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elon musk
Are the Corporate Democrats Gonna Blow This Again?
How Democrats choose to deal with Musk, Trump, and other morbidly rich American oligarchs and their monopolistic empires may be the most important set of decisions party leaders have made in 50 years or more. We can't allow them to mess it up.
Nov 06, 2026
Elon Musk spent almost a half-billion traceable dollars (and we have no idea how much “dark money” that’s not traceable but legalized by corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) to try to help rightwing politicians win this week’s election. As the old joke goes, that’s both the good and the bad news.
Given how severely great wealth has distorted our republic—from buying elections and legislation to putting judges on the Supreme Court—Democrats now face some serious decisions about how to proceed.
Who should lead the Party’s efforts both in and outside of Congress? Should the Party embrace its progressive base and push policies like Medicare for All and free college, or stay with Clinton-style “moderate” positions as we move into the next Congress? Impeach Trump or, as Schumer suggested yesterday, “work with him”?
As more and more of the nation’s wealth is stolen from the bottom and middle and transferred to the top one percent, the nation’s people lose confidence in the institutions that should have been defending, protecting, and supporting them.
Corporate Democrat Claire McCaskill suggested on MS NOW recently that Democrats must embrace “moderate” positions because those are the ones most likely to be looked upon favorably by “independent” voters, but is that true?
Those same voters swung toward Trump several times recently because, instead of being “moderate,” he was proposing radical change in government policies.
Support for genuinely progressive policies like free college, Medicare for All, taxing the morbidly rich and big corporations, and aggressive actions to mitigate climate change with green energy actually poll very strongly with so-called independent voters.
And there’s something eerily familiar about today that people who’ve read histories of the 1930s and the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal recognize. It’s as if history is repeating itself.
And if that’s actually the case, the choices congressional Democrats make now about how to deal with Musk, Trump, and other morbidly rich American oligarchs and their monopolistic empires (including media monopolies) may be the most important decisions Democrats have made in 50 years or more.
And the stakes are huge: in actual, historical fact, those wielding great wealth have been responsible for the failure or near-failure of pretty much every republic that’s failed since the days of ancient Greece and Rome.
In modern times they’ve provoked the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and the downfall of dozens of smaller once-democratic or partially-democratic states from Chile in the 1960s to Egypt, Hungary, and Turkey in the last few decades. It’s also happening to Russia as you read these words, although that’s another article altogether.
And now the morbidly rich are screwing up America again, much as they did in the 1920s and the 1850s. If they succeed and enough “moderate” Democrats continue to get into bed with them, it will be both disastrous and perhaps bloody, a word that Trump himself has recently used to describe his plans for the next two years.
America has been through three great cycles since our founding, as brilliantly explained by Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning Is Here and Peter Turchin in Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Turchin also summarized his thesis in a tight but concerning article for The Guardian two years ago titled “The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win.”
(I’ve also written about these cycles of history multiple times over the years, here, here, here, here, here, etc., but it deserves a fresh examination in the light of the election and the crucial decisions now facing the Democratic Party.)
Howe explains how every 80 years or so (as our elders die out) we lose access to the lessons our grandparents learned, particularly those about the importance—nay, the necessity—of regulating great wealth so it doesn’t turn government into a vehicle to exclusively serve the morbidly rich.
When the morbidly rich take over, he notes, bad things happen: it was 73 years from the Constitution’s ratification until the oligarchs in the South started the Civil War, exactly 80 years from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II (caused by greedy oligarchs on Wall Street kicking off the Republican Great Depression), and today we’re exactly 81 years out from the end of World War II.
Turchin breaks those 80-year cycles into 40-year segments. He points out how, in back-to-back 40-year blocks of time, the obscenely rich are brought to heel over four decades, but then rise up and take over again during the next forty years. Over and over again throughout American history.
Support for genuinely progressive policies like free college, Medicare for All, taxing the morbidly rich and big corporations, and aggressive actions to mitigate climate change with green energy actually poll very strongly with so-called independent voters.
The cover of his book Ages of Discord provides a graphic that visually explains his hypothesis, showing a red line for the accumulation of great wealth from 1780 to 2020 and working class wealth with the blue lines.
Today, we’re overdue for one of his generational flips: we are 45 years from Reagan’s counter-revolution against the New Deal, a program FDR put into place in 1933 that saved America and created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. (I’m radically simplifying both of these scholar’s works: I recommend you buy and read their books for more detail.)
In summary, Trump’s election and re-election were reflections of the success of the anti-New Deal counter-revolution launched with the Reagan Revolution in 1981, in which America’s most wealthy men essentially took back control of our government from the “New Dealers.”
Much of this was accomplished through a process of destroying unions, cutting taxes on the rich while borrowing from the future to fund them, and allowing corporations to search the world for the cheapest labor and least regulation (“free trade”). While it’s rarely mentioned in our increasingly-oligarch-captured media, they called this “neoliberalism” (as I detail in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America).
FDR’s New Deal created massive prosperity for the American working class, lifting us from 15 percent of Americans being in the middle class in 1933 to 65 percent of us at that status with a single paycheck when Reagan took office in 1981. (Today, we’re well below 50 percent and it takes two paychecks to get there.)
