“Ad Astra Per Aspera,” Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.
That’s Latin for “To the stars through hardships,” an apt motto for many of the multibillionaire’s endeavors – be it the Grok chatbot that made headlines last week for spewing anti-Semitism to his whirlwind role in the opening act of Trump 2.0 to his SpaceX rockets that have both failed and succeeded spectacularly.
The world’s richest person is undeterred, as he takes on another daunting task: creating a viable third party, and trying to upend a U.S. political system dominated by the same two parties since the mid-1800s. Mr. Musk’s announcement of the America Party earlier this month was met with skepticism, but given his enormous wealth – and a demonstrated willingness to deploy it at times for political purposes – his potential for major impact on the 2026 midterm elections and beyond can’t be ruled out.
Why We Wrote This
America’s two-party political system has been challenged before, but Republicans and Democrats still rule. Elon Musk is trying a new way at a time when the major parties may be vulnerable.
“In the critique of Musk, it’s easy to forget how unimaginable the scale of his successes in the private sector have actually been,” says Gautam Mukunda, an executive fellow at the Yale School of Management. “He’s America’s most successful industrialist.”
Mr. Musk has a relentless, outside-the-box way of thinking and operating that has turned his many companies into significant forces. But that doesn’t mean he can break the Republican and Democratic parties’ iron grip on the American system. Since the 19th century, third-party populist presidential candidates – most prominently, Robert La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, George Wallace, and Ross Perot – have won millions of votes, but ultimately failed to shatter the two-party system.
Yet in some ways, the time is ripe for a well-funded new party. Since 2009, a plurality of U.S. voters in Gallup polls have called themselves “independent.” In 2024, the breakdown was 43% independent, 28% Republican, and 28% Democrat.
Whether Mr. Musk is even serious about launching the America Party is unclear. He announced it July 5, after a monthlong buildup on X, his social media website, where he claimed that poll data showed 80% of the nation wants a new party. His motivation, he said, is to address the nation’s chronic overspending – a task Mr. Trump hired him to do as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Mr. Musk wrote July 5 on X. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”
He has also threatened to fund primary challengers to members of Congress who voted for President Trump’s big budget bill, which fiscal watchdogs say will add at least $3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years.
That threat, in fact, suggested Mr. Musk would remain involved in GOP politics. (Only Republicans voted for the bill.) But within days, Mr. Musk was talking about how his new party could influence policy in a closely divided Congress.
One idea “would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts,” Mr. Musk wrote on X. “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.”
But winning even a handful of seats would be no small feat for the America Party. The U.S. winner-take-all political system makes it extraordinarily difficult for independent or third-party candidates to prevail. Election laws are established both at the federal level and state by state, and the two major parties maintain monopoly control. Gathering the requisite signatures to get on each state ballot requires an intensive, on-the-ground effort. The last independent elected to the U.S. House was Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 1990. In the Senate today, two independents hold seats – Senator Sanders and Sen. Angus King of Maine. They both caucus with the Democrats.
It’s not clear that Mr. Musk or his advisers have even begun to focus on the mechanics of organizing a third party. He has denied reports that he registered the party with the Federal Election Commission, and then withdrew the registration. But existing third parties have certainly taken notice of the America Party. The Libertarians suggested that they join forces. Andrew Yang, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and founder of the Forward Party, says he’s eager to help Mr. Musk.
Bruce Schulman, a political historian at Boston University, sees echoes today of the 19th-century Mugwumps, who viewed parties as corrupt, divisive, and ideological.
Many of today’s independent political groups are “anti-party parties,” Professor Schulman says. “They tend to represent middle-class and upper-class interests, people who are not only hostile to the two major parties, but also sort of against the idea of partisanship.”
Does the America Party have staying power?
At the center of it all is Mr. Musk, a larger than life character who can bend history simply by opening his wallet or accepting an assignment from the president of the United States.
He spent nearly $300 million to back the former president’s effort to regain the White House. He campaigned especially hard for Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania, the biggest battleground state, which the president won by 1.7 percentage points.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, believes that Mr. Trump would not have gotten the votes he needed in Pennsylvania had it not been for Mr. Musk.
“Musk knows that, and now Musk feels like he’s being thrown out like an old dish towel,” Professor Sonnenfeld says, referring to Mr. Musk’s falling-out with Mr. Trump in May, after leading DOGE.
Ultimately, though, the question is, Will Mr. Musk do the work necessary to launch a third party, or will the effort fade?
“He does kind of have a history of making grand proclamations and then backtracking on them or sort of letting them fizzle out,” says Collin Anderson, a political scientist at the University at Buffalo.
Yet sometimes a seeming joke can become something real, such as Mr. Musk’s threat to buy Twitter, which he ultimately did buy and remake into X.
“I would say he probably should be treated seriously until proven otherwise,” Professor Anderson says.