One of my favorite midterm election jokes is that the blue tsunami will usher in Woke 3.0, the “Dark Woke” era where we finally destroy MAGA at every level, especially culturally and politically. Speaking of, you know who got reamed in the midterms? Elon Musk. Musk tried to do the same thing he did in 2024 and he threw in $446 million to influence/buy the election for Republicans. It would have been cheaper and less time consuming for him to just set fire to a mountain of cash himself.

Tech billionaire and Republican megadonor Elon Musk was among the biggest losers of election night, after spending hundreds of millions to boost candidates that failed to win their races.

He doled out around $446 million — the most a non-candidate has ever spent on an election, including over $200 million on Texas-related efforts. Musk’s preferred candidates across the country were swamped, losing almost everywhere, including Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio gubernatorial race.

His plans for a buildout of data centers across Texas are especially in doubt after Democrat Gina Hinojosa won a surprise victory over incumbent Greg Abbott in the state’s gubernatorial race.

“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” Musk wrote on X on Wednesday morning, jumping off the results to boost an idea he’s trying to pursue. He quickly followed that with a joke about election interference, writing, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time.”

Musk’s adopted home of Texas has been a hot spot for data centers and data center construction over the last couple of years, with Abbott a strong ally of both tech leaders and Wall Street.

“Amid data center backlash all across the country, Texas was supposed to be an AI oasis, where people would be able to build data centers no matter what was happening in the rest of America,” said Sam Koppelman, the publisher of Hunterbrook Media — an investigative journalism outlet connected to a hedge fund. “This election totally changed that.”

With Democrats taking control of the U.S. Congress, Musk may also be a target for a party looking to pillory tech CEOs — with some Democrats pushing to bring tech CEOs in front of Congress.

“Voters rejected Republicans in part because they were bought and paid for by AI billionaires,” Democratic Representative Greg Casar of Texas said in a statement on Tuesday evening. “Democrats must hold them accountable instead of cashing their checks.”

[From Politico]

I hope that this election leads to a direct decline in those stupid f–king AI data centers, the same centers which NO ONE WANTS. They’re not a hot-button political issue – everyone hates them, no one wants them, they’re the dumbest political issue. As for Musk’s “joke” about “election-interfering space lasers”… like… many people, including me, believe that Musk interfered in the 2024 election. And I do wonder why the midterms were such a different story. Was it because none of the big races were actually that close? Was it because “moderate” Republicans by and large stayed home and weren’t engaged with the election cycle? Did Ukraine’s bombing Russian bot farms really change the election this significantly? Anyway, I really hope that Texas’s new Democratic leaders take out the Musk trash.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.