Musk Panic-Deletes Posts as the Walls Come Crashing Down

Elon Musk spent at least $458m trying to keep Republicans in charge of the Congress that funds, buys from and investigates his companies. On 3 November they lost both chambers. SpaceX holds more than $8bn in Golden Dome missile-defence contracts, and under Republican control at least eight enforcement cases against Musk companies were dropped. By the next morning his “Vote red today!” post had been deleted.

Those dropped cases had people on the other side of them. The SEC estimates that Twitter shareholders were underpaid by at least $150m when Musk disclosed his stake late, and the case settled for $1.5m. SpaceX workers fired in 2022 over an open letter lost their labour case when the NLRB dismissed it. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa campaigned against Musk’s $1.7bn property-tax break, calling it a break on “property taxes that the rest of us have to pay full price on.” Then she beat Gov. Greg Abbott, whom Musk had backed.

SpaceX had already told investors what was at stake. Its June 2026 IPO prospectus warns that its government relationships may “be affected by which political party controls the presidency or one or both chambers of the U.S. Congress.” The same filing gives Musk 82.4% of SpaceX’s voting power, so the company’s risk is his own.

The size of the total depends on who is counting:

Count	Musk’s 2026 midterm spending
Associated Press	at least $445m
Forbes, from FEC filings	at least $458m
New York Times, cited by Newsmax	$474m

That is about half as much again as the roughly $290m he spent in 2024. By mid-October the next-largest donors this cycle, the Uihleins, had given $138m. About $216m went through his own America PAC, according to The Verge. In September he wrote two checks totalling $158m to the Senate Leadership Fund, the Republican super PAC that was also paying to promote a fake Michigan news site.

Texas got the most, more than $200m by The Verge’s count. Ken Paxton raised $22.3m himself against James Talarico’s $146m, and he still lost by more than 12 points.

Musk backed 106 House and Senate candidates. As of about noon on 4 November, Forbes counted 19 winners, “all in seats Republicans were expected to win anyway,” along with 47 losses and 40 races uncalled. America PAC put nearly $87m into 44 federal races. By Wednesday morning three had been won, 29 lost and 12 were uncalled.

The deletions began that night. A pinned 29 October post urging votes for Republican Senate candidates came down early on 4 November, “around the time Democrat James Talarico claimed victory onstage,” Forbes reported. That post had warned that a Democratic win would mean “the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.”

The first confirmation came from Grok, the chatbot his own company makes. Asked whether the post had been deleted, it answered “True” and said he took it down after “major Republican losses.” Users have reproduced the answer. Snopes confirmed the deletion, and The New Republic published a screenshot of “Vote red today!” Grok’s summary of his explanation was “He hasn’t said why.” Musk also did not respond to messages seeking comment from AP.

Around 1am he posted something else: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.” Then he wrote, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time 🤷‍♂️.”

What SpaceX told investors

In the risk section SpaceX filed with the SEC, the company names two things a new Congress can change, the money and the rules:

“shifts in the composition of the U.S. Congress or changes in the presidential administration can result in significant changes in government spending priorities, regulatory posture, and the allocation of contracts and resources across industries and programs.”

SpaceX reported $18.7bn in revenue for 2025, and about a fifth of it came from the US government, per Washington Technology’s read of the filing. That works out to roughly $3.7bn in a single year, about eight times what Musk spent on this election. SpaceX flew 11 of 12 national-security launches and all five crewed space station missions.

Golden Dome is the administration’s planned missile-defence shield, and SpaceX has won more than $8bn of its contracts. That is at least a third of the programme’s budget, the Wall Street Journal reported in August, and it includes a $2.29bn Space Force data-network contract awarded in May. xAI, now part of SpaceX, won a Pentagon contract with a $200m ceiling in July 2025 and got Grok listed on the catalogue federal agencies buy from. The watchdog Democracy Defenders Fund counts at least $6.3bn in contracts during Musk’s four months running DOGE and at least $10bn since.

Musk’s companies “maintained and won large government contracts under President Joe Biden,” NBC News noted. A Washington Post analysis found that governments committed at least $6.3bn to them in 2024 alone, with Democrats holding the White House and the Senate. Contracts flowed under both parties. What did not survive the change of party was enforcement.

Look at the dates. The NLRB complaint over the fired SpaceX workers was filed in 2022. The Justice Department’s hiring-discrimination case against SpaceX came in 2023. The SEC’s Twitter suit was filed six days before Biden left office. All three were pursued under a Democratic administration, and all three were dropped, dismissed or settled for a cent on the dollar once Republicans held power. When Musk told Tucker Carlson in October 2024 what a Trump loss would mean, he did not mention contracts. “If he loses, I’m f***ed,” he said with a laugh, and asked, “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”

Investors read the result the same way. Tesla and SpaceX each lost about $40bn in market value on Wednesday while the Nasdaq rose. Fortune puts the falls at 3.3% and 3.8% on a day the S&P 500 gained 1.6%. Joe Mazzola, head trading and derivatives strategist at Charles Schwab, said worries about congressional investigations “contributed to the early plunge for his benchmark firms.”

