Sorry Politico, but you can’t just make wild-eyed statements about Elon Musk’s political spending and think you’re so above reproach that no one would bother to fact-check you.
Following news that Musk brought his total 2026 midterm spending to “more than $422 million” with a new $75 million cash dump, Politico senior data reporter Jessica Piper haphazardly proclaimed that “there is no precedent in modern American history for any donor spending as much as he has.” She included no parameters to hedge that statement.
Had she been more careful, she would have avoided critics bringing up contrary evidence, like CNBC’s 2023 reporting that found that America’s most notorious billionaire George Soros’s “contributions to political campaigns and causes since January 2020 to roughly half a billion dollars — at the least — most of it steered through dark money nonprofit groups and going largely toward political causes aligned with the Democratic Party.” And that’s not even counting the $103 million Soros has spent on the 2026 midterms so far.
In essence, conservatives have been dealing with the liberal “precedent” for political spending for years, and somehow it’s considered a phenomenon just because the world’s richest man just discovered politics in the past two years or so. Oh but wait, Piper might protest that Musk’s spending over the past two cycles he was involved in together amounts to roughly $712 million, dwarfing Soros’s total spending since 2020. But this would still cause Piper to step on another rake, because she would have to ignore liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg spending $1 billion on his own 2020 campaign and the conjoining $322 million total he spent on outside groups (the overwhelming majority of which went to Democrats) just between 2020 and 2026 election cycles, according to Open Secrets data and news reports of his involvement in 2026.
That’s over $1.32 billion in total political spending just from Bloomberg effectively donating to himself and others.
Recall in 2020 that Bloomberg filmed himself cringely promoting “Big Gay Ice Cream” and treating it like a campaign flex.
Anytime I hear @MikeBloomberg getting involved in politics again, all I can think of is him cringely pushing "Big Gay Ice Cream" like it was some sort of campaign flex in 2020. 😂 https://t.co/HAqL2MLKmi
— Joe Vazquez (@JV3MRC) October 23, 2026
Oh, but we’re not done. Not even counting his outside spending, liberal billionaire Tom Steyer spent roughly $558 million collectively just to buy both the 2020 presidential election and the 2026 California gubernatorial election for himself. But no one would remember any of this reading Piper, who parroted how “Democrats have looked to make his money a campaign issue: Talarico recently responded to an attack from Musk on the Musk-owned X social media site by saying that there was ‘deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.’”
Well, does the same standard apply when billionaires simultaneously try to buy political office for themselves? No one knows, because Piper didn’t bother mentioning Bloomberg or Steyer at all.
“There is no precedent in modern American history for any donor spending as much as [Musk] has?” Really Piper? You could have at least tried to be a bit more careful with your wording so you wouldn’t have made an absolute fool of yourself.
