Today, Explained - Elon's party in the USA

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Elon Musk says he wants to launch a new political party. Voters consistently say they want more choices. But history is littered with failed third-party candidates. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Rebeca Ibarra, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Matthew Billy, and hosted by Noel King. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Photo by ALEX WROBLEWSKI, ALLISON ROBBERT/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elon Musk wants to create a new political party. He's fed up with excessive government spending and waste and graft. And he's mad about the Epstein files. And he did a poll and people were actually really into the idea. But then he stopped mentioning it. And he's just been tweeting about GroK and Europe's fertility rate. And did you hear he unfollowed Pam Bondi? President Trump thinks we're too simple,

lol. We have a tremendous success with the Republican Party. The Democrats have lost their way, but it's always been a two-party system. And I think starting a third party just adds to confusion. It really seems to have been developed for two parties. Third parties have never worked. So he can have fun with it, but I think it's ridiculous. But is Elon serious? That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for this program comes from FM. Established nearly two centuries ago, FM is a leading mutual insurance company whose capital, scientific research capability and engineering expertise are solely dedicated to property risk management and the resilience of property loss is preventable, work with FM to better understand the hazards that can impact their business continuity to make cost-effective risk management decisions

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My name is Joshua Green. I'm a national correspondent for Bloomberg Business Week Magazine, and I spend a lot of my time covering Elon and Trump. Why? The official reason is because they're important newsmakers. The less official reason is that it's just a lot of fun and chaos.

And then as a reporter and a columnist, it makes for good grist for columns. All right, so you heard that Elon wants to start a new political party. What's he thinking? You know, it's a good question. Everybody always wonders what Elon's thinking when he does a series of bizarre posts, tweets, but I think he's doing this because what he really wants is political power and attention. And I think he thought he'd essentially bought that by backing Donald Trump the tune of like 300 million dollars in the last election

Let me tell you we have a new star The star is born, Elon But as it turned out he didn't he's worn the hat Trump was right about everything But I'm very disappointed and Trump turned on him ousted him took away his EV tax credits Didn't cut the deficit trashed him on social media. I don't know what it is. It's sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it.

And now I think Elon is humiliated and looking for a way to respond and hit back. He is not saying those things though. He's saying there are like real reasons that I wanna do this. What is he claiming he wants here? Well, yes, I'm reading between the lines a little bit, but I think what he's claiming he wants is he wants to cut the deficit. And I think that he'd like to restore those EV tax credits.

You know, he's he's tweeted to the effect that this is terrible for, you know, for science for America's place. And it's technological race with China. If this insane spending bill passes, the America party will be formed the next day. Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty so that the people actually have a voice. I mean, there are certainly valid reasons why Elon would want to start a political third party,

presuming he could and could field competitive candidates, but there are a lot of doubts about any of those things. But right now, you know, he wanted what he wanted and he didn't get a lot of it from Donald Trump, and so now he's trying a different route, or says he's trying a different route. Do we know anything about what the party would stand for? Like what his platform would be? I mean, to the extent that it even exists, which it doesn't yet, it'll stand for whatever Elon wants it to. I think that, you know, we could presume that it would be pro-business, that it would be pro-science, that it would probably be pro-clean energy, pro-space travel. I mean, certainly Elon has a list of policy interests that would overlap with a serious political third party.

And if you were to kind of subtract Elon Musk himself from the equation, you could even kind of put together a pretty interesting party based on a lot of those principles. But the thing with Elon is anybody who follows his social media feed for more than five minutes will notice is that he's constantly hemming and honking and he's going back and forth and he's prone to conspiracy theories

and temporary periodic obsessions. I don't remember Elon Musk being particularly concerned about the deficit, you know, before this latest episode, but now he claims that he is. I think a bug can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it can be bug. I don't remember him being super concerned about the Jeffrey Epstein files, but that's a recent obsession of his too.

How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won't release the Epstein files? So I think what the America party winds up standing for will very much be up in the air and, you know, might not even be the kind of thing that you could like put down on paper and expect to last for any degree of time because I think Elon is so prone to getting excited about different things and changing his mind. I was on his Twitter feed this morning and he was tweeting up a storm last night, but it was all about Grok having problems. Oh yeah, tell me about that.

