At a Trump-Vance rally ahead of the 2024 United States election, Elon Musk stood at a podium dressed in all black, including a dark Make America Great Again (MAGA) cap.
"I'm not just MAGA, I'm dark, gothic MAGA," he told the crowd.
It was just one of many appearances Musk made at campaign events for Donald Trump before going on to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency .
Despite the pair's relationship later becoming rocky, the SpaceX CEO was the biggest individual donor in this year's midterm elections — and is now among Trump's key allies contemplating what a surge in Democratic power might mean .
Musk contributed more than US$445 million ($642 million) to Republican candidates, almost triple the amount of the next-highest donor, according to nonpartisan watchdog OpenSecrets.
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The world's richest man backed seven Republican Senate candidates, six of whom lost. The seventh is currently trailing behind the Democratic candidate, with votes still to be counted.
Of the 37 Musk-backed candidates for the House of Representatives, only three have won, with one race still too close to call as of Thursday afternoon.
Musk joked on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that his "election-interfering space lasers didn't work this time".
SpaceX and Tesla, both owned by the world's first trillionaire, have plummeted in value on the US stock market as traders anticipate greater restrictions on his companies.
As Republicans and their allies take stock of generational election defeats , some of them are lashing out.
On Thursday, US vice president JD Vance posted a lengthy breakdown of the results on X. He said voter turnout had not been a problem for Republicans — it was instead who they voted for.
"The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026," he said.
"The real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone."
Vance said a pollster had asked Trump 2024 voters what would bring them back, and the respondents highlighted four actions: ending the war in Iran , focusing on cost of living, putting America first and changing the country's relationship to Israel .
"The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night," he said.
Rumours of US secretary of state Marco Rubio resigning from the Trump administration have swirled post-midterms, with insiders telling the Independent they expect him to compete against Vance for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. The White House and US state department had refuted these reports.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who is serving his second and final term and will finish in January, told a press conference that Republicans were fighting "yesterday's battle".
"To call it a wave, I don’t think would be fully accurate," he said.
"It’s the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States, blue states, red states, everything in between. And the one state that was able to hold the line and withstand that is right here in the free state of Florida."
DeSantis described fellow southern state Texas as "the crown jewel of Republican politics", where Republican losses would impact the next decade and beyond.
The state elected James Talarico as the first Democratic senator in decades and Gina Hinojosa as their first Latina governor.
In a nearly 2,000-word X post, Texas senator Ted Cruz agreed the state was feeling the biggest consequences.
"In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election," he said.
"2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an a--kicking."
Former US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem had another theory on X.
"We were too successful the first year of the Trump administration," she wrote.
