Elon Musk Turns His Eye—and His Wallet—Towards Wisconsin

For a kleptocrat with endless ambition, the Wisconsin Supreme Court election is a bargain buy

By Adav Noti

Like any savvy businessman, Elon Musk knows a bargain when he sees one.

In 2024, Musk poured an unprecedented $288 million into President Trump’s campaign. It was this blizzard of spending—mostly funneled through a super PAC, with help from the Federal Election Commission—that positioned Musk to call in his chips and seize control of the entire United States executive branch once Trump took office.

There are plenty of indications that Musk’s federal investment is paying off in the form of financial favors from the government he now runs. But a presidential election is nonetheless relatively expensive to purchase. The lower-profile elections of 2025 present the world’s richest man with opportunities for election-buying with a much smaller down payment.

One of the few nationally significant elections on the calendar in 2025 is for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. That court has become Musk’s next takeover target.

In recent years, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has played an outsized role in deciding major legal issues relating to elections. When President Trump took his efforts to overturn the 2020 election to Wisconsin—where Joe Biden had eked out a victory by less than 1%—the state supreme court rejected Trump’s attempt to throw out 200,000 votes and affirmed the lawfulness of the election.

Similarly, the court in 2024 struck down one of the most aggressive, anti-voter gerrymanders in the nation. Before the court acted, Wisconsin voters had spent more than a decade with large Republican majorities in the state legislature, even though Wisconsin is the epitome of a 50/50 “purple” state. The court’s ruling struck down the gerrymander and required state legislators to run in fair districts, returning control of the state government to the people of Wisconsin.

In these and other major decisions, the seven-member court has frequently divided 4-3. Four progressive-leaning justices currently form the majority; one of those majority seats—and therefore the political balance on the court—is up for election in 2025.

A question endemic in this and every such contest is whether it is unwise for states to choose their supreme court justices through elections. To perform their role as neutral arbiters of law, these judges should be insulated from political pressures, not products of them. But about half the states have chosen to elect their justices, and thereby to provide a mechanism for wealthy special interests to try to capture such elections.

Where they do happen, state supreme court elections have historically been low-profile affairs; they do not generally attract a great deal of voter attention. As such, a little bit of campaign spending can go a long way in defining candidates and issues—much more so than in high-profile elections where voters have other sources of information.

Enter Elon Musk. Using both a super PAC and a “dark money” organization (i.e., a shell corporation created to finance campaigns without financial transparency), Musk has already spent more than $5 million on the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race. This includes roughly $3.4 million in advertising and another $1.75 million in field operations. And the race is only now starting to heat up; in the end, Musk could end up singlehandedly spending more on this election than has ever been spent total on any judicial election in American history.

Five million dollars—or even fifty million—is, of course, pocket change for Musk. But for a down-ballot race to attract seven-figure spending from a single, out-of-state individual should be setting off alarm bells.

Why is Musk doing this? Certainly he has business interests at stake, such as in Tesla’s lawsuit against the state of Wisconsin seeking an exemption from the state’s ban on car manufacturers operating their own dealerships. That suit is likely to be decided by the state supreme court.

But the most probable reason Musk is investing in the Wisconsin Supreme Court is to stack the deck for future elections. Musk himself has suggested as much. If the candidate Musk is supporting for the seat wins, the court will be positioned to reverse the pro-voter rulings of the last several years and instead impose restrictions on voter registration and ballots to make certain votes easier to discard. Even more troubling, the court might then be willing to do in 2026 or 2028 what it refused to do in 2020: throw out the results of a duly conducted election on purely partisan grounds.

This is the playbook that was recently followed in North Carolina, where a state supreme court election brought in two new justices who immediately and proactively overturned precedents protecting voters, elections, and fair campaign competition.

Elon Musk is a clever person. As he guides American federal government into a new gilded age, he knows that states—and ultimately voters—can be major obstacles to the kleptocracy he and Trump are trying to establish.

If buying one state supreme court seat gives voters less power to hold Musk and Trump accountable, from Musk’s perspective, that is a small price to pay.

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Adav Noti is the Executive Director of Campaign Legal Center (CLC).