Elon Musk’s Party for Oligarchs
Just what America doesn’t need – another party dominated, and this time even started, by oligarchs. SpaceX owner Elon Musk may be able to design rocket ships, but his understanding of politics and public opinion is below elementary-school level. His plan to launch a new party, the America Party, seems largely delusional.
Musk had been teasing the idea of a new, third party for several weeks, following his spectacular falling out with US president Donald Trump. Musk, who had previously led the White House’s efforts to cut public spending at the Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE), was dismayed to learn of Trump’s plans to massively boost spending in his flagship One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Last weekend, Musk announced the creation of the America Party, which he claims will be able to defeat the Republican-Democrat duopoly and represent the ‘80 per cent’ of Americans ‘in the middle’. Billionaire Mark Cuban and financier Anthony Scaramucci have offered to help get the party going.
Musk may be the most successful entrepreneur of his generation, but he is not remotely popular, with 55 per cent of Americans disapproving of him. Nor is the idea of oligarchs funding political parties well received. According to Pew Research, 80 per cent of Americans believe wealthy donors have too much power – and they are right. In 2024, election spending in real dollars is estimated to have been two to three times higher than two decades ago. Some 40 per cent of all political contributions, according to Jacobin, come from the wealthiest one per cent.
The US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which essentially prevented any real restraints from being placed on campaign spending, accelerated this pattern. This is hardly just a Republican gambit. Until recently at least, the main beneficiaries of so-called dark money have been Democrats, getting big paydays from backers like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. These donors helped Kamala Harris raise well over $1.5 billion – the highest figure in history – for her losing presidential campaign.
Americans once admired the tech oligarchs but increasingly find them objectionable and scary. Between 2018 and 2021, Facebook, Amazon and Google all suffered a large-scale loss of confidence. They are now even more unpopular than the hated mainstream media.
Let’s face it. These guys are not upstarts anymore, but increasingly monopolists. Google and Apple account for nearly 90 per cent of all mobile-browser use worldwide, while Microsoft, Android (Google) and iOS (Apple) hold roughly the same share of all operating-system software. Like Wall Street bankers, their power epitomises the relentless concentration of the economy that many Americans instinctively fear.
Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Elon Musk and President of Argentina Javier Milei at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Credit: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
