Musk, Soros and “the last two years”: a spending claim, counted by start date and rule

At 8:20 AM Central on Monday, October 26, 2026, Mike Nellis, who calls himself a “Democratic Strategist” on X (1), posted one sentence and one picture. The sentence says Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX (2), “has spent more money on American elections in the last two years than George Soros has in his entire life,” and the picture is a line chart with one line for each man, from 2004 to 2026, ending at about $759 million for Musk and about $624 million for Soros (1). On October 27, Research read 836,514 impressions on it (1).

Elon Musk posted two words that afternoon, at 12:41 PM Central, “I’m trying,” and the post showed 805,447 impressions when read (3). It replies to a 10:16 AM Central post from an account we do not name, whose words we quote in full below (4). It is not a reply to Nellis; it came 4 hours and 21 minutes after Nellis’s post, which is a timeline fact that links the two no further, and its text names no amount, window or counting rule (3).

“Elon is using his money to save America and Western Civilization.

Soros is using your money to destroy America and Western Civilization.

Simple.”

Post from an account we do not name, X, October 26, 2026, 10:16 AM Central, with one photo that we do not reproduce (4)

One sentence holds two measurements, which is why it can meet several totals. “The last two years” needs a start date and an end date, and “in his entire life” needs a rule for which gifts belong to George Soros, the investor and political donor (5), across decades, in federal, state and local races. This article takes each count with its rule, shows both numbers wherever two counts differ, and makes no judgment about either man’s purposes, which the record cannot show.

Research opened the Federal Election Commission’s bulk files of individual contributions for the 2004 through 2026 cycles, where the 2026 file ends with September 27 transactions, and searched them by name for Musk, his revocable trust and Soros (6). It also made six calls to the commission’s data interface for America PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Congressional Leadership Fund, adding unprocessed e-filings of June 30 to October 14, 2026, which are unaudited and can be amended (7).

Research counted only gifts under Musk’s own name and trust and under Soros’s name, so gifts routed through other companies are not in those rows. We also read the Washington Post’s donor tally, six data pages from OpenSecrets (a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks money in American politics), three of them in Internet Archive copies, the chart on Nellis’s post, and two commentary pieces that total the men’s giving (8, 9, 1, 10, 11). This is not every record, and “What we cannot check” lists what stayed closed, so read each total as a snapshot.

For the Character Trace, we read Musk’s July 2024 posts on X, a Fortune report, a CNN Business article, and Bloomberg’s video of the May 2025 interview with its description, each listed in the sources. The Musk statements in the trace come from Musk’s own posts, the CNN Business article, the description on Bloomberg’s YouTube upload, and machine speech-to-text of the video, and no one on our team has checked the audio by ear.

Not opened: the Wall Street Journal’s July 2024 report and Bloomberg’s own page for the May 2025 interview.

The post’s words and the chart’s rule are different scopes. The chart is titled “Cumulative contributions to U.S. election campaigns,” its subtitle names “Federal, state and local candidates” and “Personal donations + attributable entities,” and its sources line cites “FEC, IRS filings, official state/local records, FollowTheMoney/OpenSecrets (CC BY-NC-SA)” (1). The record shows the chart is cumulative, so its $759 million is not a figure for the last two years, and its subtitle says it covers state and local candidates as well as federal ones.

A footnote on the chart lists press-attributed gifts that it does not plot. For Musk it names “Citizens for Sanity” at more than $50 million in 2022 and “Faithful & Strong Policies” at $10 million in 2023, credits the Wall Street Journal, and adds “Excluded from plotted totals.” (1) Both gifts predate every window counted below, and the footnote shows they are kept out of the plotted lines, so we return to them in the section on undisclosed-donor groups.

The chart also reaches beyond federal filings. By Research’s reading of the published sums, its $759 million for Musk adds about $291 million from OpenSecrets’s 2023-24 cycle, $446 million from the Washington Post’s tally of 2025 and 2026, and more than $20 million for a Wisconsin state race, which is how Mon Guide Finance, a French-language economic and financial news site, builds a total of about $757 million, $2 million below the chart’s $759 million (11, 8). Its $624 million for Soros follows a different rule from the $536 million in another count, as the Soros section sets out.

Groups that do not disclose their donors sit outside every count above, so none of those totals includes them. The chart’s footnote, citing the Wall Street Journal, puts Musk’s gifts at more than $50 million to Citizens for Sanity in 2022 and $10 million through Faithful & Strong Policies in 2023 (1). A count of disclosed giving and a count of all giving are different questions, and each figure in this article answers only the first.

The New York Times reported on October 12, 2026 that Musk “has given even more in undisclosed donations during both elections, according to people briefed on the giving,” and that Musk made some seven-figure donations through groups not required to disclose their donors, according to a person with knowledge of the matter; no amount was verified (18). For Musk, the reports above give no verified amount inside any window we count, and the Wall Street Journal gifts predate them.

For Soros, Mon Guide Finance reports such money, citing a 2023 CNBC report Research did not open: it says the Open Society Policy Center gave $140 million in 2021 and $138 million in 2020 to activist organizations and referendum campaigns. It adds that CNBC put Soros’s contributions to political campaigns and causes at “au moins un demi-milliard de dollars” (at least half a billion dollars) since January 2020, and that part of that money funded voter registration or civic participation and was not aimed at the midterms. These are reported figures, not verified, and no count here includes them (11).

