Elon, just living by the sword I guess. Photo from Wikipedia. Image by author.

THE REPUBLIC OF SOCIAL MEDIA ONCE KNOWN AS TWITTER (The Daily Whatever Press) — Last week, Elon Musk — first trillionaire (JFC, he’s a trillionaire), owner of the platform he posted it on, and reigning world champion of buying American elections — read a Politico story about Democrats maybe investigating him next year and responded like a man with a deeply regulated nervous system. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” he wrote on Twitter, and yes, we will always call it that.

The richest man in human history has announced he’s going to find out “who is really pulling the strings,” and I would pay real money to be there when he finally gets to the bathroom mirror.

Then he threatened retaliation, warning that anyone picking a fight with him should understand that he will “find out who is really pulling the strings” and come for them, too, not just their puppets.

Fun Sunday-school fact: “live by the sword” comes from Jesus telling Peter to put his sword away. Elon read it as a dare.

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So what horrors are these Democrats threatening to visit upon him? Questions. They want to ask him questions. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on House Oversight, told Politico the committee has “a lot of questions” about Musk’s time running DOGE. Seattle’s own Pramila Jayapal — my representative, go Pramila! — said the corruption around Musk comes in a lot of different flavors. Zoe Lofgren called the conflicts of interest “astounding,” which is congressional for “holy shitballs.”

And the questions write themselves. DOGE pushed out more than 250,000 federal workers, sat on money Congress had already appropriated, and got its grubby hands on sensitive government data. Democrats on Ways and Means want answers about alleged DOGE-related data theft from Social Security. The Government Accountability Office found DOGE overstated its savings. Then there are the federal contracts flowing to SpaceX, and the conflicts of interest stacking up around SpaceX and Tesla like empties around a frat-house couch.

When my daughters were in middle school, getting caught digging through somebody else’s private stuff cost you your phone for a week. Elon dug through America’s Social Security data and got a National Medal of Science, which Trump handed him earlier this month. Love that for him. Love that for all of us.

Whoever he meant by “puppets,” look at who’s actually on the list of meddlers. Jayapal. Lofgren, who has been in Congress since 1995. Oregon’s Maxine Dexter, who wants to dig into the contracts. Elected women with real oversight power and fully functioning brains of their own. Every woman who has ever held power in this country has heard the “who’s really behind her” bit, from Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 to your local school board. It was bullshit then. It’s extremely expensive bullshit now.

Because if we’re hunting for strings, they’re not hard to find. Musk has now spent more than $442 million on this midterm cycle — $445 million by Bloomberg’s count — more than any individual donor in modern American history. He dropped $76.8 million into his own America PAC over roughly a week in October. He gave $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which turned around and moved the same amount to a group backing Ken Paxton against James Talarico in Texas. In 2024 he spent about $290 million, which at the time looked like the high-water mark for one dude shopping for a government.

And in May 2025, on his way out of DOGE, he said this about his political spending: “I think I’ve done enough.”

Reader, he had not done enough.

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The money is the tidy part, though, because at least the money shows up in FEC filings. On October 14, according to The Wall Street Journal, Musk ordered a speed cap on the military-grade Starlink service Ukraine relies on. Terminals moving faster than about 100 miles per hour started dropping out, which is a real motherfucker of a problem when the things defending your cities are interceptor drones. That same day, Musk posted that limits like that are decided by the US military and “ultimately POTUS.” A week later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the president has nothing to do with decisions made by Starlink, Starshield, and Mr. Musk.

So one man’s satellite network kneecapped a country’s air defense in the middle of a war, and the official explanation from both ends is the pointing Spider-Man meme. One of those Spider-Men is the guy now vowing to unmask the puppet masters.

The Washington Post says Musk is preparing for war. Against whom, exactly? A handful of lawmakers whose big scary weapon is the ability to make him answer questions under oath?

Live by the sword, sure. This man can’t even live by a follow-up question.

Every Saturday morning of my childhood, Scooby-Doo ended the same way. The ghost was never a ghost. The gang yanked off the rubber mask, and underneath was the rich guy who owned the amusement park, furious that a bunch of meddling kids had wrecked his real estate scheme. Fred got the credit, but Velma always figured it out first.

Pull the mask, Velma. We already know whose face it is.

Hi, I’m Dana — and I Write Out Loud

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Elon Musk Bought the Midterms For $445…