Catching Our Eye News Roundup, Oct. 14, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Data centers by the numbers. Cleveland.com’s Anna Staver reports, “Are data centers a good deal for Ohio? 5 numbers from a new study raise questions.”

Ohio electricity customers could pay an extra $16 billion over the next eight years because of the state’s booming data center industry, according to a new economic analysis.

Scioto Analysis, a Columbus-based public policy research firm, found that data centers have brought Ohio billions of dollars in economic benefits, but the next wave of development could cost nearly as much as it delivers.

• Elon Musk’s election spending. The New York Times reports, “Inside Elon Musk’s $276 Million Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans.”

Elon Musk has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July, building a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections.

The staggering amount of money makes Mr. Musk, the richest person in the world, by far the largest known donor in the midterms. Representatives for Mr. Musk supplied the previously unreported figures on his political giving to The New York Times before a federal filing deadline on Thursday.

In an effort to save Republicans’ Senate majority, he gave a total of $158 million this summer to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC backing the party’s candidates for the chamber, according to his team. In sum, that is one of the largest political donations in American history, and more than the group’s Democratic rival raised from all of its donors that quarter.

• Elon Musk’s disinformation campaign. Mother Jones reports, “Elon Musk Is the Midterms’ Biggest Disinformation Risk.”

With the midterm elections just weeks away, Musk is pouring money into GOP Senate candidates’ coffers and involving himself in the spread of literal fake news about a Democratic candidate, at a time when basically every true trust and safety guardrail has long been erased from his site. Given that he and his companies stand to profit handsomely from a Republican victory, the pattern is clear: the biggest election disinformation risk in the next few weeks is Elon Musk.

• Elon Musk’s DOGE workers now profiting off government. The Washington Post reports, “They came to Washington to dismantle government. Now, they’re profiting from it.”

Last year, billionaire Elon Musk unleashed a small army of Silicon Valley techies to drain what he called the “swamp” of Washington — wielding the U.S. DOGE Service to slash at a bureaucracy they argued was bloated and corrupt.

But today, many of his former DOGE foot soldiers have leveraged their government stints to fuel private-sector ambitions: building companies that tap government largesse or that deploy knowledge they garnered during their brief tenures in Washington.

A Washington Post analysis found that roughly two dozen former DOGE staffers have parlayed their government experience into relevant private-sector jobs or investments — becoming founders, securing CEO positions or senior executive roles, amassing large stakes in start-ups looking to win government contracts or approvals, or taking the skills developed at DOGE to the private sector. Though several of the businesses are only months old, with little public activity, at least six DOGE alumni have registered on Sam.gov, a government contracting portal examined by The Post.