Out of journalistic restraint, I'm not even going to try to characterize what is going on here. But okay, my question for you is this, how will we know he's serious about this? What will it take for you to be like, oh, this is not just a five minute obsession. He means it. Well, what it's going to take to actually start a political party, you have to do a bunch of different things. You can't just announce it on Twitter, and you can't just you know, donate a bunch of money to a political action committee, which by the way, he already has and he's perfectly capable of influencing American politics in either party or both

parties just based on what he already has now. But if he wants to start an actual third party, you have to file a lot of paperwork, you have to get lots and lots of signatures, you have to have some kind of a platform, some kind of a rationale to make it official. It's very work intensive. It takes a lot of people to get it done

and it takes a lot of time and effort. Now, certainly he's got the money to back this kind of effort if he wants to, but as we all know, Elon Musk isn't always the most reliable when it comes to following through on his claims or his big ideas. I mean, I kind of categorize this mentally in the realm of like, you know, Elon wanting to go to Mars

or Elon saying that, you know, there's gonna be fully automated Teslas driving leaps of car, you know, all over the US. It's something he'd like to happen. It's something I think he's genuinely interested in, thinks it would be a neat idea. But I don't think that he necessarily is gonna kind of follow through on it

or has any idea what it is he's actually biting off. How's the idea being received? Like who's taking him seriously? Nobody that I've come across yet. Most people are kind of scoffing at the idea, thinking it's just a periodic whim because Elon has a long track record of saying things and then not following through.

I think also, like, he's not the first rich, politically interested newcomer to hit upon the idea of starting out some kind of a centrist, pro-America third party. I mean, it's almost a cliche how many wealthy people new to politics kind of come up with this idea, think it's original, misread poll numbers, imagine in themselves that there's a huge constituency

out there just waiting to line up behind them and their particular idiosyncratic views. And then when they go and run or test it out, it turns out that there isn't. So I think if Elon were to move forward with the idea, it wouldn't be nearly as easy as he's claiming it would be in a social media post. Elan Musk has some other day jobs, right? He's responsible for SpaceX, for Tesla.

Ever since he got involved with government, his businesses, his actual businesses have been taking some hits, right? People are not thrilled about Tesla, buying fewer Teslas. Tesla's stock is whipsawing all over the place. How are his investors, the people to whom, in a business environment, he really owes the most, how are they reacting to this idea? Not well.

I don't think it was any accident that when Trump and Musk, before their fallout, announced that Musk was leaving government and going back to the private sector, Tesla stock rallied quite a bit. And there was great size of relief from Tesla bulls that Elon was going to come back, he was going to focus on the work. And now we've learned that, no, as a matter of fact, he probably isn't. He's going to launch off on some kind of a quixotic political crusade.

And you could kind of see the disappointment and frustration and angst playing out among Tesla investors. Tesla stocks are down 8% this morning after Elon Musk announced a new political party. This is not what investors want. They don't want Elon Musk focusing on political activities or spending most of his time talking about politics and fighting with the president. One of them prominently, who's a big Elon bull, had said on social media, oh, you know, we can make this work.

Let's give Elon a better pay package that'll concentrate him on his Tesla mission. It'll help the stock price. And maybe, you know, we can have a rider in his new contract saying, no, no political involvement. And Elon sort of tweeted back and said, that's a dumb idea, shut up. And something to that effect. So Elon does not want to be limited in terms of his political activities, it seems. And that's probably bad news for his companies. He has talked on Twitter about what he wants to do specifically, and he's made it seem like he wants to actually just focus on Senate seats and House seats.

Like, he doesn't, he's not expressing like a grand ambition. He's like, a couple seats here, a couple seats there. Has he been talking to anybody that could help make this a reality? So, if what he wants to do really is just play in the midterm elections, that's actually something he really could do, and he doesn't even need an America party in order to be able to do it. He has a political action committee that was very active in the last election on behalf of all sorts of House and Senate candidates, probably helped Republicans win or expand

their margins in the House and in the Senate. And it's the kind of thing he could do this time around. I think the challenge though is what does Elon actually want to accomplish in the midterm? Does he want to punish Republicans who voted for the big, beautiful bill? If he does, that's gonna present sort of a problem because he's either gonna have to get centrist or non-Trumpy Republicans to run in these seats.