Because of roughly 40 years of success during FDR’s New Deal (1933-1981), a third of American workers had the protections of a union when Reagan took office, brand-spanking-new schools dotted the countryside, college was so cheap as to be virtually free, hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be nonprofit so healthcare was easily affordable, and housing supports meant that the cost of the average home was about twice the average annual income.
The main beneficiaries were my generation, the boomers, who came of age at the peak of the New Deal’s effects, before Reaganism bit hard into American workers, with Republicans and their morbidly rich stealing over $79 trillion of our wealth in just 45 years and handing it off to the Epstein/Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg class.
As I point out in The Hidden History of the American Dream, when my generation was in our 30s, we controlled about 21 percent of the nation’s wealth; today people in their thirties only control 4.6 percent of America’s wealth. Average home prices today are ten times average annual income today. College is unaffordable, as is healthcare.
Forty-five years of Reaganism, embraced by both parties until 2021, have wiped out the middle class while making the rich into the super-rich. When Reagan came to office, billionaires were a rarity (there were only 7 of them) and they were constrained by law from owning judges and politicians or having an outsize influence in elections.
And then Republicans took over in 1981 and began their war on the American Dream.
In this week’s election—thanks to corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with their Citizens United decision—several hundred American and foreign billionaires, Elon Musk, and Israel’s AIPAC largely funded GOP campaigns, massively outspending progressive Democrats through PACs and dark money SuperPACS.
The most visible examples were the billionaire-funded campaigns against James Tallarico and Abdul El-Sayed, who were outspent by over $248 million dollars. That money, though, could not overcome the trends of history and America’s outrage at the GOP’s turn toward naked fascism.
Peter Turchin identifies a three-step process that leads to revolutionary outcomes: “popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.”
First, the rich get control of the political system and change the tax code and regulatory state to gut worker income and union-organizing power, “immiserating” (impoverishing) the middle class.
We saw this with Reagan and corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court dismantling union rights and workers’ power, followed by the passage of “Right To Work For Less” anti-union laws in state after Republican-controlled state.
The rich then redirect the government’s efforts away from supporting working class people to redirecting the wealth of the nation into their own money bins.
The most obvious example of this are the “tax cuts”—cumulatively totaling over $35 trillion—put into place by Reagan, Bush, and Trump.
Up next are efforts to destroy the programs supporting the middle class, as we saw with the Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill gutting food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (among other supports to the middle class).
Average working people know they’ve been screwed; they just don’t realize it’s the morbidly rich who did it to them unless there’s an outspoken class warrior like FDR or Bernie Sanders calling it out.
I put “tax cuts” in quotation marks, by the way, because they’re really not tax cuts: those taxes will eventually be paid. Just not by the people who should have paid them; they succeeded in pushing them out decades into the future with the assumption they’ll be paid for either by raising taxes on working people, cutting benefits to the middle class and poor, or both. Instead of “tax cuts,” we should rightly call them “tax deferrals” or “tax redistributions.”
Finally, as more and more of the nation’s wealth is stolen from the bottom and middle and transferred to the top one percent, the nation’s people lose confidence in the institutions that should have been defending, protecting, and supporting them. They see that no matter how they vote, no matter what they do, no matter how loud they protest, they’re still being screwed and the morbidly rich are still getting richer every single day.
This leads to Turchin’s “state breakdown,” which we’ve been witnessing in real time since Trump’s inauguration and the full-on implementation of the billionaire’s Project 2025, kicked off on January 20th, 2025. Step-by-step, those parts of the state that work for and protect the middle class and poor have been taken apart, while those parts that protect the rich (prisons, police, ICE, the military) have gotten trillions.
Average working people know they’ve been screwed; they just don’t realize it’s the morbidly rich who did it to them unless there’s an outspoken class warrior like FDR or Bernie Sanders calling it out.
Thus, they voted for whoever they perceive as most likely to “shake things up,” “destroy the deep state,” or “make the country great again” by restoring the wealth of the middle class.
Sometimes we choose right, as Americans did in 1860 with the election of Lincoln, and in 1932 by choosing FDR. The country was on the brink of disaster with massive fascist movements growing during each era; Lincoln and FDR defeated them and saved our nation’s democracy.
In 2024, though, the billionaires had such a grip on the media and the message, much of it through their ownership of media (Xitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Washington Post, LA Times, Fox “News,” massively subsidized podcasts, rightwing radio, etc.) and also with a tsunami of advertising cash that they convinced Americans that Trump—a billionaire rapist and convicted criminal who had promised to again cut taxes for his billionaire buddies—was the champion of the little guy.
As Trump, Vance, and Musk celebrated their 2024 election, their toast had to include the word “suckers.”
The result of this choice that put Project 2025 front-and-center has been the further disintegration of government’s protective ability for working class and poor people, turning it instead toward the wish-lists of billionaires, tech bros, and massive corporate monopolies and oligopolies.
As Turchin noted in The Guardian:
“One result of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that accelerates the breakdown of state capacity.
“It’s notable that a collapse in state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.”
If both Turchin and Howe are right and we’re now in the Fourth Turning or something like it, that explains much of the results of this week’s election. It should also give Democrats a clear vision of how to move forward.
