Elon Musk shrugged off defeat in the Wisconsin state Supreme Court race by arguing he’d actually secured “a positional gain.”

President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting aide, and groups that he supports, spent more than $20 million on getting conservative candidate Brad Schimel a seat on the state’s highest court. Over the weekend, Musk argued the stakes were so high that the outcome of the race “will be important for the future of civilization.”

Yet, in the hours following Schimel’s defeat to liberal Susan Crawford, Musk appeared intensely relaxed about the outcome, and indicated that the loss was all part of a grander plan.

“I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain,” Musk replied to an X user on Wednesday morning.

Musk’s “positional gain” was probably a reference to the state adding a preexisting voter ID law to its constitution, a proposition that was also on the ballot and successfully passed.

“This was the most important thing,” Musk wrote of the voter ID amendment in a separate post on his main X feed. The state has required voters to bring a photo ID to polling places for nearly a decade. Enshrining the law in Wisconsin’s constitution makes it more difficult to change.

On social media, not many were buying Musk’s recalibration of recent history, and the suggestion foiling pesky Democrats from reversing the law in the future was what he really wanted.