Elon Musk and Donald Trump at a Tesla event on the White House South Lawn, March 2025. Official White House photo by Molly Riley (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
By Dr Blessing Vava
“We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas.”
James Talarico said it in his victory speech after defeating Ken Paxton, the Senate candidate backed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. By mid-October, Musk had contributed more than US$445 million to federal political committees during the election cycle, and in the final four weeks of the Texas race Republicans outspent Democrats on advertising by more than two to one, according to CNN.
The result exposed the limits of that financial advantage, although it is not quite the story of an underdog defeating billionaire money that it first appears.
For Africa, the question is how such influence actually works, and what enables voters to resist it. Campaign spending buys exposure, recommendation systems shape visibility, and platform rules govern access to audiences. None of them guarantees electoral loyalty, but each deserves scrutiny long before polling day, especially when a platform owner is also financing candidates.
The Illusion of Purchased Loyalty
Trump’s relationship with technology billionaires belongs at the centre of this discussion. Because their businesses have a stake in government contracts and regulatory decisions, their political support deserves scrutiny alongside the access they receive.
Wealthy supporters can be dangerously reassuring company for a president. Their businesses may thrive while households struggle, and their enthusiasm can easily obscure how poorly government is responding to ordinary concerns.
Leaders start taking voters for granted when they assume publicity can overcome dissatisfaction. My reading of the American results is that Trump and his allies placed too much faith in their ability to dominate political debate, while voters increasingly judged them on the cost of living and the administration’s record. Early CBS exit polls put Trump’s approval among surveyed voters at 38 per cent, and more voters held negative views of the economy than two years earlier.
Michigan’s senator-elect, Abdul El-Sayed, exposed the gap between campaign rhetoric and everyday life. Answering attacks on his identity, he told supporters: “My name and my faith aren’t the reason you can’t afford your gas.” He had also openly challenged the technology industry. An October campaign advertisement declared: “Big AI is spending big against me, because I’m for taking them on.”
Musk’s own record shows how conspicuous intervention can backfire. During Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election, he appeared at a rally and handed out two US$1 million cheques, yet his preferred candidate, Brad Schimel, lost to Susan Crawford. Reuters later reported that Musk’s involvement helped energise opposition turnout. His visibility had simply given opponents someone to organise against.
Talarico, for his part, was hardly short of money: his campaign had raised US$146 million by 14 October, according to CNN. He combined those resources with an appeal centred on living costs and concentrated power, while Paxton’s own political liabilities gave dissatisfied voters further reason to look elsewhere. African challengers should study that combination of credibility, organisation and everyday concerns, rather than assume that confronting billionaires is itself a winning strategy.
The results reveal the limits of campaign spending more clearly than those of algorithms. A defeat cannot tell us whether recommendation systems quietly favoured a candidate or narrowed his losing margin, and Musk’s setbacks do not mean the technology industry as a whole has lost influence.
Brazil: Before and After the Count
Lula’s campaign offers a practical lesson in digital mobilisation. Three weeks after losing the first round by 2.2 million votes, he won the runoff, a comeback that EL PAÍS reports no Brazilian candidate had managed before. EXAME reported that André Janones ran a WhatsApp channel with 10.8 million followers, which distributed videos and asked supporters to boost hashtags and recruit others. Supporters were also told not to engage with opponents’ posts, so as not to increase their visibility. They were being organised to shape distribution, not merely to consume content.
Scale did not require deception. When the fact-checking agency Lupa reviewed 721 of the channel’s messages, it found no misinformation about Flávio Bolsonaro, while fact-checkers counted 17 false or distorted posts in the rival channel run by his supporters. African movements can learn from that, provided they build accountable supporter networks, tie online activity to organising on the ground and never mistake virality for persuasion.
The campaign also had to contend with the platforms themselves. According to EL PAÍS, Meta was suppressing the campaign’s posts, a problem attributed to technical faults. Without transparency, no campaign can easily tell a technical fault from a deliberate restriction.
Lula won the presidential runoff with 51.79 per cent of valid votes against Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.21 per cent, a margin of approximately 4.4 million votes.