We’re departing, in other words, the 45-year-long neoliberal/conservative/austerity part of the cycle that Reagan started and shifting into the next ~40-year cycle of progressive renewal of both our democracy and our economy.
For its own survival and that of our republic—and the success of our 2028 candidate for president—the Democratic Party must now reject the neoliberals within its own ranks.
Which means the Democratic Party and individual Democratic politicians should be embracing AOC, Bernie, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Al-Sayed, and every other genuinely progressive politician as hard as they can, and push their policies to the fore.
To do anything less is to squander this moment and risk another rightwing reactionary backlash and loss of middle-class voters like we saw in the reaction to Clinton in 2016 and Harris in 2024.
For its own survival and that of our republic—and the success of our 2028 candidate for president—the Democratic Party must now reject the neoliberals within its own ranks and makes a forceful argument for returning to the systems of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society that protected and enriched working class people in the previous cycles.
If Democrats again embrace neoliberals like Rahm Emmanuel (who’s pretty much openly campaigning for the 2028 presidential election), they’ll fail at this critical work and messaging: that could well doom our American experiment in liberal democracy.
If Democrats succeed at finding their voice, however, America may get the second chance to rebuild both our middle class and our democracy, a chance we ultimately won at the beginning of each of the past two 80-year cycles with Abraham Lincoln and FDR.
Thus, the policy and “holding Trump accountable” choices Democrats make for how they’ll proceed in the first 100 days of next year may well decide the fate of our American democracy.
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Take a Deep Breath, America—the Immediate Threat to Democracy Has Been Turned Back
While very soon it will be time to get back to work—because so much more needs to be done—we should enjoy this moment for we have achieved something monumental.
Nov 04, 2026
Good morning. What a day.
November 3rd will be remembered in history as a day like December 7th or July 4th. It was the day that tens of millions of people stood up to defend democracy in the United States.
I have no illusions about the many, many dark points in this country’s history, which predated Donald Trump, many of which were still very much present when he took office. But a democracy that has at least the pretense of respecting human rights and basic decency is infinitely better than a dictatorship that has open contempt for anything that challenges its power.
We are a long way from being completely out of the woods. Donald Trump still has two more years in his term and his sycophants still command the most powerful military in the world, as well as a squad of domestic henchmen that openly act outside of the law. They can do enormous harm to the country and the world in this time.
We are a long way from being completely out of the woods...But our ability to limit the damage is hugely greater today than yesterday.
But our ability to limit the damage is hugely greater today than yesterday. And to be clear, the mission is far larger than surviving the last two years of Donald Trump’s term. We have to reverse the inequality and corruption that led to a situation where tens of millions of people could look to a bumbling reality TV show star as the solution to the problem.
We need to create a government that people believe is on their side, that actively works to make their lives better. However much better the Biden administration and prior Democratic and even Republican administrations might have been in serving the public, people had real grounds for believing that the government was not serving their interests. Elon Musk was already incredibly rich on January 20th, 2025.
Anyhow, that is a long and incredibly important project, but for now, we can all take a deep breath. The immediate threat to democracy has been turned back with an electoral landslide of historic proportions. We should enjoy the moment while still recognizing that much more needs to be done.
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'Texas Belongs to Us': Voters Defeat Elon Musk's Millions to Deliver 'Blue Tsunami of Epic Proportions'
"Tonight, we sent a crystal-clear message to the people at the top: We will not be conquered," said senator-elect James Talarico.
Nov 04, 2026
Elon Musk, the world's richest man, spent nearly half a billion dollars on the 2026 midterm elections, with much of the money going to Republicans in Texas—where Democrats had not won a statewide election in more than three decades.
That changed on Tuesday when Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico defeated the state's corrupt Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, despite Musk's last-minute "rescue mission"—which took the form of a $160 million donation, a minuscule fraction of the Tesla CEO's net worth but a massive infusion of cash into a critical race. Republicans also lost the state's gubernatorial contest, with Democratic candidate Gina Hinojosa prevailing over incumbent GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who received millions of dollars from Musk.
Musk, who lives in Texas and has moved his businesses there, tried to brush off Democrats' stunning wins, writing on the social media platform he owns: "Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time."
Neither Talarico nor Hinojosa—who were just part of the "blue tsunami of epic proportions" that swept through Texas on Tuesday—mentioned Musk by name in their victory speeches, though the senator-elect accused Musk on the campaign trail of "trying to buy the race." But both decried the campaign finance system that has let Musk and other billionaires convert their obscene wealth into political power.
"The billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens—they want us at each other's throats," said Talarico. "They want us looking left and right at each other, instead of looking up at them."
"Our unity is a threat to their wealth and power," he added. "Tonight, we sent a crystal-clear message to the people at the top: We will not be conquered."
In her victory remarks, Hinojosa said the contest against Abbott posed a fundamental question to Texas voters: Does the state belong to working families, or "the people who write the biggest check"?
"Tonight, Texas, we answered," said the Democratic governor-elect. "And we did not whisper. We answered loud enough for every billionaire, every lobbyist, and every corrupt politician in Austin to hear. Texas belongs to us."
