A New York Times list of the 20 biggest midterm donors, posted on X on 1 November by Times reporter Teddy Schleifer, puts Elon Musk first at $445.6 million. By our arithmetic, donors from tech, AI and crypto account for $835.4 million, or 43.0%, of the $1,945.0 million the 20 entries add up to.
Musk alone is 22.9% of that total. Without him, the tech, AI and crypto names come to $389.8 million, or 20.0%. The three crypto entries add up to $181.6 million, or 9.3%, by our arithmetic.
Business Pill · Grid Cost Allocation Explained
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on who pays for grid upgrades. It teaches the general idea only and says nothing about the donors in this piece.
The key insight: By our arithmetic, tech, AI and crypto donors hold 43.0% of the $1,945.0 million that the New York Times top 20, as posted on X, add up to, and 20.0% once Elon Musk is set aside.
The figures here are from the three screenshots of the list attached to the post. After Musk, the list ranks Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein at $150 million, the group One Nation at $137.9 million, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz at $116.4 million and Jeff Yass at $110.4 million.
Further down are Ripple Labs and Chris Larsen at $73.1 million, Coinbase at $55.3 million, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss at $53.2 million, Greg and Anna Brockman at $50 million and Reid Hoffman at $41.8 million. The Times labels Ripple and Coinbase “special interest”.
The Times describes Andreessen and Horowitz, along with their firm, as “aiming to shape regulations on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence”. Of the Brockmans it writes that they “have said they are motivated solely by American competitiveness on A.I.” Al Jazeera separately reported on 1 November that “Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave $446m”.
The 20 biggest midterm donors and their amounts, from a New York Times list posted on X by Times reporter Teddy Schleifer on 1 November 2026. Amounts are read from the screenshots attached to the post. Colours show our classification into tech, AI and crypto, political groups and other donors; the shares are our arithmetic. FourWeekMBA.
How We Counted
We classified seven of the 20 entries as tech, AI or crypto: Musk, Andreessen and Horowitz, Ripple Labs and Larsen, Coinbase, the Winklevoss twins, the Brockmans and Hoffman. Six entries are political groups, at $493.0 million or 25.3%, and the other seven individuals and companies come to $616.6 million, or 31.7%.
The classification is ours, not the Times’s. Mike Bloomberg, whose company sells financial data and news, is counted under other donors, not tech.
The AI Money on the List
Brockman is OpenAI’s president. TechCrunch reported in August that the super PAC Leading the Future is “heavily funded by VCs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, along with OpenAI President Greg Brockman”, and that it “launched with over $50 million in funding”, citing Politico.
An affiliated group, Build American AI, planned ads “advocating for data centers” in Kansas, Ohio and Wisconsin, TechCrunch reported. OpenAI wrote in June that it “does not direct the activities of LTF, or have visibility into their operations”.
The Business Lever: Data Centres on the Ballot
Campaigns and outside groups have spent $173 million on almost entirely negative ads about data centers in this general election, according to AdImpact data reported by Axios, as we reported. Axios reported that AdImpact could not identify any commercial that made an overtly positive case for data centers.
As we read the two together, the AI industry’s biggest donors on this list sit beside an ad market that AdImpact found almost entirely negative on data centres.
The Structural Read
As we read the list, the tech, AI and crypto share rests mostly on one name: Musk is 22.9% of the top-20 total by our arithmetic, and the other six tech, AI and crypto entries together are 20.0%.
As we read the TechCrunch report, two entries on the list, Andreessen and Horowitz and the Brockmans, are also named as backers of Leading the Future, a super PAC whose affiliate planned ads advocating for data centers.
As we read it alongside AdImpact data reported by Axios, that plan sits beside a general-election ad market in which AdImpact could not identify any commercial that made an overtly positive case for data centers.
OpenAI, as quoted by TechCrunch
“OpenAI does not direct the activities of LTF, or have visibility into their operations.”
Three Implications
FOR AI COMPANIES TechCrunch names two of the seven tech, AI and crypto entries, Andreessen and Horowitz and Greg Brockman, as backers of the pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future.
FOR DATA-CENTRE DEVELOPERS AdImpact data reported by Axios counts $173 million of almost entirely negative ads about data centers in this general election.
FOR CRYPTO The three crypto entries add up to $181.6 million, or 9.3% of the top-20 total, by our arithmetic.
The framework says “The structural bottleneck isn’t computing, it’s electrons.”
As we read it, this list adds a political input beside electricity: midterm money from AI and tech donors, set against $173 million of ads about data centers. The framework predates the list and does not discuss it.
We have seen the post and its three screenshots of the list, not the Times article itself, so we cannot say what date range or which filings the totals cover. The screenshots show each entry’s total and label; the recipient details sit behind links we could not open. The list mixes individuals, companies and groups, and the sector shares are our classification.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
Anthropic’s Reality Check, The Capital Squeeze, & The New World Order
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a growthstory. This week it started being priced as a credit story.
A New York Times list posted on X puts Elon Musk first among midterm donors at $445.6 million. By our arithmetic, tech, AI and crypto names are 43.0% of the $1,945.0 million its top 20 add up to, and 20.0% without Musk.
A note on sourcing. The donor list and amounts come from a New York Times list as posted on X by Times reporter Teddy Schleifer on 1 November 2026, with figures read from the three screenshots attached to the post; we did not see the Times article. Al Jazeera, TechCrunch and our earlier reporting on AdImpact data are cited where named. The sector classification, totals and shares are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
