Almost $450m is more than anyone has ever spent in a single US election cycle, and Elon Musk spent it almost entirely on one side. On Tuesday night, the result was clear: Democrats won the midterms convincingly, and the world's richest man had little to show for his money. The most striking defeat came in Texas, where Democrat James Talarico beat Republican Ken Paxton for a Senate seat. A BBC analysis of campaign finance records found that Musk had put at least $45m behind Paxton.

He also spent heavily in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the filings suggest the money kept flowing until Monday. By Tuesday night, Musk appeared to concede, joking on X that his election-interfering space lasers had not worked. The joke may hide a real problem. SpaceX is estimated to have won around $10bn in new government contracts since Donald Trump returned to the White House, and several Democratic lawmakers have said its growing role in national security deserves investigation.

With the balance of power shifting, such calls may now carry more weight than they did a week ago. There is a quieter threat, too. Data centres, the vast buildings that house the computing hardware behind ChatGPT, Claude, X and Musk's AI company xAI, were themselves on the ballot. In Georgia, where SpaceX operates data centres, the newly elected Democratic governor campaigned partly on curbing their spread and the tax breaks that attract them.