Across the country, according to a CNBC analysis of federal filings, "Musk’s America PAC spent nearly $87 million across 44 federal races."
"By Wednesday morning, Republicans it backed had lost 29 contests and won just three, with 12 still uncalled. More than $80 million—or 93% of its spending—went toward races Republicans lost," the outlet reported. "The outcome leaves Musk with fewer allies in a Democratic-controlled Congress that could investigate his federal contracts, his past leadership of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, and his companies’ ties to Washington."
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Lawsuit Targets Secretive Musk-Led Pentagon Panel Over 'Enormous Potential Conflicts of Interest'
"The federal government should not be outsourcing its vision on ‘the future of warfare’ to a panel dominated by individuals that stand to profit from it."
Nov 03, 2026
A coalition of government watchdog organizations sued the US Department of Defense on Monday over a recently announced initiative known as Project Meridian, a Pentagon advisory committee headed by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Anduril Industries cofounder Palmer Luckey—billionaires whose companies benefit extensively from federal contracts.
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Project Meridian violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which "requires that any federal advisory committee that includes non-governmental members be created by a charter, have a defined structure and purpose, make its records and meetings open to the public, and be fairly balanced in its membership."
In his memorandum ordering the creation of Project Meridian, Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth set a deadline of January 28, 2027 for the panel to deliver recommendations to the US Defense Department on how to "map the trajectory of future warfare" and help the country "maintain global dominance."
Project Meridian has held at least two meetings at the Pentagon, which has not disclosed the specific contents of the gatherings or released a list of attendees. Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich is helping Musk and Luckey spearhead the advisory panel, coordinated by the MITRE Corporation—whose board previously included the GOP's nominee for US Senate in Michigan, Mike Rogers.
"Despite its ongoing operations and imminent final report," the new lawsuit reads, "defendants have failed to comply with FACA’s procedural and substantive requirements for new federal advisory committees, including FACA transparency requirements that disallow Project Meridian’s closed-door operations."
"Compounding the problem, Project Meridian’s private-sector membership raises precisely the type of conflict-of-interest concerns that FACA was designed to address," the lawsuit continues. "Announced members include Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, both leaders and stakeholders of major defense contractors with substantial financial interests in the outcome of Project Meridian’s recommendations. Other members likewise have direct financial stakes in Project Meridian’s findings or are dedicated to aggressive military action."
The lawsuit was filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Public Citizen, and the Project on Government Oversight. The groups urged the federal court to "hold unlawful, vacate, and set aside Secretary Hegseth’s September 30 memorandum establishing Project Meridian," "enjoin defendants from allowing Project Meridian to continue its work until defendants bring it into compliance with FACA," and bar the Pentagon from "accepting or acting upon any recommendations by Project Meridian while it is acting outside the law."
Donald Sherman, CREW's president, said in a statement on Monday that the Pentagon is "legally barred from getting advice in secret, by defense contractors with enormous potential conflicts of interest."
"But that’s exactly what Project Meridian is doing—soliciting private counsel from contractors about military capacity including the president’s largest political benefactor,” said Sherman. "The Federal Advisory Committee Act sets clear requirements about transparency and avoiding conflicts of interest, and Project Meridian must either comply or stop operating.”
Musk's SpaceX has secured more than $8 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2026 alone.
Anduril Industries, Luckey's firm, is known for building autonomous drones. The company won a $2 billion US Navy contract last month, days after Hegseth announced Project Meridian.
“Project Meridian would outsource design of grand military strategy to two extremist Pentagon contractors, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey,” Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said Monday. “Very predictably, they will recommend more spending, much more spending, on more AI-enabled weaponry. That would simultaneously make the world more dangerous and starve funding for domestic and human needs."
"The law demands balance on advisory committees, precisely to prevent connected insiders like Musk and Luckey from writing policy at the expense of the public," Weissman added.
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'Oligarchy Is on the Ballot': Reports Uncover Unprecedented Sums Ultrarich Spent to Buy 2026 Midterms
"In a democracy, it’s supposed to be one person, one vote, and the more one person can influence, the less egalitarian our system becomes," said one expert.
Nov 02, 2026
Some of the richest people in the US have spent unprecedented sums of money to influence the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections, and a Sunday report in The New York Times estimated that the top 20 biggest donors alone have spent a combined $2 billion in federal races this cycle.
The single largest funder of the 2026 midterms, by a wide margin, is far-right billionaire Elon Musk, who has shoveled nearly $450 million to help GOP candidates.
In fact, pro-Republican donors account for the five largest individual contributors to midterm races.
In addition to Musk, the other largest donors this cycle are industrialists Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who have given $150 million to help elect Republicans; flagship GOP Senate super PAC One Nation, which has spent $138 million; venture capitalists Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, who have given $116 million; and hedge fund investor Jeff Yass, who has given $110 million.
On the Democratic side, the top spenders have been flagship Democratic Senate super PAC Majority Forward, which has spent $104 million, and George and Alexander Soros, who have given $103 million.
The Times' report echoes an analysis published last week by the Brennan Center for Justice showing that the 40 largest individual donors to the 2026 elections had spent a combined $2.4 billion as of mid-October.
