Earlier this month, Americans learned that the final culmination of Elon Musk’s fallout with President Donald Trump has been the formation by Musk of the America Party. Likely to focus on reducing the national debt, spurring and better harnessing more technological innovation, and defending free speech—or so we can divine from a Musk retweet— the appeal might seem obvious. Unless you’re Donald Trump, of course. Elon did a great deal to help put Trump in power. Now, Elon wants to put him in a jam—with the help of an apparently huge swath of the American public.
According to June 2024 Gallup polling, over the last 25 years, Americans have remained constant in leaning to the right on economic issues, but have shifted left on social issues. Meanwhile, April 2025 Gallup numbers showed 81 percent of those polled expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of worry about federal spending and the budget deficit—a jaw-dropping number.
So, Trump may have won the election—admittedly running in about the most favorable environment he could ever have dreamed of. But public polling would suggest that his big spending ways, at a minimum, are a big, ugly bust with a ton of voters, and not just those on the left. Musk is clearly hoping to turn that situation into the political version of Tesla or SpaceX—one that he capitalizes on to usher in a wildly successful new entity that will remake the US’ politics as thoroughly as Neuralink might remake our concept of what the physically disabled can and cannot do.
There’s no inherent reason why it should not work; other democracies have multiple major political parties, not just one or two, and some of these have emerged and taken hold extremely quickly. While Nigel Farage has been on the British political scene for decades, his Reform party—currently the most popular with British voters—was only founded in 2018. Germany’s right-wing AfD, of which many Trumpers have become fans, was only founded in 2013. Emmanuel Macron only established his party, Renaissance, in 2016.
But as Trump himself accurately pointed out in responding to Musk’s announcement, third parties “have never worked” in the US. And let’s be honest, Trump should know: In 2000, he was a contender for the Reform Party presidential nomination before throwing in the towel on what seemed a very pointless exercise. For this, and other reasons, Musk’s effort could easily prove a fool’s errand.
Rather than accommodating multiple viable parties, the US system has always seemed more geared towards intra-party factionalism. This is how in 2008, we managed to have Ron Paul (the libertarian), Mike Huckabee (the big government social conservative) and Rudy Giuliani (the social liberal, neoconservative) running for the nomination of the same party. Or how in 2016, you had Rand Paul (the libertarian), Marco Rubio (the foreign policy hawk immigration reformer), John Kasich (the across-the-board moderate) and Donald Trump (a liberal with Pat Buchanan instincts on foreign policy, trade and immigration) running. In 2020, in the Democratic Party contest, you had Joe Biden (the generally liberal orchestrator of the budget sequester) running against Bernie Sanders (the self-described socialist), Pete Buttigieg (the former McKinsey consultant who some suspected was basically a Republican but had moved off the party because of its positions on LGBTQ+ issues), Mike Bloomberg (an actual former Republican) and Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard (the libertarians).
Another major problem confronting Musk is that while he’ll be the face, author and bankroller of the America Party, he’ll never be its candidate for the big job.
If we were in just about any other country, Musk—a naturalized US citizen—would be able to become the country’s political leader through the normal democratic process. But in America, we have a constitutional requirement that our presidents must be natural-born citizens, and Musk is not. That means the celebrity figure establishing the party, who will inherently be most associated with it and the individual most capable of attracting people to it, will be someone ineligible to ultimately do the top job. That’s quite different to the situation you saw with Ross Perot, who picked off nearly 19 percent of the vote in 1992, forcing former Presidents George H W Bush and Bill Clinton to sweat their own electoral prospects, established the Reform Party in 1996, and then picked off 8.4 percent, much to the irritation of Clinton (again) and Bob Dole. Perot voters could vote for their man for President. Musk voters will be unable to do that.
