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+--- Thread: Article After Texas’ blue wave, what happens to Elon Musk and SpaceX? (/thread-21773.html)
After Texas’ blue wave, what happens to Elon Musk and SpaceX? - C C - Nov 5, 2026
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/elon-musk-moved-spacex-to-red-texas-now-its-blue-what-happens-next/
EXCERPT: During the 2026 midterms, Musk went all in on Republicans, investing nearly half a billion dollars in their election campaigns through his own America PAC and other organizations, according to The New York Times. Of this estimated $474 million, nearly half went to candidates in Texas.
And then, on Tuesday, a historic blue wave washed over the formerly deep-red state. Most of Musk’s political friends in Texas will soon be gone. So what happens next?
We don’t really know. But there are some important things to watch.
First up is Musk’s public comments on the social media site he owns, X. Throughout the evening on Tuesday, as it became clear Republicans were headed for a historic defeat, Musk remained uncharacteristically quiet. His first comment came 12 minutes after midnight in Texas, where the key statewide races had all been called.
“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” he wrote. A bit later, he tried to react with some sarcastic humor and then largely went back to promoting SpaceX’s AI Grok bot and the Starlink Internet service.
I think we can read a lot into this, drawing on my own understanding of Musk’s motivations and conversations with a couple of people familiar with his thinking.
Politically, Musk has changed his stripes before. He bundled for President Obama’s campaigns and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. Later, of course, he took a hard-right turn, becoming Donald Trump’s most prominent and largest financial backer in the 2024 presidential campaign.
Now there are two avenues open to Musk. He can lean further into Republicans and far-right politics. He still has allies there and could look to become a kingmaker in selecting the party’s 2028 presidential nominee. He could also expand his footprint in other red states (more on this below).
The alternative, which would be consistent with some of his past behavior, is for Musk to moderate politically. But are Democrats interested in de-escalation after such a decisive victory? For several years, Musk has been one of the Democratic Party’s loudest antagonists, after Trump. But he is also doing, at enormous scale, some things Democrats have spent a decade saying America needs: investing in domestic manufacturing and chip fabs and creating thousands of industrial jobs, many of them in the red and purple districts Dems just won. Whether Democrats treat him as someone to be investigated or someone to be bargained with may be the most important open question for him in the next two years.
At the end of the day, what I believe Musk wants most is power. Not so much power in the traditional political sense, but the power to bend the world toward the future he envisions. Right now, that future is heavily steeped in artificial intelligence and requires extraordinary amounts of energy and computing infrastructure to run his AI agents, robots, self-driving vehicles, and more.
One thing to watch is whether Musk develops any kind of relationship with Texas Senator-elect James Talarico, whom he demonized prior to the election and spent so heavily to defeat. Talarico did not specify Musk in his post-election speech but did say, “In this race, we went up against our own Goliaths. The richest man in the world, the most powerful man in the world and the entire Washington, DC establishment.”
Later, he added, “Tonight, we sent a crystal-clear message to the people at the top: We will not be conquered.”
At the same time, Talarico has promised voters that he will serve all of Texas, to love all of his neighbors, and seek to build bridges rather than tear them down. Musk is the richest and most prominent Texan. He also could help ignite the state’s economy in the coming decades. Can he and the state’s newest senator, a gifted speaker and clearly talented politician, be good neighbors? (MORE - details)