We don’t know the full extent of spending

WOLF: Musk reported spending somewhere on the level of more than $290 million in 2024. How do we even piece together what he did if there are these groups that don’t have full transparency?

GHOSH: On the transparency side, the dirty truth about campaign finance in today’s world is that we only think we know how much any particular donor spent on an election. There’s a certain amount of spending that is disclosed — super PACs have to disclose where they get their money from, but they can always get their money from an associated dark money group.

So somebody like Elon Musk, he gave $270 [million] or $290 million to super PACs, and that was disclosed in his own name, but there is no disclosure of the money that’s donated through dark money groups, and that is a glaring transparency failure that has been around since Citizens United.

Some people in Congress are trying to fix that, but there is no political will to get that done. There’s a bill in Congress called the DISCLOSE Act that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, has sponsored that would effectively close that loophole by requiring these dark money groups to disclose where they get their money. But it hasn’t passed. And so every election, somebody like Elon Musk can openly give some money, but could also secretly give some money, and that, I think, makes a mockery of the Supreme Court’s condition, their understanding that all this outside money would be openly disclosed.