerted an unprecedented amount of influence over the 2024 US federal elections, accounting for almost one-fifth of the nearly $16 billion spent to elect candidates during that cycle, according to a New York Times analysis published Monday.
Just 300 billionaires and their immediate families poured an unprecedented $3 billion into the election, either giving directly to candidates or through political action committees.
These individuals represent just about 0.0087% of the 3.46 million people who donated more than $200 to one or multiple candidates during the election cycle.
And yet, with an average donation of $10 million apiece—equivalent to what 100,000 typical donors would give—they amounted to about 19% of all spending, allowing their interests to be pushed to the center of major races.
The Times highlighted the extraordinary role that billionaire fundraisers played in pushing Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) over the finish line in his bid to unseat the three-term incumbent Democrat, then-Sen. Jon Tester.
Sheehy's long shot campaign was given a boost by Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who donated $8 million to his super PAC after previously investing $150 million in the candidate's struggling firefighting business, which helped seed his campaign.
As the report explains, Schwarzman "was not the only financial heavyweight in Mr. Sheehy’s corner":
At least 64 billionaires and 37 of their immediate family members donated directly to his campaign, a New York Times analysis found. When also accounting for money that flowed through political committees that support Mr. Sheehy, an analysis shows that billionaires contributed about $47 million in the race that Mr. Sheehy went on to win.
Sheehy's campaign drew support from a who's who of GOP power brokers: Jeff Yass, the founder of the Pennsylvania-based trading firm Susquehanna International Group and a major funder of Trump's massive White House ballroom project; the Uihlein family, which owns Uline shipping and has been central to backing anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, and election-denialist causes; and Florida hedge fund founder Ken Griffin, who spent $12 million to stop an initiative in the state to legalize marijuana.
In installing Sheehy, the ultrawealthy bought themselves "a key ally on tax policies that benefit the wealthy" who "cosponsored a proposal to eliminate the estate tax," the Times reported.
While billionaires still have their talons in both political parties, the Times noted a distinct shift toward Republicans in 2024—for every one dollar given to Democrats, five went to the GOP in the election.
Trump, who openly begged for donations from oil tycoons on the campaign trail, was the single largest beneficiary of this avalanche of spending.
According to a study by Americans for Tax Fairness in October 2024, less than a month before election day, Trump had already received $450 million from 150 billionaire families, 75% of their $600 million total to major candidates, and three times Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris's $143 million.
By the end of the campaign, Trump and his affiliated PACs would amass more than $250 million from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and more than $100 million from both the pro-Israel megadonor Miriam Adelson and the banking heir Timothy Mellon, according to OpenSecrets.
Trump has since appointed more than a dozen billionaires to administration positions, including Musk, who was tasked with eviscerating public spending as the de facto head of the so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE).
But as the Times reported, "Many of those billionaires are not only hoping to reshape the federal government... but to win influence in state legislatures, city councils, school boards, and courthouses."
"Ultrawealthy donors... have helped overhaul political leadership and policy in states across the country, expanding private charter schools, restricting abortion rights, advancing artificial intelligence in government, and blocking laws that would make it harder to evict tenants," the report explained.
As the 2026 midterm cycle begins, another spending blitz is coming. As the Times reported last month, the artificial intelligence industry, crypto industry, the pro-Israel lobby, and Trump's super PAC have each amassed war chests of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to help elect their allies to Congress.
Silicon Valley billionaires, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, meanwhile,have collectively dumped tens of millions into stopping a proposal in California for a one-time 5% tax on billionaires in the state, which would replace Medicaid funding slashed by Republicans' massive budget law last year.
The explosion in spending by the ultrarich has come quickly. Where billionaires spent just $16.6 million to influence the 2008 election cycle, that number has steadily ballooned up to $3 billion in 2024, a more than 12,000% increase when adjusted for inflation.
Daniel Weiner, the director of the Brennan Center for Justice's elections and government program, said that the "astonishing stat" was a "legacy of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision" in 2010, which allowed billionaire-funded dark money groups to spend unlimited amounts of cash on political communication advocating for candidates.
"The resulting collapse of campaign finance rules has combined with a resurgence in the sort of high-level self-dealing that was pervasive during the Gilded Age, when bribery and graft were common, and corporations used their wealth to secure monopolies, government subsidies, and other benefits," Weiner wrote for TIME on Monday.
"As in the past, the question now is who will offer Americans a real alternative, including a commitment to stamp out self-dealing in all three branches of the government," he said, recommending a constitutional amendment to restore campaign finance limits tossed aside by the Supreme Court, a ban on spending by government contractors seeking contracts, and bans on congressional stock trading.
"For a representative democracy like ours to work, citizens must have some confidence that, through voting and other forms of political engagement, they have a fighting chance to turn their priorities into government policy," he concluded. "Far too many Americans have lost that faith, and they identify pervasive corruption at the top of our government as a big part of the reason. But cycles of corruption followed by reform are an enduring feature of American history. A new round of ambitious reform is overdue."
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Why Pausing the Data Center Buildout Is the (Humanly) Intelligent Choice
We should stop and think before remaking society, not to mention pouring far more carbon into the atmosphere.
