Bulwark Takes - Elon Musk Has Dumped $276 Million To Save Republicans

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Right now, save up to 20% on mattresses when you go to https://Casper.com. #adTim Miller gives his take on Elon Musk’s return as the biggest campaign donor of the 2026 midterms, funneling $276 million into Republican groups, including $158 million to help Republicans hold the Senate. After threatening to launch his own political party and breaking with Donald Trump, Musk is back in the GOP’s corner.Tim looks at how Musk’s spending, Trump’s return to X, the administration’s dealings with Russia, and Ukraine’s loss of critical Starlink access point to a renewed alignment between Trump, Musk, and Vladimir Putin. He also looks at how powerful tech executives, including Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and Marc Benioff, are sucking up to with Trump as the tech industry’s influence over politics and public discourse grows.

Hey, everybody. It's Tim Mow from the Bullwork. There are a couple of news items from the last few days that have caught my eye that are concerning on their own. But together paint a, I think, pretty alarming picture of what we have ahead of us here over the next three weeks. So just stick with me as I list them out. One, Donald Trump is posting on Twitter again, like on X.com, not just on his own truth social platform. to Elon Musk, we're now learning as the largest campaign donor this midterm again, after saying he wasn't going to do that after the big, beautiful bill. Trump is trying to finish an illegal deal to purchase diesel from Russia. The Ukraine's military has lost critical access to Starlink right as Russia is escalating their attacks on civilians. So Trump and Elon are working back together again, both on Twitter and on the campaigns. Trump and Putin are working together again on oil deals.

Elon and Putin are working together on killing Ukrainians. So it seems to me what we have here is a coordinated threat from the rogue president, the richest man in the world and the Russian autocrat ahead of the midterms. Do any of you think those are the only things that they're doing together? Because I don't. It's not a conspiracy theory channel. Don't want to speculate about what other shenanigans they might have in mind ahead of the midterms.

But they definitely all seem to be working together as a team again. You know, I am famously Donald Trump and Elon had a falling out. Elon said he was in the Epstein files. Elon's complaints about, you know, the one piece of legislation that they got passed were extensive, both in how much they've increased the debt. He also had some complaints about impact on his businesses, you know, the various provisions in the bill. From a tech standpoint, they didn't think it was particularly good. Do you remember this? Elon was starting the America Party?

But this is something that happened. Like, Elon was going to start at the America party. party ahead of this midterm. And he's going to primary people that were going along with Trump. But instead of doing that, he is, again, I repeat, the biggest campaign donor this midterm to Republicans all across the country. And so when you see that Trump is posting on Twitter again, it's like, it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

You know, if you just scroll down his feed here, he's just posting a lot of the various videos that he's been posting. There's the taxpayer-funded one that you and I are paying for about the Venezuela coup. There's a weird man in the arena, Teddy Roosevelt video. You know, I'm just kind of scrolling down here. There's a lot of black and white. He loves black and white now. I think right because his skin color is not existing in nature.

Tom Holman video, there's some ice. I used to back to the deportation videos. They have one really disgusting video, which is some ice. anti-immigrant, kind of ASMR porn, they're back to doing that a little bit. So okay, I mean, like the content isn't anything particularly noteworthy,

but the scale, the number of posts on X, I mean, it was a competitive business. Like, he had truth social. And it wasn't doing that great as a competitive business, but he had a competitive business. There was a reason why he was exclusively posting on truth. There was a reason why they cut the corrupt deal

with various finance bros that they got early access to his bleats and that they had to have, you know, truth plus plus or whatever it was in order to be able to do market manipulation. There's a reason why he was doing stuff over there, like a personal business reason. To bring it back to Twitter, which has a bigger market share, to me is, again, another piece of evidence of detente. The fact that they're both now aligned with Putin, as Putin escalates this war in Ukraine, with, you know, innocent people dying, with blackouts across Kiev.

And, you know, let's just go through some of the details of what we have here on the Starlink. I mean, this is from the New York Times this week. Ukraine said that its military with no warning had lost some critical access to a military version of Starlink, a pillar of its battlefield communication. Kiev relies on the satellite internet network,

which we pay for what the Pentagon pays for, that led Ukrainian officials and analysts to surmise that restrictions had come from Washington as President Trump is locked in his latest feud with Ukraine's leadership. So you have like Trump and Musk, like working together on that. This is from The Guardian. The restriction just happened suddenly. It happened, again, seemingly coordinated with a launch of Russian ballistic missiles on Ukraine.

There was no warning about the outage coming. and Poland had to come into the mix here. Like they, the Polish foreign minister, Sikorsky went after Musk, you know, saying basically as a European customer, he's watching him. But everybody sees what's happening here. Like it's totally political.

And this is a game in which the lives of innocent Ukrainians are in the hands of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, his tiny hands. because it's not, you know, the front lines. The ballistic missiles are hitting the cities. They're hitting civilians. And, you know, the military, you know, needs, obviously, you know, access. It's something that our guys are reported in the spy have been covering, but, you know,

from a military standpoint. But, you know, they need internet access, you know, both for missile defense for the, you know, drone technology, to go on offense and to Russia, and to have the rug pulled off out of them suddenly while Russia is escalating attacks onto the cities. I don't know any other way to look at this, but to say that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are costing the lives of Ukrainians while Trump and Putin are doing a deal on diesel. Like even though he just signed legislation, you know, the Lindsey Graham legislation that was going to sanction and tariff countries that bought Russian energy.

So something is up. Like something changed. You know, like at some level, obviously something is the same because, you know, Trump and Elon have been sympathetic to Russia throughout, you know, that's the Russia, Russia, Russia thing is real. But like, the degree of the cooperation has increased substantially over the last. week across economic, political, and military verticals. So, like, they're all working together.

