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

Sign up for the We the Texans newsletter to receive twice-monthly updates on our year-long initiative dedicated to boosting civic engagement and chronicling how democracy is experienced in Texas.

---

Elon Musk gave $1 million last month to a powerful tort reform group that is one of the main political forces backing Republicans in battleground legislative races this fall, marking the tech mogul’s deepest foray yet into Texas politics.

Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, has emerged recently as a key player in national politics, launching a PAC to support Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and leveraging his social media site, X, to elevate the former president. But Musk’s seven-figure donation to Texans for Lawsuit Reform — one of Texas’ most influential business groups and a central figure in the state’s internecine GOP power struggle — is the first major sign that he is willing to throw his weight around in state politics.

The donation, revealed in campaign finance filings due this week, comes as Musk is deepening his ties to Texas, most notably with his announcement this summer that he would move the headquarters of X and SpaceX from California to Texas. SpaceX already has a presence in the state with a rocket launch facility near Brownsville. Additionally, Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, has been headquartered since 2021 in Austin, where Musk has also filed paperwork through one of his charities to start a new university.

Musk’s donation to Texans for Lawsuit Reform is especially notable because of the group’s poor standing among some of Trump’s key allies in Texas. Known as TLR, the group was once widely heralded on the right for helping Republicans win control of Texas. TLR reshaped Texas’ civil justice system by making it harder to sue businesses, a key priority of business leaders in the 1990s and 2000s, and has continued to pass tort reform legislation in the years since.

But the group has been recently vilified by Attorney General Ken Paxton and his hardline allies, who believe TLR worked behind the scenes to orchestrate his impeachment last year. Paxton and others from the party’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 too much power to Democrats.

TLR insists it had nothing to do with Paxton’s impeachment and has said it supports candidates based on whether they are “philosophically aligned on civil justice issues.”

Paxton and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Phelan’s biggest political rivals, are close 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 four battleground states in a lawsuit that relied on discredited claims of election fraud.

TLR reported donations to several Democratic lawmakers since the start of July, as it has routinely done before, though the vast majority of its money continued to flow to Republicans in contested legislative races.

Musk’s $1 million donation accounted for more than one third of TLR’s $2.9 million haul from July 1 through late September. Miriam Adelson, the owner of the Las Vegas Sands casino empire and a major GOP donor, kicked in $500,000. TLR reported nearly $34 million cash on hand at the end of the reporting period.

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

TLR was a leading promoter of the court system, which the Legislature established last year to hear cases involving large business transactions. Judges are appointed by the governor.

Earlier this year, Musk secretly put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a group that tried unsuccessfully to oust Travis County District Attorney José Garza in the Democratic primary, The Wall Street Journal reported. Musk was the main funder behind the group, Saving Austin, which spent more than $650,000 on ads blasting Garza’s progressive policies, according to the Journal. Musk has been an outspoken critic of progressive prosecutors backed by billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, who has supported Garza and other prosecutors campaigning on overhauling the criminal justice system.