Elon’s political party “America party” is official:
There are several possibilities:
1. Elon does not actually understand how electoral politics works. I see this as unlikely given his experience with politics under Trump.
2. Elon knows his party will split the vote, but does not care.
3. Elon hopes to cost Trump’s successor reelection, as payback.
4. Related to the above, Elon hopes to split the vote to allow Newsom to win in 2028, in what is likely to be a close election.
If Musk launches a new party, there are only two plausible outcomes: it either gets hardly any votes and doesn’t matter, or it hands every election to the Democrats by splitting the right wing vote.
— Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort) July 6, 2025
This is wrong. A spoiler candidate doesn’t need many votes to swing a close election. An obvious example is Al Gore in 2000 losing Florida by merely hundreds of votes. A small number of votes can be extremely consequential. That is the whole point of a spoiler candidate.
The latter point is especially interesting. Newsom is governor of California, by far the most important state for Tesla sales. Although they disagree on some social issues, they agree on the importance of subsidies. Splitting the vote would be much more effective than openly supporting Newsom, which would be an obvious act of betrayal.
Elon is savvy enough to think many moves ahead. You can see that his tweets are motivated by self-interest, than ideological consistently or loyalty to any person or party. This is common of billionaires in general. You don’t get that rich by taking a ‘hard line’–you have to be flexible and make alliances.
For example, why is he constantly promoting Apple and Tim Cook despite the latter’s woke politics?
It’s obvious when you think about it: Apple is half of the ‘mobile app store’ duopoly. And unlike Android/Google, the much more profitable and richer half. Apple users are generally from the U.S. and have higher socioeconomic status, making them more likely to pay for premium Twitter features and generate more ad revenue—unlike Android users, who are more globally distributed and often from lower-income regions.