After Texas' Blue Wave, What Happens to Elon Musk and SpaceX?

A blue wave in Texas has raised fresh questions about the future of Elon Musk and SpaceX in a state the billionaire has spent years making his own. Musk's wager on Texas was personal, political and industrial, and the midterm results now test all three.

Musk moved to the Austin area in 2020 after public disputes with California authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the following six years, he steadily deepened his commitment to the Lone Star State.

In 2021, he increasingly concentrated the Starship program in South Texas, urging SpaceX employees to relocate there and work on the company's future. In March of that year, he began using the name Starbase for the production and launch facilities near the Rio Grande River.

Two years later, in 2023, he built a massive factory east of Austin to manufacture customer terminals and other electronics for the Starlink program. Then, in July 2024, he announced that SpaceX would shift its corporate headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas, citing California's regulatory and political environment as the reason.

The expansion has not slowed. This summer, the company announced that Terafab, described as "the most epic-chip building effort in the world," would be built in Grimes County, Texas. "A vertically integrated factory with more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is planned," the company said. That figure is equivalent to 1,700 American football fields, 15 Pentagons, or three Central Parks.

For a time, Musk's relationship with Texas politicians was a mutual admiration. He repeatedly said he loved the state's political climate, its regulatory environment and its Republican leaders, and they praised him in return. In July, Governor Greg Abbott lauded Musk as "the leading visionary of our time. Thomas Edison. Just like that, maybe even bigger," before interviewing him as a guest host of The Sean Hannity Show.

Then came the midterms. During the 2026 election cycle, Musk went all in on Republicans, investing nearly half a billion dollars in their campaigns through his own America PAC and other organizations, according to The New York Times. Of the estimated $474 million, nearly half went to candidates in Texas.

Despite that spending, the state's elections produced a blue wave. What that political turn means for Musk, whose personal residence, corporate headquarters, launch site and planned factories are now all rooted in Texas, remains an open question.