Who Are Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks? The Billionaires Buying Texas Elections
Short answer: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks are two West Texas oil-and-gas billionaires and Christian-nationalist megadonors who have poured more than $100 million into Texas politics — effectively “buying” the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and state senate — and are now spending to control the Texas House and hand-pick its speaker. In a viral floor speech, Texas Rep. James Talarico called it the takeover of a state.
Who Are Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks?
Tim Dunn, a Midland oil executive, and Farris Wilks, a fracking-fortune billionaire and ordained pastor, are the two biggest Republican donors in Texas. On the surface it’s oil-and-gas money. But as Talarico lays out, they’re also Christian nationalists — men who treat political power as a tool to remake Texas government in the image of one narrow religious and ideological worldview. When two private citizens can write nine-figure checks, elections stop being about voters and start being about donors.
“They Bought Our Government” — What Talarico Is Alleging
Standing on the Texas House floor, Talarico doesn’t hedge: Dunn and Wilks “already bought our governor… our lieutenant governor… our attorney general… our state senate.” The last piece, he says, is the House — and the plan is to install “one of their puppets” as speaker. Even a Republican colleague called it “the most corrupt state government in Texas history.” Strip away the party labels and the mechanism is simple: concentrated wealth buying concentrated power, one office at a time.
Why This Isn’t Just a Texas Problem
It’s easy to scroll past a statehouse fight two states over. Don’t. The playbook — a handful of billionaires funding an entire slate of officials through PACs and “dark money” networks that hide where the cash actually comes from — is national. The same model shapes school boards, district-attorney races, and legislatures across the country, including in states with large Black populations. When you can’t see who’s paying, you can’t hold anyone accountable. That’s the whole point of dark money, and it’s the same power game we broke down in Would You Erase Obama to Stop Trump?
The Receipts: Vouchers, Book Bans, and a “Theocracy”
Follow the money to the policy. Talarico ties Dunn and Wilks to more than $100 million spent to ban abortion, ban books, and push private-school vouchers that pull funding out of public schools. For Black families, that lands close to home: public schools educate the overwhelming majority of Black children, and voucher schemes quietly drain the budgets those schools depend on. Book bans routinely target Black history and Black authors — the same fight we unpack in What Is Critical Race Theory. This is what dark money actually buys: policy that lands hardest on the communities with the least political cover.
In The Black’s Take
This is why we say follow the money, not the noise. The fight in Texas isn’t red vs. blue — Talarico points out that Republicans and Democrats teamed up to stop it. It’s the many vs. the few: everyday voters against two men with checkbooks big enough to buy a state. And money is exactly how power gets quietly redistributed away from our community — the same pattern we trace in How the Tax System Disadvantages Black Americans. The lesson is old but urgent: political power you don’t build and defend, someone else will buy. Vote in the “small” races — statehouse, school board, DA — because that’s precisely where the billionaires are spending, exactly because they’re betting you’re not watching.
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There is something happening here in Texas. Here in the state capital, a small band of Republicans and Democrats in the Texas House are coming together to stop two West Texas billionaires from taking over our state government. Their names are Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. And they’re the biggest Republican donors in the state. They’ve already bought our governor. They bought our lieutenant governor. They bought our attorney general. They bought our state senate. And now to complete their takeover, they’re trying to buy the Texas House. Tomorrow, they’ll attempt to get one of their puppets elected speaker. One of our Republican colleagues said, quote, “This is the most corrupt state government in Texas history.” Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks are not just oil and gas oligarchs. They’re also Christian nationalist pastors. They’ve spent more than $100 million to ban abortion in Texas, to ban books in Texas, and now they’re trying to close our Texas public schools with a private school voucher scam. This is bigger than party. This is bigger than partisanship. Texas is too big and too great to be sold to the highest bidder. We cannot allow two billionaires to transform our beloved state into a theocracy. We have to stop them.
