Elon Musk gambled $445 million to boost Republicans in midterms and came up short

Elon Musk spent at least USD 445 million in a gambit to help Republicans keep control of Congress, an amount roughly equivalent to someone on a USD 100,000 annual salary saving every penny for 4,400 years.

To the world’s first trillionaire, it’s a pittance, but the billions of dollars’ worth of business his companies do with the federal government is not.

And on Tuesday night, a Republican Party that had embraced Musk lost again and again, ceding control of Congress to a Democratic Party leery of the world’s richest person and keen to put his companies and his work at the Department of Government Efficiency under a microscope.