And that's a really tall order. Or he's gonna have to back Democrats. And I mean, I wouldn't rule that out either. If what he really is concerned about is to put the brakes on government spending, then maybe the best thing for him is to get Democrats elected, have them win back the House, and then he wind up in a situation

where Washington is in gridlock and nothing can pass, including additional budget-busting, deficit-exploding bills like the one we just saw signed into law. So what do we make of all this? and nothing can pass, including additional budget busting, deficit exploding bills like the one we just saw signed into law. So what do we make of all this? You said earlier, like lots of rich guys have tried to start third parties. Is this time different, Josh?

I, you know, I'm not really in the business of making predictions, but if you put a gun to my head and made me make one, I'd say that no, this time probably isn't different. The one wild card is that I think Elon is much more aggressive and willing to spend his own money and lots of his own money in the service of plans and projects that probably aren't gonna work out

or that other people might view as ridiculous. Like I was a big skeptic of him kind of getting behind Trump and thinking he'd really be able or be willing to write those kind of huge checks because the knock on Elon in Washington over the last eight, 10 years was, well, you know, he talks a big game and he promises he's gonna get involved,

but when it comes time to stroke a check, he's never willing to do that. Well, turn out he was willing to do that. He wrote a bunch of really great big checks. And so if he's willing to back his America party idea with lots and lots and lots of money, who knows? I mean, he could have an effect. It might not be the effect that he intends,

but he could certainly disrupt any number of House and Senate races in a way that produces a meaningful impact, not just on the outcome of those races, but in terms of who winds up, which party winds up controlling the House and to a lesser extent the Senate after the 2026 midterms. Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek. Coming up, polling shows, and I did not know this, that most Americans are actually sick of the two-party system. The argument that getting rid of it is possible. Support for Today Explained comes from Quince.

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when you head to the number three, d-a-y-blinds.com slash explained. Whether you're a startup founder, navigating your first audit, or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in. Businesses use Vanta to build trust by automating compliance for in-demand frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. And with automation and AI throughout the platform, you can proactively manage vendor risk and complete security questionnaires up to five times faster, getting valuable time back.

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scientist and I'm the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, the Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America. You are not a big fan of the two-party system. You know, I think it's outlived its usefulness. Huh? What's the thesis? Go ahead, tell me what. America's a pretty big diverse country these days, you may have noticed. And to fit everybody into just two parties

seems like kind of insanity. And it's clearly not working. Also, it has divided this country into two teams, the red and the blue team, that have learned to absolutely hate each other. It's created these artificial divisions around this zero-sum, winner-take-all electoral politics that is just really breaking down the foundations

of democracy in this country. So I think there was a time when it worked reasonably well for certain reasons, but that time is in the past. Okay, so you will know that Elon Musk agrees with you. He says he wants to start a third party. He ran one of his little polls on Twitter, and the question was, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle? I'm looking at that poll now.

80% of people said yes, 20% said no. How does that match up with reality in the US? Well, there are two parts to that question. One is how many people want a third party and then two is how many people want that party to be somewhere in the middle. Now the first part, how many people want a third party? That 80% is a little bit high. There might be some selection bias there, but it is close to polls that I've seen. Generally it's about 60 to 70% of Americans say there ought to be more than two parties

when polled. So overwhelmingly Americans say they want more than two parties. Now, is the party that they want a party in the center? That's less clear. I think people's perception of the political center depends on themselves. I think everybody, most people think that

they're more reasonable and they're more moderate, but in reality, when you look at the viewpoints of the American electorate, as I've done repeatedly, you see that the support for a genuine center party is limited, maybe 10 to 15 percent, but there is a lot of interest in parties that are maybe not as traditional. Third party candidates do run for office all the time in the United States. They very rarely win. If so many voters want more options,

why don't we have more people in elected office from third parties? Here you're hitting on the core problem, which is that we have a single winner System of elections. So in a single winner election third parties become Spoilers and wasted votes because it's yeah, one of the two major parties is gonna win every election So voting for a third party is just basically a protest vote or maybe it could spoil the

election. And as a result, most people don't want to do that because they think, well, I want to vote for somebody who at least has a chance of winning. And more importantly, people who have ambition in politics say, well, I'm not going to waste my time with one of these fringe parties. I want to actually win. So you get minor parties that are mostly cranks and weirdos. And people say, well, I'd like to vote for another party, but not that third party. What's the recent history of third party candidates, serious third party candidates at a national

level? I have like a vague memory of Ross Perot. Now, just for the record, I don't have any spin doctors. I don't have any speech writers, probably shows. I make those charts you see on television even. That's true. But I couldn't give you many details because it was the 90s. How serious of third party candidates been over time?