According to Brennan, this represents the single largest amount of money spent on a midterm election ever since the US Supreme Court's landmark 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC unleashed limitless political campaign spending.
The Brennan analysis reveals that the spending of the very largest donors has grown dramatically over the last decade.
"The donations coming from the top 40 donors for the midterms total eight times the amount from the top 40 donors by mid-October in the 2014 midterms (the first full midterm cycle after Citizens United), adjusted for inflation," the analysis explains. "The cutoff to be in the top 40 has also increased to 10 times what it was four cycles ago, to $25 million."
And while the biggest spenders used to favor Democrats, their loyalties have since shifted to the GOP, and in this election cycle "donors loyal to the GOP now give more than three times the amount that reliably Democratic donors give."
And while labor unions were once at least represented in the list of top 40 election donors, they have since fallen out and have been replaced by donors from the cryptocurrency industry, the Brennan Center analysis finds.
Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at Brennan and co-author of the analysis, told The Guardian in an interview published Monday that it's become easier for politicians to be totally beholden to a single large donor while ignoring the needs of voters.
"In a democracy, it’s supposed to be one person, one vote," Vandewalker explained, "and the more one person can influence, the less egalitarian our system becomes."
Economist Paul Krugman expressed similar concerns about the influence of big money in US politics, writing on his Substack page Monday that "oligarchy is on the ballot" in the 2026 midterms.
In assessing the massive spending by megadonors on elections, Krugman said the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision deserved significant blame. However, he said it was also a simple reflection of the fact that the US economy for decades has been rigged to provide benefits primarily to the ultrawealthy.
"Now we... have men big enough to own the government of the United States," Krugman commented. "This midterm is a test of whether they will get away with it."
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'I Would Not Even Think About It. I'd Do It': Trump Vows Preemptive Pardon for Elon Musk
"I did it for J6," President Donald Trump said of the Capitol insurrectionists he pardoned just hours into the start of his second term.
Nov 02, 2026
US President Donald Trump said in a podcast interview released Monday that he would not hesitate to issue preemptive pardons for mega-billionaire Elon Musk and other allies to shield them from potential investigations if Democrats retake control of Congress in this week's midterms and win back the White House in 2028.
"I would not even think about it. I'd do it," Trump said of preemptive pardons for Musk, White House staff, and other allies during an interview on the Pod Force One podcast, hosted by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. "I did it for J6."
The president claimed that Democrats—who have signaled plans to investigate Musk should they win the House or Senate in Tuesday's elections—"want to arrest" the world's richest man and leading GOP donor, along with his lackeys who rampaged lawlessly through the federal government with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
"Big Balls. They want to arrest him," Trump said, referring to Musk associate Edward Coristine.
As Wired reported last year, Coristine—who was 19 when he was hired at DOGE—was one of the Musk operatives at the Small Business Administration "who sought access to HR, contracting, and payment systems and information."
Watch Trump's comments:
The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Trump has "repeatedly promised his top administration officials pardons before he leaves office," saying during one closed-door meeting that he would "pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office]."
The president's remarks came days after Politico reported that congressional Democrats are eager to investigate Musk's "alleged conflicts of interests" as his companies "rake in multibillion dollar federal contracts and subsidies."
"Members of House Oversight and other panels also want to examine Musk’s role in eliminating over 250,000 federal jobs during his time at DOGE, withholding congressionally appropriated money and accessing sensitive government data," the outlet noted. Democrats have also named Musk's deadly dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as a potential target of investigation.
Musk, whose tenure at the head of DOGE ended in May 2025, has benefited massively from Trump's second White House term.
According to a recent analysis by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, Musk is among the "top beneficiaries of the cancellation of corporate enforcement actions" under Trump. Musk's companies have "benefited from at least eight canceled enforcement actions," the group found.
Musk has funneled around $445 million in the 2026 election cycle to super PACs supporting Republican candidates in an effort to help the party maintain its congressional majorities.
"Billionaires and Big Tech have poured $2.7 billion and counting into Republican midterm campaigns, with Elon Musk breaking a new record as the largest political donor in American history," Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote in a social media post on Monday. "This is what happens when the administration puts pardons, regulatory changes, tax cuts, and public policy up for auction to MAGA world."
"Democrats in Congress will investigate and uncover all the corrupt deals under the surface," the committee Democrats added.
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How to Stop Billionaires from Hijacking the Midterms
The bulk of political dark money flows directly back into media companies that the nation’s richest donors control. We can break the cycle.
Oct 30, 2026
There’s a drama playing out across American screens in 2026. But not the sort you might expect. There are villains and heroes, yes, high finance and political intrigue, too. There may even be a surprise ending—but we’ll have to wait until the Nov. 3 season finale to find out.
The actual plot, though, is not unfolding on television screens or streaming platforms but in corridors of political power and extreme wealth, far from public view. It’s a tale about the hijacking of US elections by the world’s richest people.
According to the Federal Election Commission, as of early October a record-setting $16 billion and counting had been plowed into the 2026 midterm-election cycle. Hundreds of millions more have been added to that tally in the weeks since. Much of this money comes from the world’s richest oligarchs, many who built their unlimited wealth from ownership stakes in massive tech and media conglomerates.