Feb 24, 2026
For a variety of reasons, I’ve found the data center debate to be difficult to get a real handle on over the last year. But I think a clearer picture is beginning to emerge, and I will do my best here to share it with you. Remember, I’m just one human brain, and I have not (illegally) digested every single book ever printed; I can’t draw you a picture of a data center licking an ice cream cone; and if you asked me to render this essay in the style of Emily Dickinson I would fail. Still, for what it’s worth:
First source of confusion: How much demand for AI will there actually be?
This depends on how useful it turns out to be, and that is still a very open question. Yes, AI executives are busy insisting it will upend everything and everyone—the AI chief at Microsoft said last week that all white-collar jobs using computers will be wiped out in the next 12 to 18 months—accountants, project managers, marketing staff. But there’s another school of thought—most ably represented by an AI researcher named Gary Marcus—that thinks the hallucination-prone large language models are good at writing certain kinds of code but not getting much better, and in fact may be at about the limit of their abilities.
There’s a second question resting on top of that one: Whatever AI can do, will it make a lot of money doing it, thus justifying the enormous investments currently being made or planned for data centers? The stock market apparently thinks so—AI makes up some stupendous percentage of its gains in recent years—but there are, as you have heard, fears it might be a bubble. The most eloquent—indeed logorrheic—source of those fears is Ed Zitron, a blogger who has followed the various money trails and concluded that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have no real prospect of making back the scads of money that they’ve spent, and that sooner or later the bubble will indeed do the thing bubbles do.
If we reach the point where we decide as a society that we actually want to build out this technology, then BYOG should be replaced by BEYONCE—Bring Your Own New Clean Energy.
These are crucial questions for us because as long as the bubble keeps expanding, there will be insatiable demand for more electricity for more data centers, and if it pops that demand will start to drop dramatically, especially since much of it is still semi-speculative—that is to say, there are far more data centers on the drawing board (to use an old-fashioned image) than under construction.
In fact, it’s been remarkably hard to estimate how much demand for electricity is actually going to go up, precisely because there’s so much speculation here. In an interview that got pretty wonky even for him, the invaluable David Roberts last week talked to Clara Summer, a public advocate at the PJM Interconnection Board, PJM being the the largest regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States, managing the high-voltage electric grid for 67 million people across 13 states from Delaware to Illinois. Anyway, Summer explained that any given data center might be applying for permits to build in four or five different jurisdictions:
There is a big difference between a data center that has knocked on the door of a utility and said, “I am interested in being in this area,” versus a data center that has entered into a contract with a utility and put down money.
One estimate has that the number of requests for potential data centers to connect to the grid is 5 to 10 times more than the number of actual data centers that will be built.
Obviously, however, there are plenty of data centers going up. Some are truly terrible (consider the joint investigation by Floodlight News and the Guardian of an xAI facility in Mississippi; it has followed the path of Elon Musk’s egregious data center in the poor part of Memphis, both using portable gas turbines that pollute the air, and all in an effort to support an artificial “intelligence” that goes on long happy rants about Hitler; it won’s surprise you that the NAACP was early in expressing concern) and some are less terrible: Google just signed up for two big solar farms in Texas to support its data centers.
The default, sadly, seems to be headed toward the Musk model. With grid providers unable to build generating capacity fast enough to keep up with demand, data center developers are going BYOG—bring your own generation. Here’s a long and detailed new report about how the G generally turns out to also stand for gas, in this case onsite gas turbines, with not much concern for the climate or local air pollution risks. (Or for the amount of water required—here’s a recent account from Brad Reed of a single Pennsylvania data center that will use 40% of the town’s excess water). Here’s a kind of worst-case scenario from John Kostyack, a DC-based consultant:
By the end of this decade, capital spending by tech, real estate, and utility companies will likely represent the largest private-sector infrastructure spending spree in world history. McKinsey, for example, estimates a whopping $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030.
Although forecasts of the scale of data center buildout vary widely, anything near this projected scale has enormous climate implications. The most obvious concern is the emissions generated in powering the massive hyperscale complexes, which are being designed to consume as much as 2 gigawatts (GWs) of power–roughly 15 times the capacity required by the entire city of Philadelphia during summer peak load. According to energy analyst Rystand’s 2025 review of industry announcements, data centers consuming up to 100 GWs of power could come online in the next 10 years.
Much of this power would come from gas-fired power plants. Researchers at Urgewald estimate that roughly 37% of the gas plant capacity proposed in the last 2 years is linked to data centers and AI infrastructure. Thanks in significant part to data centers, the US has overtaken China as the world’s largest developer of gas plants, with 125 GWs of planned new capacity, up 120% from 2024.