Now, Mark Cuban—a natural born US citizen, fellow investor and entrepreneur, tech-sector-focused guy, and celebrity with a big bank account—seems keen on Musk’s new project (Tesla shareholders less so). Cuban has long been suspected to have political ambitions—and goodness knows his name routinely pops up when political pundits are speculating about who outside the existing pool of current and former officeholders could potentially run for President. But America doesn’t have anything approaching a blueprint for a party created to fit the contours of one man’s fairly specific philosophy and bankrolled by him, but with an entirely different person as the actual name on the ballot line. And for those who say the differences between Elon and Cuban are not so stark, let’s not forget that they split on which candidate to back in 2024—Elon obviously having supported Trump, and Cuban having supported then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
There’s also one unanswered question in all of this, and that is why create a new political party at all when America already has a third political party that loosely looks similar to what Elon and Cuban might want. That party would be the Libertarian Party, and it already has achieved ballot access in all fifty states multiple times.
Yes, yes, that sound you hear is a collective, loud sigh in response to the mere suggestion. I even groaned a little writing it. Speaking as a diehard libertarian Republican (with emphasis on that exact phraseology, lower case and upper case letters, specifically), I am acutely aware of the fact that Libertarians mostly have a reputation as being defenders of policy that strikes your average voter as insane. The Libertarian Party is where you go if you’re desperate to see crack cocaine legalized and/or interspecies sexual relations normalized, while returning the US to the gold standard, and privatizing all public roads and services right down to, say, police and firemen. It’s also where you go if you want to achieve limited electoral success because winning elections entails things like non-insane policy positions, message discipline, volunteer and grassroots organizing, and abiding by lots of rules and regulations—all difficult things to accomplish when your average Libertarian loathes being told what to do and conforming on even very basic levels.
Nonetheless, there is a blueprint for more moderate, centrist figures to run under the Libertarian Party line. Gary Johnson did it in 2016, and won about 3.3 percent of the vote nationally. If Musk is right that there is market demand for a party along the lines he is selling, he would do far better to hire Johnson’s team—or at least borrow their brains for, say, two weeks at some sort of “political learning” retreat he funds—and copycat what Johnson did that year, but then turbocharge the effort with much more financing, grassroots organization, and more and better candidates. That might include Cuban on a 2028 presidential line, or perhaps a figure like former Michigan congressman Justin Amash, or the aforementioned Yang.
In all probability, whichever path Musk chooses here, despite all of his intentions and money, he is more likely to fail than not. The America Party feels, for now, more like the latest installment in Musk’s ongoing political enlightenment that more or less patterns that which all libertarian Republicans (and maybe libertarian Democrats) working in the media or consulting space have gone through—though most of us did it when we were in our twenties, not our fifties. You start out with many illusions and ideals, great aspirations and intentions, only to have almost all of them brutally destroyed, causing a retreat back to a place where you are largely left fighting within the party for more Rand Pauls or Thomas Massies and fewer of whichever your arch-enemy within the party ultimately is. Your (or his) mileage may vary as to whether that is an acceptable result.
The big asterisk there, though, is this: Musk is perhaps one of a hundred people alive on this planet who has repeatedly set out to do something that everyone else said was insane, sure to fail, and a waste of time. Yet, we have SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink (for my money, the most successful and enviable Musk endeavors). Just because something has never happened before does not mean he won’t be the one to do it. And let’s be honest, if we went back in time to, say, 2006, how many people thought that America would elect an African-American within a decade, that Donald Trump would become President twice, and that none of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush would ever get the big job (or, frankly, that Bernie Sanders would give Clinton a run for her money).
Maybe the America Party will be the next SpaceX. Or maybe it will be closer to a dud investee company that Musk earnestly believed could and would succeed, but instead became a go-nowhere money pit that barely earns a mention in the next wave of Musk biographies.
Liz Mair is President of Mair Strategies LLC. The former RNC online communications director, and advisor to Carly Fiorina, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Roy Blunt and numerous other campaigns in both the US and the UK, she principally advises corporations and trade associations on strategic communications and opposition research.
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