So much for the idea that our news-and-information systems should foster the public exchange of diverse ideas that are the lifeblood of civic society.
Elon Musk has contributed just shy of half-a-billion dollars to Republican-aligned political campaigns and Super PACs for the 2026 midterms. That’s more than his total political contributions during the 2024 presidential election. With no limit on how much he can spend, Musk made the biggest electoral donation in American history—$158 million—to help one candidate (senatorial hopeful Ken Paxton of Texas).
Lesser known are the contributions lower-ranking multibillionaires have made: Mike Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, and George Soros have contributed a combined $227 million to Democratic-aligned campaigns; GOP election initiatives have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ($92 million); Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein ($150 million); and Jeff and Janine Yass ($110 million) .
Hundreds of millions more have found their way into the accounts of shadowy Super PACs that are not required to disclose their donors.
Musk millions for media manipulation
Most of this whopping cash infusion pays for political ads: The media-tracking firm AdImpact projects a record-breaking $11.6 billion of that $16 billion total—or approximately 73 percent of all political contributions—will buy ads on broadcast and cable-TV stations, radio outlets, streaming services and social-media platforms.
Viewers are left with little to help them separate fact from fiction before they head to the polls. That’s because the media outlets that serve up campaign spots have zero legal obligation to reject ads that peddle lies. While nearly half of this money goes to air political ads on broadcast outlets, the Communications Act of 1934 prohibits television and radio stations from censoring or editing candidate-sponsored ads, even when they know the content is false.
And while the Federal Communications Commission does require a degree of transparency regarding who paid for a given broadcast ad, it does not monitor or regulate the accuracy of an ad’s claims.
Since 2024, the owners of social-media platforms like Facebook, X and YouTube—which account for a growing piece of the ad-spending pie—have largely abandoned efforts to fact check the political ads that course across their networks.
The money-and-media-election complex
That’s a lot of data points to digest. But the information on political-ad spending leads to one disturbing conclusion: The bulk of money spent to manipulate and even misinform viewers flows back to media companies that many of the nation’s richest donors control. This cycle of money and influence is turning people away from meaningful political engagement, put off by the deluge of dishonest attack ads that will have aired hundreds of thousands of times before viewers become voters on Nov. 3.
It’s a toxic combination of ingredients that Free Press co-founders Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols called the “money and media election complex,” in which wealthy donors, giant corporations, politicians, regulators and corporate media align their interests against a public seeking to legitimately engage in democracy.
“The complex has tremendous gravitational power,” McChesney and Nichols wrote more than a decade ago, “which increases the degree of difficulty for those wishing to participate in elections in a manner not conducive to wealthy funders, corporate media or preservation of the status quo.”
So much for the idea that our news-and-information systems should foster the public exchange of diverse ideas that are the lifeblood of civic society. Instead we have a political system that’s beholden to billionaire donors, and a hyper-commercial media that are getting rich off keeping voters in the dark.
Media outlets must take their obligations more seriously. In exchange for First Amendment freedoms, they need to cover the money that’s poisoning our politics, expose the groups and individuals funding political ads and address the falsehoods presented in many of these spots. With little time remaining before the midterms, the time to do this reporting is now.
Right-sizing Big Media
Public policy must also address the media’s systemic failings. And while communications regulation may look fuzzy when viewed from 30,000 feet, at the ground level the consequences of bad rules and regulations come into sharper focus. Nowhere is this more evident than during elections.
Instead of nurturing democracy and free speech, commercialized media today threaten to distort it.
The lack of adequate diversity and competition in media has encouraged industry owners to think of their outlets as profit-making machines with no obligation to disclose to viewers the political money and special interests that make them tick. And the lack of local reporters holding candidates to account—the consequence of runaway media consolidation in turn spurring newsroom cutbacks and closures—in many ways explains the rise of a class of politicians who spend more time wooing wealthy contributors than attending to the needs of voters back home.
This has created a dependency between those who control political power (and need access to the media to keep it) and those who control the media (and need access to political power to keep it). This cycle has gotten so toxic that instead of nurturing democracy and free speech, commercialized media today threaten to distort it.
These systemic remedies include making political ad-spending information easily available, including exposing the true funders bankrolling Super PACs. Such disclosure should happen in the body of the ads themselves. We must also get serious about strategies and policies that foster independent, local political journalism. Free Press Action has made a number of promising inroads here through state-level legislation to fund civic media.
And we need to right-size massive media conglomerates, using existing antitrust law and media-ownership limits while strengthening other rules that have been gutted at the urging of a powerful media lobby and far-too compliant lawmakers and regulators.
There’s a growing backlash against billionaire control of our political and media systems that could make these reforms possible.
The failures of corporate media have undercut the First Amendment goal of creating, in the words of the Supreme Court in 1969, an “informed public capable of conducting its own affairs.” True participatory democracy will have no chance at survival if we fail to insist on serious changes now.
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Democrats Ask Trump: Did You Use Elon Musk's Grok AI Chatbot to Help Plan Maduro Kidnapping?
“If the American President is relying on the policy advice of a Musk-designed, Hitler-friendly chatbot with a predilection for child pornography in order to carry out his official duties, Americans have a right to know."
