Ilon Musk's political roulette: how he can build his party

Last week, the world's richest man, Ilon Musk, announced his new project: he is creating a new political party in the United States. In business, he has had nine projects, seven of them working. In politics there will be only the third, the first were the election of Trump as president and DOGE. And there the score is 1:1 so far.

Jan Veselov, a political scientist and author of One Big Union, a Telegram channel about American politics, discusses why Musk needs his own party and whether it has any chance of success.

Nowadays, it is hard to imagine American politics without Ilon Musk. He owns one of the largest social networks X, actively comments on the news agenda, and until recently was a member of US President Donald Trump's team. Before Trump's current return to the White House, Musk was limited to only relatively small donations, with money he transferred to both Republicans and Democrats. For example, to the current governor of California, Democrat Gavin Newsom in 2018, he donated $11.8 thousand to his campaign as head of SpaceX, in 2015 he transferred $2.6 thousand to the current head of the State Department, Republican Marco Rubio. That same year, Musk also sponsored the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 

In those years, Musk often described himself as a centrist and supported (including financially) Barack Obama, and voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But in 2022, he wrote, "Given the unwarranted attacks on me by Democratic leaders and my extremely cool attitude toward Tesla and SpaceX, I plan to vote Republican in November." The reason is dissatisfaction with Democrats regulating attempts to regulate his business: authorities were outraged by unapologetically political posts on X, or by additional rocket launches in the Santa Barbara area. Perhaps that's why Musk changed tactics and instead of supporting different political forces, put his eggs in one basket. Having bought the social network Twitter, he began to actively promote conservative Influencers and the Republican agenda;

In 2024, after an assassination attempt on Trump, Musk endorsed his candidacy and donated a total of more than $291 million to his campaign, becoming his biggest donor.

In the 2025 election, Trump had the "PayPal mafia" on his side - that's how they call the founders and former employees of this company who were able to build their successful businesses. In addition to Musk, it was Peter Thiel. He supported Trump before. In his first term as president, Palantir, a company Thiel co-founded, won major contracts from the Pentagon; his second term was no exception. A third partner in the "PayPal mafia," David Sachs, chose to side with Trump in protest against Democrats and gained the post of presidential adviser on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. Ilon Musk, after Trump's victory, became the first person on Earth whose fortune exceeded $400 billion.

Venture capitalists like Marc Andriessen, Ben Horowitz, and Mike Solana also backed Trump. In many ways, this reflected Silicon Valley's conservative turn, in which Democrats were increasingly seen as a threat to technological progress, especially in cryptocurrencies and AI. Some were attracted to Trump by his libertarian agenda of deregulation and fighting the growth of the federal government. To those disenchanted with the very idea of democracy, Trump seemed like a strong leader who could ensure technological progress even as Americans protested.

Almost all the heads or founders of the "Magnificent Seven" companies came to Donald Trump's inauguration. Only Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was absent. He was celebrating Chinese New Year in the People's Republic of China. But he, like the heads of Apple, Meta, Amazon and Google, donated $1 million each to the president's inaugural committee.  

Musk has made no secret of his plans for officials and the Washington bureaucracy. In the fall of 2024, the New York Times counted two dozen audits of the billionaire's businesses. He also hasn't forgotten how Democrats demanded an audit of Tesla to determine whether the board is independent of Musk. He readily accepted Trump's offer to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was created to crack down on inefficient budget spending and fraud. Ilon Musk promised to save $2 trillion. DOGE began with mass layoffs of government employees and, according to its own calculations, reduced budget spending by $190 billion. But the Financial Times, citing estimates by experts at the Partnership for Public Service wrote that the layoffs and rehiring would cost the U.S. $135 billion;

Many of Musk's ideas, such as weekly progress reports from officials and appointing his own representatives to various departments, have met resistance among ministers and agency heads, including those who will already be appointed by Donald Trump. The billionaire fought with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a conflict with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ended in a brawl.