Forbes, writing that morning, tied the first $23.7bn drop in Musk’s net worth to fears of a “regulatory slowdown of data center construction” and noted that Dell, Nvidia and SoftBank fell too. A sector-wide data-centre scare should have dragged down an Nvidia-heavy Nasdaq, and it did not. By Thursday a wider AI sell-off had joined in, and the two companies had shed about $456bn between them.

Contracts flowed under both parties. What did not survive the change of party was enforcement.

Eight cases dropped

Public Citizen counts eight cancelled enforcement actions that benefited Musk companies under the current administration. Each one had someone on the other side:

SpaceX employees fired for writing an open letter about working conditions. Their NLRB complaint was dismissed.
Tesla drivers and the people sharing the road with them. Three NHTSA investigations of Tesla were closed.
Refugees who said SpaceX would not hire them. The Justice Department dropped their case in February 2025.
The NAACP, suing under the Clean Air Act over xAI’s Memphis data centre. The Justice Department intervened against it.

NBC adds that Trump halted the Labor Department office that audits federal contractors for civil-rights compliance on his first full day back. Tesla was one of 2,000 contractors on its audit list. The office’s new head is a lawyer who previously represented SpaceX in a labour dispute.

Senate Democrats put Musk’s companies’ potential liability across all pending matters at $2.37bn. NBC’s May 2025 review shows how cases leave without anyone closing them. More than 40 Musk matters had shown no public action for months. Trump fired the Agriculture Department inspector general whose office was investigating Neuralink. The FAA granted SpaceX a fivefold increase in Starship launches, and the Transportation Department loosened crash-reporting rules for self-driving companies, Tesla included. The Senate Democrats’ report put it in a document’s words:

“The truth is that the breathtaking scope and scale of benefits Mr. Musk is gaining from his present position may never be known, and that is by design.”

The SEC case shows the price. The agency estimated the late Twitter disclosure let Musk underpay other shareholders by at least $150m, and it settled for $1.5m. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan approved the deal. She also asked whether the SEC would “afford other alleged securities-law violators such solicitude” or whether it was “a one-time deal designed for Mr. Musk.” She wrote that whether the government had done enough was “for our citizenry to decide at the ballot box.”

Cary Coglianese, who directs the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Regulation, told NBC it was “a hard question” whether Musk got special treatment or the relaxed scrutiny “any business might enjoy.” He then added:

“As a citizen, I have to say it looks like there might be some special treatment.”

Public Citizen’s own numbers answer his question. Its full count is 212 cancelled actions against 205 corporations, so nearly every other company on the list had about one case dropped. Musk’s companies had eight, and Tesla alone had at least three.

Put in order, the record reads like this. A man whose companies collect billions in federal contracts, and whose enforcement problems melted away under one party, spent close to half a billion dollars to keep that party in charge of the Congress that oversees all of it. He lost. The public record of the attempt came down the morning the new majority was called.

The gavels change hands in January

From January, Democrats chair the committees that can compel testimony. Rep. Robert Garcia, the expected Oversight chair, said “absolutely we have questions for Mr. Musk”, though he named “the Trump family and the clear corruption” as the first priority. Sen. Chris Coons says he has a list of questions for Musk “when I subpoena him”, and no subpoena has been issued yet. Rep. James Walkinshaw wrote that Musk “must answer for it under oath.”

The new majority will have more than contracts to ask about. Musk’s money has put him in court over an election before. In 2024 America PAC paid $1m a day to swing-state voters who signed its petition, presented as a random draw. The Justice Department warned the PAC the payments might break the federal ban on paying people to register to vote. When two Arizona signers sued, the PAC’s director testified that the winners “were not chosen by random chance”, and a federal judge let their fraud claims proceed. The case settled on 15 October, three weeks before this election, on undisclosed terms; Musk and the PAC deny wrongdoing.

Democrats also plan public hearings on the Epstein files, which the Justice Department released only in part after Congress forced it to. Musk is in them. Emails released on 30 January show him asking Jeffrey Epstein “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” and, later, “When should we head to your island on the 2nd?” Epstein cancelled that trip. In June 2025, during his feud with the White House, he posted that the president was in the Epstein files. He deleted that post too.

Texas changes hands as well. Musk’s state deals, including SpaceX’s Terafab tax arrangement, now answer to a Democratic governor and a Democratic state House.

Musk saw it coming. On 21 October, responding to reports that Democrats were planning investigations, he posted on X:

“Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.”

Some matters are still open. NHTSA’s engineering analysis of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving in low visibility covers 3.2m vehicles and includes a pedestrian death. A smaller defect-petition inquiry into about 1,000 robotaxis speeding in school zones has recorded no crashes. The Space Force says it will not single-source the Golden Dome architecture.

The remaining Golden Dome awards, the 3.2m-car safety analysis and the first subpoena will now be overseen by a Congress Musk spent $458m to stop. He has already promised to “come for” whoever is “pulling the strings.”