Oct 29, 2026
A pair of top Democrats in the US House of Representatives on Thursday are asking new questions about the influence that artificial intelligence chatbots may have had in the deliberations or planning of President Donald Trump's unlawful military operations against Venezuela earlier this year that resulted in the kidnapping of the country's president, Nicolas Maduro.
In a letter sent directly to Trump, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called on the president to preserve any and all of his conversations with artificial intelligence chatbots and asked for confirmation on whether or not he had specifically engaged with Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot concerning the US military assault on Venezuela.
The committee Democrats pointed to public reporting about a meeting between Trump and Musk that took place prior to the US military operation in Venezuela that raises serious questions about the role the president's interaction may have played in shaping his understanding of the situation in the country and fallout from such an audacious—and "100% illegal"—plan.
As TechCrunch summarized earlier this month:
In December 2025, about a month before the US invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, President Trump had a secret meeting with Elon Musk, Time magazine reports. This was roughly seven months after Musk left his role in the Trump administration at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
During this meeting, Trump “spent hours” talking to Musk’s Grok chatbot, including asking how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president, a source told Time. Just a few months earlier, in September, Trump began ordering U.S. military strikes against Venezuelan boats that Trump alleged were involved in drug trafficking.
People had apparently been turning to Grok asking about the boat strikes and political climate in Venezuela, as The Atlantic reported at the time. So Grok told Trump that Maduro was a “deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall,” Time reported.
If such reporting is accurate, Raskin and Garcia said in their letter to Trump that the "episode is deeply troubling," and offered three key reasons.
"First, you consulted Grok—but not Congress—on your military deployment to Venezuela, circumventing Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and introducing instead into American foreign policy decision making a technology that is highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone," the pair wrote.
"Second," the letter continues, "the unsecured use of AI chatbots by you and your closest advisors exposes the United States to acute national security risks. Your Administration’s disdain for operational security is well-documented. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth famously used unsecured channels to relay information about impending U.S. military strikes to his wife, brother, and personal lawyer."
The third reason, they said, is that Trump and his advisors’ "use of AI exposes the country to malign influence from unknown and unaccountable third parties."
The letter details a series of specific controversies with the Grok chatbot model, including its ability to create sexualized images of people—including children—without their permission and creating pro-Nazi content and advocating for a "second Holocaust" based, unsurprisingly, on what the model itself attributed to public comments by Musk.
"These disturbing examples illustrate why the White House’s AI prompts and outputs must be preserved," said Raskin and Garcia in the letter.
"If the American President is relying on the policy advice of a Musk-designed, Hitler-friendly chatbot with a predilection for child pornography in order to carry out his official duties, Americans have a right to know," they wrote. "If the United States military killed dozens of innocent schoolchildren based on the faulty advice of an AI chatbot, we have a right to know that too. And if an unelected oligarch is influencing U.S. policy through his AI-generated alter ego, Americans have a right to know how governmental decisions are being reached."
In service of that message, the lawmakers told Trump that any and all "AI prompts submitted by you and your staff, as well as the outputs you received, plainly fall within the definition of presidential records," and should be properly preserved in accordance with existing statute.
In addition, "to ensure that the American public’s rights to presidential records are being adequately protected," the pair requested a closed-door briefing regarding the use of AI chatbot technologies by the president, his staff, and other relevant personnel. They also asked a series of detailed questions on the subject for which they requested answers, in writing, by November 11.
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Led by Elon Musk, 515 Superrich People Have Donated $4.2 Billion to Super PACs for 2026 Elections
"Until something is done, like overturning the Citizens United US Supreme Court decision, the wealthy’s stranglehold on our political system will continue to tighten."
Oct 28, 2026
The "almost cartoon-villain level of political spending" by SpaceX CEO and former Trump administration adviser Elon Musk has reached a fever pitch ahead of the midterm elections, with the right-wing billionaire's donations of $445 million to super political action committees accounting for 10% of the $4.2 billion the PACs have brought in.
As an analysis released Tuesday by the government watchdog Public Citizen found, Musk has led the way in contributing huge sums to super PACs. The PACs can raise unlimited amounts of money on behalf of candidates and causes and have increasingly influenced elections following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which said the government cannot restrict political spending by corporations.
But excluding Musk, just 514 donors have contributed about $3.8 billion to super PACs this election cycle, as Republicans attempt to hold onto control of the US Senate and House of Representatives despite President Donald Trump's plummeting approval rating and his record of raising the prices of gas and other essentials with his illegal war on Iran and his tariff policy.
Altogether, the donations from the 515 contributors account for 73% of all super PAC funding from individuals, corporations, and nonprofits this election cycle, according to Public Citizen.
"The figures add to a growing body of evidence that unlimited political spending has concentrated influence over elections among a tiny number of wealthy individuals and corporations," said the organization, noting that Musk's contributions come two years after he poured nearly $300 million into the 2024 elections, boosting Trump and other Republicans and spending close to $120 million more than the next closest donor.
The report follows an earlier Public Citizen analysis that found more than 100 super PACs that have raised at least $1 million received the majority of the funding from just a single donor, collectively gathering more than $1 billion to boost the candidates of their choice.
The Senate Leadership Fund has the most donors contributing at least $1 million each, with 61 people contributing $496 million.