When the statutory period for volunteering for public service expired and it was time for Musk to leave DOGE, Trump thanked him for his work. Already three days later, there was a public conflict between them: Musk almost relentlessly criticized in X Big Beautiful the bill increasing the budget deficit. The US president couldn't stand it when the businessman wrote that Trump was on the "list" of billionaire pedophile and child sex seller Jeffrey Epstein. Afterward, Trump stated that the best way to save budget money was to take away government contracts from Musk's companies. The Independent calculated that if SpaceX's contracts were canceled, its lost profits would be $68 billion;

That's how this famous political bromance ended. Musk ruined relations with just about the entire bureaucratic Washington, and also lost part of his fortune - just since the beginning of the year, Tesla's shares have fallen in price by more than 23%. 

The criticism didn't stop the Trump bill from passing, with almost all Republicans voting in favor. Now Musk has promised that all those who supported the bill will lose the election, and announced that he is forming his own political party under the unpretentious name "America."

It's not very clear yet whether it will be a real political organization or an informal movement like the conservative Tea Party that originated among Republicans in the 2000s.

There is indeed a request for a new political force in America. In polls, already 43% of US residents don't associate themselves with either Democrats or Republicans. And since 2013, consistently about 60% of Americans say they would like to see a third party because the current ones don't adequately represent their views.

A poll Musk's X poll of more than 5.6 million people found that 80.4 percent believe the U.S. needs a new party.

He himself wrote on Web X that the goal of the new party is "to give you back your freedom." However, it is not clear whose interests and views the new political association will reflect. Musk himself said that he may focus on picking up 2-3 seats in the Senate and 8-10 in the House of Representatives to form a kind of "political pendulum" that will lean toward Democrats and Republicans on various issues. That is, the party will have a rather centrist character, relying on the support of more moderate voters. 

In part, this centrism reflects Musk himself: in the "culture wars" (over inclusiveness, gender diversity, and so on) and the national debt, he is closer to the Republicans, but at the same time he defends green energy and increased high-skilled migration, which is closer to the Democrats' position. But in that case, it would be easier for Musk to finance the election campaigns of Democrats and Republicans in party primaries, promoting more moderate candidates, rather than create a new political force.

Election laws in many states do not favor third parties. Candidates from them need to collect voter signatures or pay a cash deposit to run for office. In theory, Musk could use the infrastructure of an existing party, such as the Libertarian Party, which is already represented on the ballot and would be very interested in supporting someone with such extensive financial and informational resources.

But the fundamental problem for Musk will be the so-called  "Duverger's Law" - the states have a "winner-take-all" system, meaning that a party that gets, for example, 20% of the vote will get nothing. Under such conditions, a voter will prefer not to waste his or her vote on a movement with little chance of winning;

Any third party in such a system, in fact, acts only"spoiler" one of the two major parties, which often leads to the victory of the opponents. This has happened many times before in American history. For example, in 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party when Republicans refused to nominate him for a third term. As a result, Democrat Woodrow Wilson won with fewer votes than Roosevelt and Republican Howard Taft combined. After Roosevelt's defeat, his party quickly fell into decline. 

And in 1992, businessman Ross Perot, who, like Musk, was very concerned about the growing national debt, went to the presidential election on behalf of the Reform Party. He got a record 18% of the vote for a third party candidate, but he didn't win any of the states. And the president was Democrat Bill Clinton, not Republican George W. Bush, who was closer to Perot in his views.

Democrats have had similar defeats due to "spoilers." In 2000, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader gained just 2.7 percent of the vote. But if Nader's left-leaning constituents had voted for Democrat Al Gore, he, rather than Republican George W. Bush Jr. would have become president. Similarly, in 2016, Green candidate Jill Stein beat out Democrat Hillary Clinton by enough votes for her to lose to Donald Trump. 

On the other hand, as stated above, more than 40 percent of Americans no longer identify themselves as either Republicans or Democrats.

But even if the America Party has a chance to become a third force in the United States, whether Musk will have it is a question. Data polls as of July 10, which Silver Bulletin is compiling, show a 55% dislike rating for Musk. 

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor