After Texas Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting last year, we all became familiar with a wee-little man named Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust (NRRT), the GOP’s chief redistricting organization. He was the guy who drew the maps in 2025 meant to strip Black political representation in Texas. But behind every wee-little man is an even wee’er-little man, lurking past the curtain. And in the 2025 redistricting incident with Adam Kincaid, as it turns out, that wee’er-little man was the Republican Congressional Candidate for TX10, Chris Gober.
We know this because Kincaid testified in open court that he took direction directly from Chris Gober. You can read about it in Democracy Docket, and here is that snippet of the transcript:
Kincaid admitted in open court that the requests he received from Chris Gober influenced the racial gerrymandering of the Texas Congressional map, which stripped away Black political representation.
Back in 2021, the National Republican Congressional Committee and 23 Texas congressmen hired him to help draw the state’s map, a credit his own law firm still brags about on its website.
Adam Kincaid testified under oath that the RNC brought Gober back for round two in 2025, this time to represent the Texas delegation while Kincaid did the actual pencil-pushing. Gober’s job, per that testimony, was relaying “requests” from the delegation. Kincaid wouldn’t say what those requests were. Attorney-client privilege, he said.
Kincaid said under oath in a federal court that Chris Gober asked for things, and mostly got them.
One of the things Chris Gober apparently wanted was a brand new TX10. The district retained just 55% of its old population from the 2021 map, according to court filings cited by Democracy Docket.
And when the dust settled on his handiwork, guess whose house ended up inside the new lines? Chris Gober’s. The man who helped draw the map now lives in the district he drew, and he’s asking you to send him to Congress to represent it.
Look at what he built:
TX10 grabs exactly 21% of Travis County, the beating blue heart of Austin, just enough of it (277,284 people, more than a third of the whole district) to keep those Democratic votes from doing any damage anywhere else in the state. Full-on Brazos County comes along too, A&M and College Station, another 233,849 people. Then the map drags a tail nine counties long straight east. Grimes, Houston, Lee, Leon, Madison, Polk, San Jacinto, Trinity, and most of Walker, all the way out toward the Piney Woods, over a hundred miles from downtown Austin, just far enough to drown that liberal sliver in enough deep-red rural Texas to keep the whole seat comfortably in the family. Cook rates it R+10.
That’s done on purpose, by the man now standing in front of you asking for your vote.
He also bought the Republican nomination.
Chris Gober has personally loaned his own campaign $1.625 million. Add the $24,800 he’s kicked in directly, and you’re looking at just shy of $1.65 million of Chris Gober’s own money going toward convincing you to send Chris Gober to Congress. He’s buying the seat outright and inviting you to rubber-stamp the purchase in November.
Where’s that money coming from?
His financial disclosure puts his net worth somewhere between $32 million and $107 million, according to the Texas Tribune’s analysis.
Lex Politica, the law firm he founded and still owns, is valued in that same disclosure at $25 to $50 million on its own. This is a man who helped draw the district, decided he liked what he saw, and wrote himself a check large enough to make sure nobody else in the race could compete with him.
And he wants you to know he’s just folks. Gober tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s a product of Throckmorton, Texas, population 700 and some change, a hard-working small-town boy who understands what it’s like not to have much.
What he leaves out is that Throckmorton County has a well-documented history as a sundown county, and Black residents were run out and kept out for the better part of a century. But it is the place he holds up as his character reference, the wellspring of what his own website calls his “timeless conservative values,” and it says something that a man with $107 million on the table is still out here cashing in on small-town nostalgia rather than reckoning with what that town actually was.
He also leaves out of the pitch that his parents owned a bank that owned the oil wells. So, when he says he worked in the oil fields, he forgets to mention that he was pushing pencils.
Gober’s ties to Elon Musk.
Chris Gober ran supervillain Elon Musk’s money. As Director and Chief Lawyer of America PAC, Gober oversaw nearly $300 million that Musk poured into getting Donald Trump back in the White House in 2024. When Pennsylvania prosecutors and Wisconsin’s Attorney General came calling over Musk’s million-dollar-a-day voter sweepstakes, it was Gober standing in the courtroom defending it. He was Elon Musk’s lawyer in the fights that mattered most.
So when Joe Lonsdale, Palantir’s co-founder, cut Chris Gober a personal check for $3,500, that was the ecosystem taking care of its own. And Lonsdale didn’t stop at his own checkbook. His American Mission PAC, an arm of the AI-industry super PAC network Leading the Future, spent roughly $747,000 boosting Gober through the primary, more than any other Texas congressional candidate got from that network. Nearly half of all the ad spending on Gober’s behalf in that primary came from Lonsdale’s people. Silicon Valley bought and paid for his primary campaign.
Gober’s own campaign website has a whole section called “Ensuring America’s AI Dominance.” In it, he promises to “champion smart investments in American AI infrastructure that protect rural Texans from projects that drive up electricity rates and drain local water supplies.” That’s his platform.
Now watch him get asked, on the record, what he’d do to bring investment into Brazos County and the surrounding area. He talks about “liberty-minded investors.” He calls new arrivals “political refugees.” 🙄
He never says the word Terafab. He never mentions Grimes County, sitting right there in his own district, where SpaceX just got a 100% property tax abatement for a $55 billion chip plant that residents are fighting over water, over power, over the fact that the county might get run over by it. He wrote the promise on his own website. Then somebody handed him the microphone and asked him to keep it, and he talked about political refugees instead.
Who’s actually paying Chris Gober?
Lex Politica, the law firm Gober founded, owns, and is only partially selling, is worth somewhere between $25 million and $50 million, per his own December 2025 financial disclosure filed with the Clerk of the House. That same disclosure shows the firm threw off over $5 million in income to Gober in a single year.
Gober’s disclosure lists his clients as “Confidential,” and the reason he gives isn’t attorney-client privilege, though you’d be forgiven for assuming that, since that’s the phrase that keeps getting repeated about him. What he actually cites is the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, the state bar’s confidentiality rules, and separate confidentiality agreements he’s personally negotiated.
That’s a business decision he made, on paper, to keep the American people from knowing whose interests he’d be representing in Washington while he’s supposed to be representing yours. Because it won’t be yours. Multi-millionaires on the far-right have never worked for the American people.
His disclosure shows he’s selling his ownership stake in Lex Politica to two of his partners, Steve Roberts and Jessica Furst Johnson, through quarterly installment payments running through December 2027. That’s most of a first term in Congress. Every quarter he’s in Washington voting on legislation, he’ll also be collecting a check from a law firm with a client list he’s refused to disclose, sold to a man, Steve Roberts, who’s already shown up in his own campaign’s donor rolls and in reporting on the Danube Institute, the Viktor Orbán-network nonprofit whose American paperwork Lex Politica itself handled.
So Chris Gober went to the Texas Tribune and made you a promise.
“The American people don’t send people to Washington to get rich,” he said, “and they deserve confidence that elected representatives are serving the people and not themselves. As I’ve stated on the campaign trail, I won’t trade individual stocks while serving in Congress, and everything I own will remain fully disclosed to the public.”
Sounds good. Sounds like a man who’s thought about this. He’s already rich. He doesn’t need to trade stocks. But read his statement again.
He said he won’t trade. Look at his own disclosure, and you’ll find Tesla stock sitting in a Fidelity IRA. Rivian, sitting in a Vanguard brokerage account. He’s not promising to get rid of either one. He’s promising not to buy more or sell what he’s already got. Those are very different things.
Here’s why that distinction isn’t academic. Tesla is the company building Terafab. Terafab sits in Grimes County, in TX10, in the district Gober himself helped draw. If Gober wins this seat, he’ll be voting on the tax policy, the infrastructure funding, the regulatory environment that determines whether Terafab succeeds, and every time that stock moves, so does his own net worth.
