Musk's America PAC Is Spending $100 Million on Anti-Trans Senate Ads

Elon Musk’s America PAC has committed $100 million to Senate races in the closing weeks of the midterms, and a striking share of it is going into ads about transgender people. The spend covers television, digital advertising and a social media push across the platforms Musk owns and the ones he doesn’t, and it was first reported by Axios on 9 September.

The targets are James Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Josh Turek in Iowa, Mary Peltola in Alaska and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Musk is also funding ads in New Hampshire and Maine, though those do not appear to be about trans people.

What the ads say

They are, as Erin in the Morning reported, built to a formula: grainy high-contrast footage, ominous scoring, a claim delivered flat. The ads assert that Talarico “believes there are six genders.” They say Brown put “the trans agenda ahead of Ohio’s values” and backs “men in women’s sports.” They say Turek “voted to spend our tax dollars on sex change surgeries for children.” They say Peltola wants “your daughter to share a bathroom with a man,” and that El-Sayed peddles “sex changes for minors.”

These are running on broadcast and on Google, Instagram and Facebook. Several are catalogued in AdImpact’s public tracking and in Meta’s ad library, which is worth knowing if you want to look at the actual creative rather than take anyone’s characterisation of it.

Why the concentration is notable

The interesting data point here is not the dollar figure — Musk has spent at this scale before — but the composition. AdImpact, which tracks political advertising across markets, told Axios that the PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking precisely because trans content has been a much less prominent theme in Republican Senate advertising for most of this cycle.

In other words, this is not a continuation of the campaign’s existing message. It is a late substitution.

Axios’s Mike Zapler noted the obvious tension: on its face, the strategy sits at odds with what voters say they want to hear about. Pew Research Center polling in July found economic concerns dominating the midterm landscape, with trans and LGBT issues barely registering as a voter priority. The counter-argument inside Republican circles is memory rather than data: the “Kamala is for they/them” ads in 2024 are widely believed on the right to have been among the most effective spots of that cycle, and the assumption that lightning can be summoned twice is doing a lot of work here.

The capitulation problem

Here is the part that should concern Democratic strategists more than the ad buy itself.

Several of the candidates being attacked had already moved right on trans issues. Sherrod Brown ran an ad in 2024 that leaned on anti-trans framing and footage of swimmer Lia Thomas, in what looked like an attempt to inoculate himself against exactly these attacks. Josh Turek has issued a statement opposing the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports, and his campaign has said he opposes “taxpayer-funded sex changes.”

They are being attacked anyway, in the same terms, with the same footage, as if none of it had happened.

That is not an accident or a failure of message discipline on the attacker’s side. It is how the tactic is designed to work. Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project once told CNN that the sports issue “was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues.” The point was never to win a specific policy argument about swimming. The point was to establish that trans people are a legitimate subject of attack, and then to keep moving the line. A candidate who concedes ground on sports has not bought protection; they have confirmed that the ground is available.

There is a countervailing data point worth noting. In Massachusetts, Representative Seth Moulton left his House seat for a Senate run after an early and much-criticised pivot on trans issues, and lost to incumbent Ed Markey. Polling in that race suggested voters were significantly less likely to back a candidate who adopted anti-trans positions. One race is not a trend, but it is at least a counterexample to the reflex.

The candidate who isn’t taking the bait

Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in Michigan has responded differently. El-Sayed, a progressive with a background in health care whose insurgent run has drawn comparisons to Zohran Mamdani’s in New York, declined to engage when Fox News host Jesse Watters tried to draw him into a fight about trans rights last month.

His spokesman Cole Wozniak was similarly unbothered by the ad buy. “It’s no surprise that the world’s first trillionaire would be trying to buy a Senate seat,” Wozniak said in a statement to local press, adding that “Michiganders will see right through this” and that the campaign would stay focused on getting money out of politics, cost of living, and Medicare for All.

Whether that holds under $100 million of pressure is an open question, and the answer will be visible in November rather than now. But it is at least a strategy, as opposed to a flinch.

What to watch

Musk’s involvement in this cycle has been building since the summer — Axios and the New York Times both reported plans for a major America PAC push in July and August — and the advertising is only part of it. Mailers and door-knocking operations are expected to follow.

For trans Americans, the practical effect of $100 million in saturation advertising is not limited to who wins these five races. Ad campaigns of this scale function as a form of mass communication about who is and isn’t an acceptable presence in public life, and they run in living rooms where trans kids are sitting. That cost lands regardless of the outcome on election night.

The races themselves are close enough that the spend may well matter. Whether it matters in the direction Musk intends is the thing nobody can tell you yet.