Elon Musk is pretty cool with the fact that President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” gave a $1 trillion tax cut to gazillionaires like himself. What’s not great, according to Musk, is that Trump didn’t cut enough. So with the same unwarranted confidence he brings to all things, Musk has declared he is starting the “America Party.”
Like all his efforts, Musk sees the creation of a new major party as a piece of cake, something no one else has yet succeeded at because they don’t have his big brain. So of course this will work, just as well as it worked with the Boring Company. You know, where Musk promised a network of high-speed underground tunnels where you could zip along at stupid speeds, but what we really got was a 2.4-mile stretch in Las Vegas where you get to toodle along in a Tesla driven by someone else.
Or maybe it will work as well as the efforts to get to Mars, where Musk once promised crewed missions by 2024. Or perhaps it will turn out like his promises for full self-driving technology in Teslas, where we were supposed to be letting the Tesla computer entirely take over way back in 2016.
Per Musk, breaking the two-party system is “not hard tbh,” which are the words of a person who has paid no attention to American politics whatsoever until buying Trump the presidency. If Musk bothered to look around, he’d see that American politics has been notoriously resistant to third parties, particularly celebrity-driven parties like the one Musk is proposing.
Musk also displayed his profound lack of understanding when he declared that the new party was needed to “represent the 80% in the middle.” In reality, there are very few things that 80% of Americans approve of, and Musk’s wholesale destruction of the federal government is not one of them.
Except Musk isn’t actually going to try for widespread representation of those 80% at all. What he’s actually going to focus on are “just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.” Why? “Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.
So, Musk will be handpicking seats to install representatives and senators by deploying his enormous resources, but that’s not about representing the people. Instead, it looks much more like Musk has simply decided to shift his locus of control from Trump to Congress, and will use those people he ushers into office to ensure he controls vote outcomes.
The market doesn’t seem too wild about Musk’s latest foray into politics, with Tesla shares taking a bath as of Monday. This continues the tremendous drop in value Tesla has suffered since Musk made himself the face of the brutal cuts the Department of Government Efficiency unleashed. It turns out people do not like buying cars from a Nazi-saluting goon who played a key role in the Trump administration’s dismantling of science, public health, safety, and more.
Unsurprisingly, Trump is not impressed with Musk’s efforts, initially saying that it was “ridiculous” to start a third party because “we have a tremendous success with the Republican Party” and “starting a third party just adds to the confusion.” After he stewed on it some more, he made a Truth Social post saying that Musk was going “off the rails” and was now a TRAIN WRECK. Perhaps Trump will renew his threats to Musk that he’ll have him deported.
It isn’t clear at this point if the America Party effort will get Musk’s full attention, as DOGE did, or if he will treat it like one of his products, where Musk’s spectacular pronouncements always collapse into a series of broken promises made by a congenitally arrogant and lazy man. Either way, Musk’s efforts aren’t meant to help anyone except Elon Musk.