Elon Musk, who implored his army of Twitter followers to vote Republican in the 2022 midterms, did not vote in the election, state records show.
The billionaire is registered in Cameron County, Texas, where his rocket company SpaceX has a launch base and development site. Musk lists a modest home as his residence, though he has been known to spend time at other luxury properties.
Musk’s political advocacy accelerated last spring, around the time he was maneuvering to acquire Twitter. “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican,” he tweeted in May.
Later that month, he added, “Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November.”
Then, in June, Musk announced that he had voted for Republican Mayra Flores in the special election in Texas’ 34th Congressional District. Flores, who won the race, had been accused of spreading the QAnon conspiracy on social media and had baselessly tried to blame the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots on left-wing activists. (She later deleted some of the comments and said she did not support QAnon.)
“First time I ever voted Republican,” Musk declared at the time. “Massive red wave in 2022.”
He again tried to rally support for the GOP before the November elections. “Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” he tweeted on Nov. 7. Musk has separately insisted that he identifies as a centrist who supports “the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party.”
Ultimately, Republicans narrowly recaptured the House, failing to deliver the forecasted red wave. Flores lost her re-election bid by more than 10,000 votes.
State and local records show that Musk did not vote for her—or anyone. He did vote during Flores’ race in June, records show, and also previously cast an absentee ballot in the 2020 elections.
“Based on our records, we do not have any indication that Mr. Musk participated in the November 2022 Election in Cameron County,” the county’s election administrator told The Daily Beast.
The official added that Musk could not have voted in another county, since that would have triggered the cancellation of his initial registration.
An official in the Texas Secretary of State’s Office confirmed that Musk is only registered to vote in Cameron County, noting that any changes would show up in state databases. The office’s records also showed that Musk did not vote in the midterms.
That doesn’t mean the billionaire has been politically neutral. Shortly after acquiring Twitter in late October, he tweeted—then deleted—a link to a fringe conspiracy about the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
More recently, Musk released internal Twitter documents in a spectacle dubbed the “Twitter Files,” which purportedly showed a conspiratorial effort by the platform’s staffers to suppress information about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election. More realistically, the documents showed that Twitter’s employees were conflicted about how to address the story, which many believed may have been ginned up as an act of foreign electoral interference. (Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, has acknowledged it was a mistake to censor the allegations.)
Musk has continuously engaged with right-wing Twitter users in recent weeks. And if there were lingering doubts about his political leanings, on Dec. 11, he attacked Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who helped steer the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he tweeted.
The billionaire did not immediately respond to requests for comment on his voting record.