You know, the result is there's huge blackout. 600,000 people in Kiev lost access to power. And, you know, I think it's a worthwhile question to say, like, what else are they working on? This message is sponsored by Casper. So, you know there are certain things in life that are worth investing in. In a good night's sleep? Well, that's definitely one of them.

one of them. You cannot be a good night's sleep. I know because I don't get many of them. This podcast is sponsored by Casper. Casper makes reliable, high-quality mattresses designed to deliver consistent, comfortable sleep night after night. And out of 99 mattresses, consumer reports named Casper's The One mattress, it's top-rated, all-foam mattress of 2006. That's a pretty damn big endorsement. If you've been talking about upgrading your bed now's the time, Casper's friends and family sale means you can save up to 20% on a mattress that you deserve. They offer a wide range of mattress types from firm to soft so you can find what works for you. Plus there's a 100-night risk-free trial so you can try it out at home.

100 nights. It's a pretty long time to try out a mattress. Thank you, Casper. And Casper has just launched a brand-new kids' mattress so even the youngest sleepers in your family can get that same comfort and quality. Remember, the day always ends well with Casper. Right now, save up to 20% on mattresses when you go to casper.com. One last time, that's C-A-S-P-E-R.com and save up to 20% on the mattress that you deserve. Let's go back to Elon's midterm engagement here.

Just since the start of July, he's funneled 276 million into Republican groups. By far, the largest known donor. He gave a total of 158 million to Senate Leadership Fund. try to save the Senate majority. He is engaging in some pretty weird and creepy advertising. And I want to show one example of this. I think that the good news here is that this is like bizarre and off-putting and I think likely to backfire.

The bad news is if they're doing creepy shit like this, you know, we don't have full visibility into all of the targeting. doing and you know there might be other more nefarious and effective stuff afoot but let's let's take a look at this video why are they smiling because christopher hasn't made a plan to vote yet they know if voters like you sit this election out they're one step closer to a radical socialist takeover of america christopher don't lose your chance to vote make a plan to vote at the link today again that's a bad ad i don't i don't really see that working but the christopher thing is like they're doing that with that's why it has a weird voice,

Christopher, because like if I was getting this ad, they would target it and it would say, Timothy, you know, just like when I get texts from, you know, random super PACs or campaigns and sometimes they say your name on that.

That's like a little strange, but oftentimes because you signed up for the email list with your name. But like they're, they're doing, you know, this, you know, just using their targeting,

matching the lists, et cetera. But I, and I think that if you're getting a YouTube pre-roll ad, and it was like, Tim, like Elon Musk says vote for this and not socialism. I just think, like, this is kind of the direction that these guys are going. Like, they are, you know, really, I think there's a more, like, the inverse version of that,

you see, which is like voter suppression efforts targeting individual people. Like, that is something that they could be up to. I mean, we've seen in the European elections the way that Russian disinformation and, you know, Russian bots and, you know, totally Russian false news, like getting injected into campaigns. Like, we've been seeing that all across Europe. And I think that, like, this week, one of the other stories that was out there was, like, that Ukraine had hit this data center in Russia. And that was, like, impacting, like, traffic in bot farms.

And I think that that was a little overstated. Like, I think that there are a lot of things happening about why there was some decrease in traffic to some of those terms. But I don't see any evidence that this, you know, that type of, you've kind of bot interference into the discourse is diminishing in any meaningful way, certainly because of that attack.

So if anything, I think that's going to escalate over the next few weeks. You can kind of see it all happening right now, the way they're working together. And I think the other thing is you can see the way that it's, that that, like, axis of evil, that cabal is, expanding out to the other most powerful people in the world, which are these AI executives. And again, similarly to all this, like over the past week, you see a series of things.

There was Beni-Marc Beniof at Salesforce did a post where they're now calling it S-I-Force to suck up to Trump. Satcha Nadella, the Microsoft CEO. He did a post talking about the risks in the superintelligence world. There was a big Sam Altman interview in Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair. of any pharaoh loves all the tech executives or the new establishment now they asked him about trump you know all they did like word rapid fire with famous people um one of them was about down the first one's Donald trump and altman says powerful it's like is he is he powerful right now like you guys are making him powerful uh you know he's he had negative things to say about a lot of other people

when they asked about dario amade over at anthropic his competitor he said pass you know Zuckerberg has been sucking up to Trump recently. When you put all that together, the degree to the control that they have over the discourse, they're engaging in geopolitics. Elon Musk, to such a degree that he's engaging directly in the ability of a free country to protect itself, you know, by shutting off their internet access. I just think that, like, as they see the threats to their power increase, the things that they will do to work together with other nefarious but aligned, to take an AI phrase,

individuals to hold on to that power, it's going to skyrocket. I mean, like they're going to continue to, I think, advance these coordination efforts and use all the things that they have at their disposal, which is significant. When you think about all the tech platforms and then the U.S. government who knows, Russian government and others, they've got a lot of levers they can pull and they're starting to pull them

and we're going to keep an eye on it for sure here over the next few weeks. Again, I'm not sure it's working. We talked about this, Susan Rice. There's a level of this that, like, there's some stupidity in the strategy. And there's tragedy once happening in Ukraine. But I don't know that the Trump-Musk

Batman and Robin routine is going to have the same impact this time. that they did in 2024 for a bunch of reasons, mostly self-inflicted mistakes by Trump. That doesn't mean the threat isn't real. We must be vigilant. And I suspect that there'll be a few more stories that we can throw on this pile here

to talk about the coordination that we're seeing between Putin, Trump, and Musk. So we'll keep an eye on it. Subscribe to the feed. Tell your friends. We'll see you all soon.