17 better ways Elon Musk could have wasted $446 million

One of the basic problems of spending too much time on social media is that you are cooking your brain by reading posts from a pack of attention-seeking lunatics. If your social media of choice is the site formerly known as Twitter, and it is your main source of contact with the outside world, you may delusionally throw away nearly $500 million dollars on midterm elections, just like Elon Musk.

In particular, $47 million of that money from Musk’s America PAC was aimed at defeating Texas Democrat James Talarico, who trounced Musk’s preferred Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, with 55 percent of the vote. Talarico even made Musk’s influence a central part of his campaign ads, with the slogan “Texas is not for sale.”

How did Musk get this so wrong? I blame the bubble of X. My former colleague Casey Newton, who has (with some well-earned shame) slunk back to X, explained that he did so because it was the site that was most influential with the AI crowd. In some sense, this is exactly the problem. The agentmaxxing loons of AI influencing are wildly out of touch with normal people. There is, right now, one very important bipartisan position in the United States, and it is: Fuck a data center.

It’s pretty obvious that the opposition to data centers is a way of making concrete how pissed off most people are with the tech industry, particularly with the gangster tech regulation of late and the constant stream of threats coming from AI companies. These guys have really tied themselves and their AI aspirations to Donald Trump’s sinking ship, and if you’re hanging out on X all the time, that’s impossible to see, not least because the site’s owner, Musk, is shaping the algorithm in ways that make him feel good.

Since Musk seems to have forgotten what it is like to experience joy, or even mild satisfaction, I have taken the liberty to make a list of things he could have bought to get him a better return on his investment. He probably could flip several things on this list for more money, but at minimum he could have gotten a little rush of pleasure from a new purchase:

* Larry Ellison’s private island ($300 million in 2012, $440 million in today’s dollars per CPI calculator) (source)

* 13 Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptails ($32 million) (source)

* 5 The Graff Diamonds Hallucination watches ($55 million, $78 million today) (source)

* The Washington Post ($250 million in 2013, $360 million today) (source)

* 30 Sunseeker 100 yachts (base price $14.6 million) (source)

* 43 Hope diamonds ($300,000 in 1911, about $10.3 million today) (source)

* Ken Griffin’s NYC penthouse ($239.96 million in 2019, $321 million today) (source)

* 76 New Zealand golden visas ($10 million plus $27,000 application fee in NZD, about $5.77 million in USD) (source)

* 44 30-second Super Bowl commercials ($10 million) (source)

* At least 977 rides on Blue Origin’s New Shepard ($450,000) (source)

* Willem de Kooning’s Interchange (~$300 million, ~$400 million today) (source)

* $14.67 gift card to every Texan (~30 million Texans) (source)

* 34 renovations of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ($13.1 million) (source)

* 223,000 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards (at MSRP of $1,999) (source); 60,000 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards (at “globalized normal price” of $7,240) (source)

* 8 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Fantasy Bras (source)

* His very own non-Grok version of The Odyssey (budget $250 million) (source)

* 4 sets of Wachtell, Lipton lawyers from the Twitter takeover suit ($90 million fee) (source)

But hey, at least changing the name of SpaceX’s “Superintelligence” division back to “Artificial Intelligence” is free!

Musk spent last night deleting tweets so he wouldn’t look as stupid as he is. Too bad it’s not as easy to delete other things! Texans were already asking questions about sweetheart deals to benefit Musk, and now there’s a wave of politicians who ran against his money coming into power, including the governor and the attorney general of Texas. That may mean unredacting Gov. Greg Abbott’s Musk emails, for instance — answering some questions about the influence Musk bought with Texas Republicans.

So actually, maybe the best investment on that list would be the dream team of lawyers who clobbered Musk on the Twitter deal — because Musk has a bunch of new enemies in power, and the simplest thing in the world they can do to curry favor with their voters is investigate him. Bet you’d never know that if you spent all your time on X.