Yeah, well, Ross Perot is the most recent third party candidate to actually get a pretty decent share of the electorate. He got almost 20% of the electorate, although he didn't win a single state. A lot of people remember Ralph Nader in 2000. Here we go again. Who only got about 3% of the vote, but it was a very well-placed 3% because his votes were more than the difference

between Bush and Gore in Florida and a few other states. Clearly George W. Bush took far more votes away from Gore, didn't he? But why not call him a spoiler? Before that, you had George Wallace running in 1968 on the American Independent Party as sort of a, you know, a preserve segregation platform. The Supreme Court of our country has handcuffed the police. They have rendered decisions today that are absolutely ludicrous and asinine.

They have rendered decisions today that are absolutely ludicrous and asinine. And then 1912, you have Teddy Roosevelt running as a Bull Moose third party candidate, was the most successful third party candidate. Are the American people fit to govern themselves to rule themselves to control? I believe they are. And of course, he's already been president. So you've had periodically third party challenges at a presidential level, at a house and Senate level, you have a few people who run as independents, but it's people tend to go right for the presidency because that creates a level of visibility if you're trying to build a party. All right. So in terms of solutions, if one thinks that the two party system is a problem, let's talk about solutions.

You advocate for something called proportional representation. Explain what that is and why you think it might be a solution here. Well, proportional representation is the most common system of voting. And basically, at its simplest level, it means that parties get shares of seats in proportion to what percent of the vote they get. So if a party gets 30% of the vote, it gets 30% of the seats in the legislature, it gets 10%, it gets 10%. Now there are varieties of proportional representation that we could spend an hour going in the weeds on.

Tell me the one you like the best. What would work in the US? So what I think would work in the US is probably the most commonly used version, which is called open list proportional representation with multi-member districts, which is this idea that rather than having a single district with a single representative, you have a single district with five representatives, the district is larger, and then the parties put forward lists of candidates. You choose the candidate from the party that you like.

All the votes for each party get tallied up, and then the seats get allocated in proportion. So if a party gets 40% of the votes in that five-member district, it's top two candidates go represent the district. If a party gets 20%, it's top two candidates go represent the district. If a party gets 20%, it's top candidate. So in theory, you can have five parties representing the same district. So we talk a lot about gerrymandering as a huge problem

and it is. Fair elections, the cornerstone of American democracy. Psych. Welcome to my political pizzeria where my pies are as screwed up as the gerrymandered districts in your congressional home. Gerrymandering sucks. But you move to five member proportional districts, gerrymandering becomes irrelevant. It doesn't matter because votes are going to be allocated proportionally no matter what. So everybody gets to cast

a meaningful vote because every seat matters. Every seat is competitive. Every vote matters. So electoral reform is the most powerful tool we have. So at the end of the day, has Elon Musk done something admirable here? Well, we will see. By making this a topic of conversation in a kind of real way? Right. yeah. So I think by raising the issue of the need for a third party, I think it certainly opens

up a conversation about what it would take. I'm not sure Elon's approach is going to be successful. On the other hand, if he's strategic and wants to spoil a few races that will determine control of the House and the Senate by running a spoiler candidate, then historically that's actually what has led to a wider conversation about electoral reform. That's one of the reasons that a lot of countries move to electoral reform. We've never had this level of dissatisfaction with the two-party system as far back as we've seen polling.

So there is a real kind of understanding that what we're doing in our electoral system is just not working. Lee Drutman is the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. Today's episode was produced by Avishai Artsy and Rebecca Ibarra. It was edited by Jolie Myers and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. Our engineers are Matthew Billy and Patrick Boyd. I'm Newell King. It's Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Icy Hot.

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