The Many Problems With Elon Musk's Sketchy Plans to Start a Centrist Third Party
If Elon Musk had stuck to electric cars, spaceships, and claiming credit for the work of others, he could have held onto his reputation as a visionary businessman, environmentalist, and the face of the electric car revolution, a real-life Tony Stark.
At the very least, Musk would not be the single most hated man in the United States. That’s quite the accomplishment when the competition includes Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, pretty much all of Trump’s cabinet, Sean “Diddy" Combs, and Mike Love.
Musk was too arrogant to stay in his lane. It wasn’t enough for him to be the wealthiest man in the world, and by extension, one of the most powerful men in the world as well.
The Tesla mogul could have enjoyed a decadent life of schtupping supermodels, singers, and actresses when not swimming around in a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck and ruling over his various fiefdoms.
Disastrously, for Musk’s ego and reputation, as well as humanity as a whole, the South African-born jackass wanted more. He wanted much more. The consummate dork wanted the masses to marvel at his coolness. He wanted Poindexters to be blown away by his gaming skills.
Musk wanted people to think he was funny and edgy, like his beloved The Babylon Bee. That was just sad, verging on pathetic.
Much more ominously, the owner of what I will always call Twitter wanted to be seen as cool, hip, edgy, hilarious, and politically savvy.
It would be so much easier to respect Musk if he weren’t so eager to expose his many character flaws.
Musk is a preeminent businessman in the world of electric cars and space travel. When it comes to comedy, politics, and social media, however, Musk is an emotionally stunted man-child desperate for validation and approval.
Social media and politics have revealed Musk to be a hateful fourteen-year-old troll desperate for attention and validation in the body of an impossibly powerful fifty-four year old.
Like Donald Trump, Musk lacks a coherent philosophy. Instead, he has a complex web of prejudices, grievances, and hatreds that collectively make up his paranoid and narcissistic worldview.
Musk did not educate himself on politics. He did not read books, attend lectures, and have long, substantive conversations about the world with intellectuals who would challenge him.
Instead, Musk was radicalized by his own stupid website. I would be surprised if he reads anything longer or more challenging than a Babylon Bee article. Musk “learned” about American politics by looking at memes from self-consciously edgy teenagers.
Musk’s politics are the politics of personal resentment. His transphobia feels rooted in his troubled relationship with his trans daughter.
Musk hates his trans daughter Vivian Wilson, who he has described as "dead to him” and yet another victim of the dreaded “Woke Mind Virus” because he’s sexist, transphobic and sees his children as reflections on him rather than autonomous people with needs and desires of their own.
But he also hates her because she’s everything that he wants to be but most assuredly is not: cool, hip, funny, independent, and confident in a manner not rooted in seething insecurities. Musk tries desperately to be cool and fails. Wilson doesn’t need to try to be cool; she just is.
Musk’s alliance with Donald Trump was fundamentally pragmatic and symbiotic. Each man got something they wanted out of it. Trump appreciated that Musk was using his vast fortune, including hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money, his popular, albeit increasingly less popular, social media site, and his own cult of personality to help him get re-elected.
The richest man in the world, meanwhile, was given a level of power he previously never imagined possible and he was, it should be noted, already one of the most powerful people in the world.
Musk bought Trump the presidency. As a reward, he was given a new department with scary, amorphous, seemingly unlimited powers named after a meme.
Because he apparently didn't already have enough to do, Musk was given the keys to the entire government and invited to recreate it in his own image. Trump was metaphorically inviting Musk to take a chainsaw to government bureaucracy and help destroy our ability to help anyone other than billionaires here and abroad.
Musk and Trump decided that giving money to help feed starving children and fund cancer research was woke and DEI, but giving tax cuts to billionaires was America First and patriotic.
The worst people in the world cheered as a drug-addled billionaire, high on unearned power and Ketamine, destroyed countless lives and damaged our institutions in ways it might never truly recover from in the dubious name of fighting corruption, and bloat and saving taxpayers’ hard-earned money.
Musk was given so much unearned, inexplicable power and freedom that people began calling him President Musk.
It was inevitable that Trump and Musk's historic bromance would end messily and dramatically, but when critics trolled the troll by saying that Musk was the one who truly held power, it hastened their split.