After the result, Musk amplified a calculation questioning the outcome and wrote: “Math doesn’t add up.” UOL reported that the calculation failed to account for the increase in valid votes between rounds.
There is an arrogance in treating a result as suspect simply because it defies one’s expectations, particularly when the arithmetic behind the doubt is incomplete. Every result should be open to legitimate challenge, but the fame of the person raising the allegation is no substitute for evidence.
Brazil’s electoral authority published a tool showing how the count developed, allowing citizens and journalists to check claims independently, and the Carter Center’s expert mission commended the administration of the runoff. Measures like these help settle what happened when influential voices dispute an outcome.
South Africa’s dispute with Musk over Starlink concerns connectivity rather than campaign messaging, but it exposes a related problem: how governments regulate companies whose owners also wield political influence. Licensing conditions should be debated openly and applied consistently, and the same principle should govern electoral platforms. Neither commercial importance nor presidential connections should place a provider beyond public scrutiny.
Zambia’s August election showed how fragile such principles become under pressure. After the commission suspended tabulation amid violence at counting centres, EU observers said the transparency of the tabulation process “deteriorated significantly”, even though formal procedures were in place.
Practical Safeguards
Electoral commissions should publish polling-station returns, correction logs and reconciliations between local results and national totals, so that observers can trace exactly how the declared outcome was assembled. Public procedures with platforms should cover impersonation, false voting instructions and account suspensions, with explanations for decisions and meaningful appeals.
Independent scrutiny also requires records showing who financed political advertisements, whom campaigns intended to target and which audiences actually received them. Researchers should examine these alongside moderation decisions and campaign declarations, with safeguards for personal information, and disclosure must extend to the agencies, influencers and third parties through which campaign money flows.
Universities, newsrooms and civil society can investigate coordinated deception and test safeguards in African languages. Election observers should examine these conditions alongside voting and counting.
These protections must apply equally to opposition candidates, citizens and incumbents. Independent enforcement and judicial review are essential, because governments can readily use rules against deception to silence legitimate criticism.
The starting point will differ from country to country. Where their mandates allow, commissions can publish detailed results, correction logs and complaint procedures themselves. Compulsory disclosure by advertisers and third-party campaigners may require legislation and cooperation with data-protection authorities.
Regional bodies can carry what small countries cannot manage alone. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union can negotiate common requirements with platforms, while networks of electoral authorities, such as the Electoral Commissions Forum of SADC Countries, the ECOWAS Network of Electoral Commissions and the Association of African Election Authorities, can pool technical expertise and share lessons across borders. Domestic institutions, however, must remain responsible for enforcement.
A Changing Landscape
Wealthy donors and technology companies may respond more quietly next time, spreading support across parties, concentrating on particular regulatory decisions or channelling resources through less visible organisations. Electoral defeat may change their methods without substantially diminishing their influence.
AI will make that influence harder to see as persuasive material becomes easier to produce and adapt. Kenya has already had a preview. Africa Check documented a fake Citizen TV broadcast that used genuine footage, cloned voices, and manipulated lip movements to make journalists and a doctor appear to promote a bogus cure; it attracted more than 169,000 views on Facebook. Fact-checkers have also caught genuine footage of a party leader overlaid with an AI-generated voice endorsing a governor aspirant. Repeated deception of this kind may eventually lead citizens to dismiss authentic evidence as well.
America and Brazil have shown that concentrated wealth can be defeated at the ballot box. They have not resolved the unequal power that determines who gets heard, who can compete and whose interests shape regulation. For Africa, electoral resilience means being able to trace campaign money, scrutinise platform decisions and independently verify the count.
The test is whether those safeguards remain enforceable when they inconvenience the president, the largest donor or the platform owner. Citizens should not have to depend on a billionaire’s restraint to exercise their political rights. The rules must hold even when the powerful refuse to accept the result.
About the Author
Dr Blessing Vava is a Zimbabwean academic. His work examines elections, digital politics and democratic accountability in Southern Africa, and he co-authored PARI-Africa’s briefings on Zambia’s 2026 general election. He holds a doctorate in Communication Studies from the University of Johannesburg and writes The Thursday Briefing.
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