On September 2026, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk.
When Musk posted “Well done !” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks, posting : “If we take on responsibility here, I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation. Germany would then once again be a place worth investing in. Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt !”
Jon Henley of the Guardian noted that right-wing leaders across Europe celebrated the outcome, including ousted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who called the election results “a huge night for Germany and Europe,” adding : “Buckle up. This is just the beginning.”
Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 U.S. elections, putting around $290 million into the 2024 election to help elect President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. On August 28, Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he considered investing at least $100 million to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.
Since that meeting, Musk has plowed money into the Texas Senate race to support Texas attorney general Ken Paxton against Democratic nominee James Talarico. According to Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times, Musk’s investments—many through political action committees—target Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as House races in at least California, Wisconsin, and Washington.
Musk’s open attempt to buy elections for the Republicans should be bigger news, not only because of the political power his money has given to one man, but also because of what his behavior says about the MAGA administration’s ideology and its goals.
After supporting President Donald Trump in 2024, Musk appeared to become the head of the Department of Government Efficiency—the administration was coy about who actually held that title—where he worked to slash government spending. On February 3, he posted on his social media : “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk called USAID—the United States Agency for International Development—“a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America.”
In July 2026, Ari Daniel, David Augustine, Kazeem Olawale Nasiru, and Lameck Nyagudi of NPR reported on a study by Boston University infectious disease modeler Brooke Nichols that estimated more than 700,000 people had died from the sudden stop in USAID funding, including more than half a million children in developing countries.
And yet, for all his talk about slashing government expenditures, Musk’s DOGE did not appear to save much. Emilio Perez Ibarguen of Politico reported in August, when DOGE officially ended, that a report by the Government Accountability Office found that the savings it claimed were in large part exaggerated or couldn’t be corroborated.
Meanwhile, government contracts continued to flow to Musk’s businesses. As Desmond Butler, Trisha Thadani, Emmanuel Martinez, Aaron Gregg, Luis Melgar, Jonathan O’Connell, and Dan Keating reported in the Washington Post in February 2025, Musk himself has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in history, taking in at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the course of more than 20 years. Once he was in power in Trump 2.0, government investigations into those businesses ended.
The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires. In July, economist Paul Krugman noted a growing backlash against those billionaires. A poll by UMass Amherst found that 58% of Americans think billionaires are a threat to democracy, and 45% of them say the U.S. is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” As Krugman noted, only 28% of those polled disagreed.
Krugman pointed out that wealth has been concentrating at the top of the U.S. economy for decades, so the growing wave against that concentration of wealth appears to be driven by those like Musk and President Donald Trump himself, who has flaunted his use of taxpayer money for his own interests while dismissing the pain of regular Americans.
There is, in fact, increasing pushback against the world Musk and President Donald Trump are trying to put into place instead of liberal democracy. In the U.S., the growing opposition to data centers, which seems to represent anger at the very wealthy tech bros who want to call the shots, is perhaps a sign of the direction the wind in the U.S. is blowing.
Whether that popular pressure can withstand the extraordinary amounts of money Musk and other right-wing billionaires are pouring into the midterms is unclear. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that Musk is funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government.
Instead, Musk’s campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status, among other information.
Legum reports that the privacy policy of the website “allows [Musk’s super PAC] America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.” America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”
A new documentary about Musk by filmmaker Alex Gibney argues, as Steven Zeitchik of the Hollywood Reporter put it, that Musk is “a dangerous huckster [who] is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data.” The documentary, called Musk, notes that, under Musk, DOGE had access to federal IT systems and, as Zeitchik recalls, a whistleblower warned that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive data from the Social Security Administration.
Zeitchik reports on the onscreen comments of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” who said : “It’s fairly clear to me that President Donald Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