Faced with this level of speculative craziness, local opponents and an increasing number of national groups are calling for a moratorium on the buildout of data centers. As Jenna Ruddock wrote in December:
Confronted with similar stakes, cities and counties across the US are pulling the emergency brake. From Maryland to Missouri, at least 14 states are home to towns or counties that have implemented moratoriums: a complete pause on data center development. In early December, over 200 groups—from faith groups in Florida and Louisiana to physicians in Texas—publicly called for a moratorium on new data center construction nationwide.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) became the highest profile Democrat-aligned politician to join the call for a moratorium, but as Politico reported in January it’s been hard to find others who are quite as outspoken. Most temporized—for instance, Rep Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), running for Senate, said AI “can bring real economic opportunity to Texas,” but “we must demand transparency, accountability, and responsible growth.”
But this is very soft ground for politicians, who haven’t found their footing yet. Late last week Sanders joined California Rep. Ro Khanna for conversations with AI executives; he emerged to tell a Stanford audience:
Congress and the American public have “not a clue” about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution, pressing for urgent policy action to “slow this thing down” as tech companies race to build ever-more powerful systems.
It seems to me that the call for a moratorium is sound; we should pause before remaking society, not to mention pouring far more carbon into the atmosphere. Whether that’s possible is not clear. The Trump administration, amid its myriad corruptions, is making the case that we must keep ahead of China. What that means is unclear: The Chinese are indeed building AIs of their own, but they seem to be developing architectures that use less energy. And of course they are building out huge amounts of clean electricity, to use for transit and heating and, if they want, artificial intelligence. So far the big difference with the Chinese models is that they’re transparent and open. Which, by the way, complicates the task of American AI entrepreneurs who want to get rich via their proprietary systems.
That getting rich part, of course, now means using AI to try and game our politics, and indeed in recent weeks a new generation of AI-fueled bots seem to be infecting our political system. An AI platform apparently managed to generate 20,000 comments telling California regulators to ignore air quality concerns:
Environmental and public health advocates are calling on California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman to investigate an AI-powered campaign that allegedly submitted public comments attributed to residents without their consent to oppose Southern California clean air standards. The extent of the AI astroturf campaign remains unknown—who funded it, whose identities were used without consent, and whether California law was broken. Watch the press conference recording here.
The call follows a Los Angeles Times investigation exposing how CiviClick, an AI-powered advocacy platform, was used to generate more than 20,000 public comments opposing standards proposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). When staff at the AQMD followed up with a sample of people to verify comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency or had knowledge of the message.
Even so, the campaign for a data center moratorium seems to be gathering steam—one of the most recent pushes emerged in New York State where Third Act’s organizing director Michael Richardson was among the proponents. He said, quite sensibly I think:
At a time when New York State should be leading the rapid transition to solar and wind energy generation while also ending further buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure, the permitting of data centers with massive energy needs will only feed into the fossil fuel industry’s narrative that to keep this technology running we have to put a pause on dealing with climate change for now. The pause should be the one put on the data centers—not renewable energy projects.”
Indeed, if we reach the point where we decide as a society that we actually want to build out this technology, then BYOG should be replaced by BEYONCE—Bring Your Own New Clean Energy. But in the politically charged year in which we find ourselves, I think intelligence requires us to slow down.
A real shoutout, as I close, to the 86-year-old Pennsylvania farmer who last week turned down a $15 million offer for his land from a data center developer, instead giving it to a land conservancy for $2 million. Let’s give Mervin Raudabaugh the final word:
“It was my life,” Raudabaugh told Fox 43 News of the land he has farmed for 50 years. “I told [the data center company] no, I was not interested in destroying my farms.
“That was really the bottom line,” he continued. “It wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.”
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Big Tech Faces More Probes Over AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material
"These platforms are attacking the mental health, dignity, and rights of our sons and daughters," said the Spanish president. "The state cannot allow it. The impunity of the giants must end."
Feb 17, 2026
Big Tech firms are coming under greater scrutiny for the proliferation of child sexual abuse material generated by artificial intelligence-powered chatbots on their social media platforms.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on Tuesday that it was invoking the European Union's data privacy regulations to open an investigation into Grok, the AI chatbot featured on Elon Musk's X platform, after it was used to generate nonconsensual deepfake images, including sexualized images of children.
In announcing the investigation, DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said that the commission has been in contact with X for weeks after reports first emerged of Grok being used to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Doyle said DPC has since decided to launch "a large-scale inquiry which will examine [X's] compliance with some of their fundamental obligations" under European privacy laws.
Spanish President Pedro Sánchez said on Tuesday that his government would ask Spain's Public Prosecution Service to "investigate the crimes that X, Meta, and TikTok may be committing through the creation and dissemination of child pornography by means of their AI."
"These platforms are attacking the mental health, dignity, and rights of our sons and daughters," Sánchez emphasized. "The state cannot allow it. The impunity of the giants must end."
The probes announced by Ireland and Spain mark just the latest actions by European governments against US-based tech giants. Earlier in February, law enforcement authorities in France raided the office of X in Paris, which the Paris prosecutor’s office said was part of an investigation aimed at "ensuring that the X platform complies with French laws, insofar as it operates on national territory."
The UK government's Information Commissioner's Office has also announced an investigation into X that the agency said encompasses "their processing of personal data in relation to the Grok artificial intelligence system and its potential to produce harmful sexualized image and video content."
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