Elon Musk has been monkeying around with the U.S. political system with increasing regularity. Another example of this unfortunate trend presented itself this week, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that the tech billionaire had recently bankrolled an ad drive that sought to oust a liberal District Attorney in Texas. That DA, Democrat José Garza, originally won his seat with the financial help of George Soros, another billionaire. Musk reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an advertising blitz that sought to kick Garza out.
The Journal reports that Musk financially backed a non-profit dubbed Saving Austin, the likes of which circulated droves of fliers, TV ads, and text messages designed to demonize Garza. All told, the organization secretly funded by Musk is said to have spent over $650,000 on the campaign. The Journal cites Federal Communications Commission filings and corporate documents, as well as sources familiar with Musk’s involvement.
The campaign against Garza seems markedly similar in content and tone to the rightwing propaganda that Musk promotes daily on his social media platform X. Much of said propaganda presents liberal politicians as authoritarians and lunatics. “José Garza is filling Austin’s streets with pedophiles & killers,” one of the fliers circulated by the campaign reads. “The next victim could be your loved one.” The fliers even included a grotesque image of a man’s hand covering a child’s mouth, the newspaper notes.
Despite the well-funded scare tactics, the effort against Garza failed. The DA won back his seat with 67 percent of the vote. “The country should take note,” Garza said in an email to the Journal. “MAGA billionaires treat Texas like a petri dish for extremist policy aims, then export their anti-public safety, job-killing, anti-freedom agenda to all fifty states.” He added: “We’ve shown that these extremists can be beaten.”
Gizmodo reached out to Musk via X. We also reached out to Garza’s office.
Musk, one of the world’s richest people, now seems to be leveraging his grotesque wealth to bend the U.S. political system to his will. Musk has been very involved in this year’s U.S. presidential election. In July, it was revealed that Musk had created a Super PAC devoted to re-electing Donald Trump. Musk claimed he planned to spend $45 million a month to support Trump’s re-election (he later went back on that claim). Should his favored candidate win in November, Musk has also been promised a role in the upcoming administration. Trump recently said that he would select Musk to head a “Government Efficiency” task force, a concept that Musk, himself, is said to have conjured.
Musk has framed his political activity as a personal effort to save the world from deranged, tyrannical liberals. On X, he has perpetually demonized the Democratic Party, and has referred to presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a “communist.” The billionaire has also made a lot of hay about “free speech” and “censorship,” claiming that one of the reasons that he bought Twitter in 2022 was to protect personal expression from authoritarian government overreach. However, a report last year claimed that Musk’s version of the platform had actually been more responsive to government requests, not less.
Most of Musk’s tangles with government regulators seem to have less to do with the rights of the users on his platforms and more to do with his own business interests. Musk recently referred to regulators in Australia as “fascists” due to the fact that the nation is currently mulling a bill that would institute fines for web platforms that allow the spread of disinformation on their sites. Musk’s website is notably overrun by disinformation. It’s ultimately really hard to have sympathy for a guy who is worth $200 billion yet treats the occasional regulatory inconvenience as if it were some sort of authoritarian boot on his neck.
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