Elon Musk steps into Texas legislative races with $1 million donation to enterprise group

Join the We the Texans e-newsletter to obtain twice-monthly updates on our year-long initiative devoted to boosting civic engagement and chronicling how democracy is skilled in Texas.

Elon Musk gave $1 million final month to a strong tort reform group that is likely one of the most important political forces backing Republicans in battleground legislative races this fall, marking the tech mogul’s deepest foray but into Texas politics.

Musk, the billionaire chief govt of SpaceX and Tesla, has emerged just lately as a key participant in nationwide politics, launching a PAC to help Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and leveraging his social media web site, X, to raise the previous president. However Musk’s seven-figure donation to Texans for Lawsuit Reform — considered one of Texas’ most influential enterprise teams and a central determine within the state’s internecine GOP energy battle — is the primary main signal that he’s prepared to throw his weight round in state politics.

The donation, revealed in marketing campaign finance filings due this week, comes as Musk is deepening his ties to Texas, most notably with his announcement this summer time that he would transfer the headquarters of X and SpaceX from California to Texas. SpaceX already has a presence within the state with a rocket launch facility close to Brownsville. Moreover, Musk’s electrical automotive firm, Tesla, has been headquartered since 2021 in Austin, the place Musk has additionally filed paperwork by considered one of his charities to start out a brand new college.

Musk’s donation to Texans for Lawsuit Reform is particularly notable due to the group’s poor standing amongst a few of Trump’s key allies in Texas. Generally known as TLR, the group was as soon as broadly heralded on the precise for serving to Republicans win management of Texas. TLR reshaped Texas’ civil justice system by making it tougher to sue companies, a key precedence of enterprise leaders within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, and has continued to cross tort reform laws within the years since.

However the group has been just lately vilified by Lawyer Basic Ken Paxton and his hardline allies, who consider TLR labored behind the scenes to orchestrate his impeachment final yr. Paxton and others from the occasion’s rightmost flank have bashed the group for supporting Republican Speaker Dade Phelan and his lieutenants, amid their effort to depose Phelan for backing Paxton’s impeachment and allegedly ceding an excessive amount of energy to Democrats.

TLR insists it had nothing to do with Paxton’s impeachment and has mentioned it helps candidates based mostly on whether or not they’re “philosophically aligned on civil justice issues.”

Paxton and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Phelan’s greatest political rivals, are shut allies with Trump. Patrick has chaired all three of Trump’s presidential campaigns in Texas, and Paxton unsuccessfully challenged Trump’s 2020 election loss in 4 battleground states in a lawsuit that relied on discredited claims of election fraud.

TLR reported donations to a number of Democratic lawmakers for the reason that begin of July, because it has routinely performed earlier than, although the overwhelming majority of its cash continued to stream to Republicans in contested legislative races.

Musk’s $1 million donation accounted for a couple of third of TLR’s $2.9 million haul from July 1 by late September. Miriam Adelson, the proprietor of the Las Vegas Sands on line casino empire and a serious GOP donor, kicked in $500,000. TLR reported practically $34 million money readily available on the finish of the reporting interval.

In August, TLR promoted Musk’s transfer to include Tesla in Texas — shifting from its location in Delaware — as an indication that Texas’ newly created enterprise court docket system marked “a bold move to compete with Delaware as a top destination for business incorporation.”

TLR was a number one promoter of the court docket system, which the Legislature established final yr to listen to circumstances involving giant enterprise transactions. Judges are appointed by the governor.

Earlier this yr, Musk secretly put a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} into a gaggle that attempted unsuccessfully to oust Travis County District Lawyer José Garza within the Democratic main, The Wall Road Journal reported. Musk was the principle funder behind the group, Saving Austin, which spent greater than $650,000 on adverts blasting Garza’s progressive insurance policies, in accordance with the Journal. Musk has been an outspoken critic of progressive prosecutors backed by billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, who has supported Garza and different prosecutors campaigning on overhauling the legal justice system.