Musk ultimately turned on Trump not because of contrasting values or ideals but rather out of ego and self-interest.
Trump eliminated a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars, which Musk understandably viewed favorably, as it would have injected billions into his already overflowing pockets.
Even more disastrously for their relationships, Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich instantly undid all of the belt-tightening and department-destroying D.O.G.E had performed under Musk’s direction. It turns out that Trump didn’t actually care about the budget deficits he had depicted as civilization’s ruin during Biden’s time in office.
In a shocking, unforeseen turn of events, Trump wasn’t genuinely deeply concerned about deficits. He just wanted to make life even easier for himself and his fellow billionaires, and is willing to say anything to get his way.
Musk split with Trump. He had a lot of big feelings, which he shared on his terrible social media site. I could read them, but I am not going to, for the same reason that I do not pour hot sauce into my eyeballs.
But sometimes I glance to get a gist, or I read about them because what that asshole does is unfortunately always newsworthy due to his place of prominence in the world.
At his most insouciant, Musk brattily insisted that Trump didn’t want to release the Epstein Files because he's all over them. No duh! They were bestest buddies for a very long time. The man gushed about how Epstein loved the ladies as much as he did, and he liked them on the younger side.
Musk apparently forgot that he's on the Epstein list as well.
On June 5th of this year, Musk ran a poll on his garbage site asking, “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80 % in the middle?”
A little over eighty percent of the respondents answered in the affirmative. That’s not particularly impressive, considering that Musk was quizzing his own deluded cultists on his own dumb site, and even then, a fifth of the folks polled felt that it was a bad idea.
Musk vowed to form a centrist America Party to represent those alienated from the excesses of the left and right.
The problem is that Musk is not a centrist. He doesn’t have complicated and contradictory opinions, some of which are conservative and some of which are progressive.
Musk is, instead, an anti-woke, anti-immigration, anti-trans, racist, antisemitic, far-right-wing Republican in favor of policies that personally affect Elon Musk and his massive ego, most notably the tax credit for electric cars and reducing the deficit by decimating the government’s ability to help the working class.
The former head of D.O.G.E. almost instantly lost interest in pursuing the America Party beyond a few strategic election.
Musk’s disinterest is understandable. For someone who purchased the most power-mad presidency in American history, losing money funding candidates who will finish in third place if lucky must feel like a massive comedown.
There is no place in the current political landscape for a briefly anti-Trump Trump Republican. In their divorce, Trump ended up gaining custody of almost all of their followers.
Splitting with Trump left Musk a lonely political orphan who had pissed off the left in a way we’ll never forget or forgive and antagonized a man with an iron grip on the Republican party.
Musk has already begun the process of crawling back to Trump. They were photographed together at Charlie Kirk's memorial. Saint Charlie wanted to reunite the two worst people in the world because he knew that they could more harm to vulnerable people together than separately.
The absentee father of several thousand children is an unenviable position. He might have lost his title as the world's richest man to Oracle mogul Larry Ellison. Tesla sales plummeted due to Musk's decision to lay off tens of thousands of people on behalf of a uniquely unpopular president who nevertheless has total control over his movement.
Musk obviously misses the power and popularity that came with being Trump’s top advisor and a hero to the MAGA free speech crowd, who, in a funny turn of events, are actually strongly against free speech unless they agree with it.
Having tasted supreme power, Musk can’t go back to merely being the richest or second richest man in the world, the face of electric cars, and the owner and most aggressive user of the biggest social media site in the world.
Musk will continue to support the toxic Alt-Right in the United States and abroad. He’ll justify abandoning the America party and his fake independence by saying that it’s what Charlie wanted and that keeping Marxists like (checks notes) Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from turning our country into a Mad Max-style dystopia is more important than his policy disagreements with his former and future hero.
I wish Musk would go the fuck away and focus on selling cars but he’ll undoubtedly continue to be a major player in American politics by virtue of his wealth and ownership of a social media site he made a toxic soapbox for his far right wing views and people who think just like him, like the owner of Truth Social, who will eventually accept his apology because he needs Musk, albeit nowhere near as much as Musk needs him.