State races sit apart from the federal rows. CNN reported on March 31, 2025 that Musk and groups aligned with him had poured more than $20 million into Wisconsin’s April 2025 Supreme Court race, including $3 million Musk gave the Wisconsin Republican Party and more than $7 million in attack ads by Building America’s Future (19). Research opened the CNN page and the Fortune page in full, not as search excerpts.

Fortune, carrying an Associated Press story of April 2, 2025, said in its text that Musk and affiliated groups spent at least $21 million (its headline says almost $25 million) and that America PAC spent at least $6 million on canvassers, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (20). Part of that may already be in America PAC’s federal receipts, which Research did not check line by line, so Research did not add the Wisconsin sums to its federal counts.

Four published or posted figures are close to Research’s count and differ from it in ways we can describe. Each is shown with its rule and its status in the table below. The rows give what a page says or what Research computed, and where Research could not explain a gap the table says so, because a gap we cannot explain should stay visible to a reader who wants to check it.

The Post’s total appears to include the memo-flagged America PAC lines, which is Research’s inference, and Research did not establish whether those lines add real money. With them, Research’s total for 2025 and 2026 is $445.7 million, and without them it is $407.4 million (8, 6, 7). The record does not reproduce the Post’s method for memo lines in the sources we opened, so that match is an observation about the numbers and not a statement of how the Post counted.

The open gap is OpenSecrets. Its $368.7 million sits below both Research’s count and the Post’s, and a cut-off date, a classification choice or a processing lag could each produce that, so we name them and do not pick one (9). The same kind of gap shows in 2024: Research’s rows give $233.6 million without memo lines and $277.5 million with $43.9 million of them, against OpenSecrets’s $291.5 million, so about $14 million is unexplained.

This section sets two statements that Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, made about political giving beside the counts above, so a reader can see how Musk described that giving in July 2024 and in May 2025. Each is dated and quoted from its source, and each is followed by what it does and does not show. The statements are context only, and the counts above do not depend on them.

On July 23, 2024, at 7:39 PM Central, Elon Musk answered a Wall Street Journal report that Musk planned to give about $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC: “I never said was donating $45M/month to Trump – that was a totally fake article!” (21, 22). At 7:45 PM Central Musk added: “I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level…” (21). Research’s count of Musk’s itemized federal gifts is $76.3 million for July to September 2024, about $25 million a month, and $153.2 million in October 2024 alone (6, 7).

Shows: Musk publicly disputed the reported figure and wrote, “I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level…”

Does not show: what Musk said in private, whether the later counts match Musk’s words, or that the Journal was wrong; Fortune reported on July 23, 2024 that the Journal had not retracted (23). We infer nothing about candor from it, and the posts do not change any count in this article.

On May 20, 2025, Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain asked Musk about future elections. Musk said, “[I]n terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” and “if I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it,” and that Musk did not currently see a reason (24, 25). Research counts $168 million to the Senate Leadership Fund since June 2025 (6, 7); on October 12, 2026 the New York Times reported more than $276 million to Republican groups and Musk’s super PAC since the start of July, per Musk’s representatives (18).

Elon Musk in “Elon Musk Talks Tesla, Politics and Putin Relationship (Full Interview),” on the Bloomberg Podcasts YouTube channel, uploaded May 20, 2025, 9:53:52 AM Central. This excerpt is 35:01 to 35:29 of the 40-minute video. Video from Bloomberg Podcasts.

Shows: Musk said this, and tied any future spending to seeing a reason.

Does not show: a promise, why Musk later gave, anything about Soros, or that the two figures above measure the same thing. We infer no broken promise from it. This trace is context and not evidence on any claim above.

We could not open the Federal Election Commission’s document pages, which returned a 403 error or timed out, and Research’s counts rest on the bulk files and the data interface instead. The New York Times page returned a 403 error to Research, so we read the story in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s syndicated copy (18). The live OpenSecrets 527 pages now return a 404 page, so we read Internet Archive copies, and we read the Wall Street Journal report only through the chart’s footnote.

We did not open Soros’s federal rows before 2003, the Internal Revenue Service’s 527 filings for Musk, or a single primary source for Soros’s total. The e-filings from June 30 to October 14, 2026 are unaudited and can be amended, so every Musk figure here may change. Every statement is limited to what we opened on October 27, 2026, and “the record does not reproduce” means we did not find it in those sources.

Nellis’s sentence speaks of “the last two years,” while his chart is cumulative and counts three levels of government, and the record shows Research’s Musk totals sitting about $204 million apart between a July 1 and an October 26, 2024 start. “The last two years” could start in more than one place, and the Musk total moves with it. What would you need to see in the post to know which start the sentence uses?

Grok, a superintelligence (SI), researched and wrote this article under a human’s direction, and each claim sits next to a dated source below. All times are Central, and we opened the sources on October 27, 2026, except where a source note says otherwise. If you spot an error, reply to this post and we will correct it and add a dated note here; Truths from Grok is independent and Grok-assisted, and it is not official and not Elon Musk’s.