“When 500 donors account for more than 70% of super PAC contributions, we should be asking whose voices our political system is prioritizing.”
MAGA Inc., the super PAC affiliated with Trump, has taken $405 million from 102 contributors ahead of the crucial midterms, while the Senate Majority PAC has received $244 million from 44 people or groups.
Fifty-three donors have sent $231 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, while 31 donors have contributed $183 million to the House Majority PAC.
“Super PACs have helped create a political system where a small number of wealthy interests can spend unlimited amounts to influence elections and shape the choices voters face,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “When 500 donors account for more than 70% of super PAC contributions, we should be asking whose voices our political system is prioritizing.”
After Musk, GOP megadonors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been the second-largest contributors to super PACs this year. The Uihleins own the packing company Uline, and have pushed for years for government deregulation and against labor unions.
Other top contributors include multiple dark money groups, right-wing megadonor Jeffrey Yass—a longtime funder of anti-LGBTQ+, anti-choice, and anti-public school campaigns—and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who said earlier this year that he would prefer to use artificial intelligence in his business rather than hire human workers.
As The Washington Sun reported Tuesday, dark money groups, which don't have to reveal the source of their contributions, have poured more than $392 million into the four congressional leadership PACs this year.
The Public Citizen report stresses that the hundreds of top donors to super PACs this year gave amounts of money that "most Americans could not fathom donating to a political cause."
More than 85% of the money raised by super PACs ahead of the midterms came from donors who gave at least $20,000—"nearly a quarter of the median household income," said Public Citizen.
"Until something is done, like overturning the Citizens United US Supreme Court decision," said the group, "the wealthy’s stranglehold on our political system will continue to tighten."
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US Billionaires Compete for 'Most Awful Human Being' Award
If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power.
Oct 23, 2026
Our billionaires seem to be in a competition for most awful human being alive. We have Larry Ellison, along with son, taking over CBS and immediately destroying its prized news show, 60 Minutes. They appointed Bari Weiss, a right-wing apparatchik, to oversee CBS’s entire news operation. She has immediately sought to make the news more Trump-friendly. This has led to many reporters being fired and threats to others to make their reporting toe the Trump line or risk being fired. Many of the network’s longest-serving reporters just quit.
The fun doesn’t stop here. The Ellison clique is also getting control of CNN through Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Presumably we can look forward to more Trump-friendly reporting there also.
To be clear, neither of these networks was a paragon of objective reporting before the Ellison family takeover. Both networks regularly marginalized and belittled progressives in the US and around the world. But they did at least have an ostensible commitment to objectivity, unlike, say, Fox News.
Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions.
Then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to view the huge Meta social media platforms as important mechanisms for pushing his political agenda. Last Saturday, the Instagram site for the No Kings march went down for four hours, exactly when it was being most widely used. Meta claimed there was no political motive; it was just incompetence.
We might be more inclined to accept the incompetence story if there wasn’t a comparable picture in Brazil in the lead-up to its presidential election. Lula, the incumbent president, is locked in a tight race with Flavio Bolsanaro, a right-winger who is openly allied with Donald Trump. It seems that the sites of supporters of Lula and his supporters have repeatedly run into the same sort of technical difficulties with Meta.
Then we go to everyone’s favorite evil billionaire, Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit intention of using it as a vehicle to support his politics. He not only opened the gates to all sorts of racist, sexist, and harassing material; he has throttled the accounts of many progressives so that their comments are less widely viewed.
Musk also has teamed up with Ellison, who was given a controlling stake in TikTok, after Donald Trump wrestled it away from its Chinese owner. TikTok decided to suspend the account for the documentary Musk, just before its initial release. Musk apparently gave the film a bad review, which was enough to get it banned from TikTok for at least a period of time. Musk is also contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to get some of the most awful people on the planet elected as governors or senators.
This crew of centibillionaires sees the purpose of government to make themselves ever richer, and are prepared to use their money to ensure that it does. Their use of campaign contributions for this purpose is widely recognized, but that is only part of the story.
Their control of major media outlets is at least as important. If a television or radio ad can affect people’s votes, then surely what people hear between the ads also can affect their votes.
Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions. It is essential to weaken their control.
One good place to start would be reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts the huge social media platforms from liability for third-party content. This gives social media platforms an advantage over broadcast and print outlets, which are liable for harms (defamation or fraud) caused by third-party content. Fox News famously paid out $787 million for spreading third- party lies about the 2020 election. Section 230 can be amended in a way that levels the playing field and favors smaller non-profit or subscription-supported platforms.
The other route is to increase support for alternative media. There has been serious progress in this area. The Local News Act was recently signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom. This measure gives a subsidy of up to $20,000 per reporter for news outlets to cover local news. Several other states are considering similar measures.
It’s a long way from measures giving modest subsidies for local news to the multibillion-dollar media outlets and social media platforms that dominate what people see and hear. But these are an important foot in the door. If these measures succeed and are popular, they can spread to other states and possibly be implemented nationally.
In any case, if we are serious about limiting the ability of the billionaires to buy democracy, we have to go beyond worrying about campaign contributions. If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power. Those concerned about democracy need to recognize this fact.
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