His “I won’t trade” pledge does nothing about that. He keeps the shares. He keeps the stake. He just promises not to add to it or cash it in while you’re watching.
That’s not a lie. That’s a man who read the Common Cause standard, understood exactly where the loophole was, and built his pledge around it. Fucking Republican lawyers, right?
Who does Chris Gober actually run with?
Start with Hungary. Lex Politica represents Danube Institute USA, the freshly minted American arm of Viktor Orbán’s flagship propaganda outfit, the one that spent a decade laundering Hungarian state money into American conservative media, paying Christopher Rufo $35,000 for a six-week stay to lecture on critical race theory, paying Rod Dreher $105,000 a year to widen his “circle of Christian-conservative contacts.”
That’s the operation Lex Politica did the paperwork for when it needed a US-facing entity to survive Orbán losing power back home. This is Gober’s firm, and his signature on the disclosure that keeps the whole client list a secret.
One of Gober’s own law partners, Steve Roberts, the same man buying Gober’s stake in the firm through 2027, the same man who personally donated to Gober’s campaign, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Examiner floating the idea of turning FARA, the law meant to expose foreign agents working to influence American politics, into a weapon against what he called the “Soros network.” A partner at the firm laundering an Orbán-funded think tank into American legitimacy also wants to use foreign-influence law against George Soros. If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is.
In September of last year, Gober sat on a Federalist Society panel in Austin titled “DOGE & The Deep State: Executive Power in the Trump Administration.” He shared that stage with a sitting Fifth Circuit judge. This is a man who has spent the last year moving in rooms where the operating theory is that the president should have more power and fewer checks, sitting beside the people actually building the legal architecture to make that theory real.
Add it up. A lawyer who ran Musk’s money. A firm that launders a foreign authoritarian’s propaganda machine into an American nonprofit. A partner who wants to weaponize foreign-agent law against domestic political enemies. A candidate who spends his evenings on panels debating how much power one man in the executive branch ought to have.
And when a man spends his year moving between billionaire super PACs, foreign propaganda outfits, and panels debating how much power one president should be allowed to hold, that’s fascism, dressed in a Fightin’ Texas Aggie ring and a $107 million net worth. Call it what it is.
Who does TX10 actually get if he wins?
You get a congressman who drew his own district before he ever asked you for your vote. You get a man who bought the nomination outright with $1.65 million of his own money because he could, and who’s backstopped by a small circle of maxed-out donors, Austin venture capital, DC legal elite, and the actual co-founder of Palantir, none of whom need anything from a freshman congressman except the thing they’re already buying. You get a man whose own law firm’s client list is a secret he’s paid a lawyer to keep secret from you, and who’ll keep collecting checks from that same secret client list through most of his first term. You get a man who wrote a whole platform plank about protecting rural Texans from exactly what’s happening in Grimes County right now, and when a reporter put the question to him directly, on tape, he couldn’t bring himself to say the word “Terafab.”
Water fights, tax abatements, a $55 billion chip plant, and a Republican nominee who won’t touch it out loud. That’s TX10, right now, waiting for someone to actually show up.
Caitlin Rourk is showing up. She’s out there knocking doors in Bryan and Huntsville, and every rural stretch of this district Republicans assume Democrats won’t bother with, running a real campaign against a man who can write himself a seven-figure check without blinking.
We are never going to outspend Chris Gober. Nobody beats Elon Musk’s old lawyer at a money fight. But we can out-organize him the way we’ve always won anything worth winning in this state, one person at a time.
If you’ve read this far, you already know what this seat is worth and what it costs to lose it.
You can learn more about the Democratic candidate Caitlin Rourk on her website, Facebook, Instagram, or Bluesky.
She needs your help!
If you have a few dollars, please donate.
If you live in this district, go sign up to knock on doors.
Caitlin needs it, and honestly, so do the rest of us.
71 days until the November election!
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