Elon, Let's Talk Turkey!

Elon Musk jubilantly unveiled himself as “Dark MAGA” during a rally with presidential candidate Donald Trump on October 5th, 2024. Musk sank $292 million into the campaign of Trump and his Republican allies -- $100 million more than the next highest donor – and when Trump won, he tapped Musk to direct the Department of Government Efficiency, which President Trump established by executive order.

DOGE discovered and eliminated wasteful long-funded programs, many of them progressive pet projects, earning Musk the ire of progressives everywhere. Through a coordinated worldwide campaign, progressives boycotted Musk’s company of Tesla, which principally manufactures electric cars. Additionally, progressives promoted the vandalism of Teslas and their dealerships. All this resulted in the company losing $380 billion in valuation by June 2025.

But MAGA was not yet done with Musk. Whilst Musk was hemorrhaging money in service to his adopted country (he was born in South Africa), trimming the fat from the government’s accounts, Trump and his partisans were writing pork into the “Big Beautiful Bill” to the tune of billions. Worse yet, Trump and company were discontinuing consumer tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles such as Teslas, which by stimulating sales would ameliorate some of Musk’s financial loss during his stint in government. In effect, Trump sent Musk on a fool’s errand, and there would be no upside to offset the harm to Musk’s reputation and finances.

The ”bromance” between Trump and Musk degenerated into nasty snipes and accusations across social media. Musk described the Big Beautiful Bill as “utterly insane and destructive,” and a “disgusting abomination.” Trump retorted that Musk was going “completely off the rails,” possibly in response to Musk alleging that the recent “disappearance” of Jeffrey Epstein’s dossier was due to Trump being named therein. President Trump at one point even suggested that he may deport Musk, a naturalized citizen. Musk upped the ante by surveying 220 million followers on X (which Musk also owns) to ask whether another major political party should be founded. Over 1.2 million of these followers responded affirmatively.

On the day after Trump ratified the Big Beautiful Bill, Musk declared to his sizable following on X that “The America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.” In truth, no legally significant steps had been taken to form a new political party, yet Musk limned some objectives for this party. The America Party would aim to reduce the federal debt, to modernize the military via artificial intelligence, to advance “pro tech” policies, to decrease regulations on energy, to promote free speech and to represent Americans’ interests over those foreign. Furthermore, Musk outlined a strategy for the party to pursue: it will target 2 or 3 seats in the U.S. Senate, and 8 to 10 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hence, Musk is setting goals which are passably realistic, along a timeline to begin in one to three years.

Right-wing activist Laura Loomer predicts that Musk’s America Party will attract President Trump’s critics, snidely suggesting that its first big-name enrollees should be independent journalist Tucker Carlson, and U.S. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, all three of whom had supported President Trump in most things but lately have criticized him on some key issues. If Loomer’s prediction proves true and the party recruits from the pool of Trump’s detractors, then that alone may be a formidable subset of the population, given Trump’s volatile relationships. It could include Trump’s former now disbarred attorney Michael Cohen, commuted but not pardoned former Proud Boy leader Joe Biggs, former ally and Attorney General Jeff Sessions whom Trump fired in 2018… there are many people who may have enough of an axe to grind against Trump to induce them to join the America Party.

Meanwhile, as of a Gallup poll taken in 2023, 43% of surveyed Americans identify as Independents, unaffiliated with either Republicans or Democrats. These disaffected voters could prove decisive if enticed into the America Party in certain polities.

That said, given Elon Musk’s predilection for efficiency, which has made his companies of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) highly profitable and was the main reason fellow entrepreneur Donald Trump tapped Musk to direct DOGE, one wonders why Musk is re-inventing the wheel with his proposed America Party. He could more efficiently capitalize on another major party’s pre-existing infrastructure to achieve his stated objectives with far less effort and in less time.

The major party which offers this, of course, is the Libertarian Party. Founded 54 years ago, the Libertarian Party has affiliates in all fifty states, and crucially, ballot-access in forty-eight of them. More importantly for Elon Musk’s purposes, Libertarians already share five of the America Party’s six declared goals, and that last one can be negotiated, as will be explained below.

Taking the America Party’s proposed planks one by one, reduction of the federal debt is of great concern to Libertarians. Libertarians possess a vanishingly rare superpower called financial literacy… which means that we understand that credit which the government spends today unfailingly impoverishes future generations. To that end, Libertarians have long advocated for complete solvency in government.

Deregulation of energy is also near and dear to Libertarians. We have denounced the insanity of the so-called Green New Deal, which lowers Americans’ living standards and hamstrings the USA’s competitive advantage to rivals like China without proportionately guaranteeing climatological stability or improvement. Libertarians keenly understand that energy – including next generation nuclear such as liquid fluoride thorium reactors – is essential to human progress. As long as market participants are held responsible for any externalities, then we favor deregulation of the energy markets.

The America Party’s proposed protection of free speech also conforms to the Libertarian objectives. We are in fact free speech absolutists. We realize that by government choosing whose speech we hear and whose we may not, society is perniciously deprived of the widest range of opinion. Within opinions which are unconventional and unpopular may be solutions to societal problems which will go unheard. Thus, there is incalculable value to free speech, and ample common ground for agreement between the America Party and Libertarians.

The representation of Americans’ interests over those foreign is murky as a policy. Obviously Libertarians desire that the government we elect safeguard our interests over those of foreign governments, insofar as such conflicts arise. That said, we recognize that at times the interests of government and those of the citizenry will diverge, and when conflicts arise, we favor the citizen who stands on his rights over government, since we realize that collectives such as government are but an abstraction for the individual. If this qualification of the policy appeals to those founding the America Party, then we may have concurrence here as well.

As for the military’s modernization, there may be some common ground, with some crucial caveats. Insofar as military defense is necessary – which it is – Libertarians prefer that the United States’ hardware be updated such that it can effectively deter and combat foreign threats at the least risk to U.S. personnel and uninvolved foreigners (e.g., intercontinental drone-delivered “smart bombs” over Korean War-era ordnance lobbed by ground crews to demolish a whole building for a sole enemy’s neutralization). Additionally, some of the technological updates needed for the U.S. armed forces may be in the medical field (e.g., nanorobots which can safely perform prognosis and microsurgeries in the field to preserve our troops’ lives), which would be tolerable to Libertarians.

That said, current defense budgets are farcically profligate. The USA spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined. What the USA spends to act as the world’s policeman for our allies, is inverse to what our allies save and invest into their own civilian industry, such as state-of-the-art infrastructure. Our society forgoes so much advancement in civilian industries due to crowd-outs by military spending. If the type of military spending which the America Party claims to desire would reduce current military spending’s scope and restore the long-awaited “peace dividend,” then this could be another point of congruency with the Libertarian Party.

The final, negotiable point would be pro tech policies. “Pro tech” can mean many things, so some clarification is needed. There may be policies which favor supply, and those which favor demand. An example of a supply-side policy would be a subsidy, as in governmental payments to a designated industry to foment production. Notwithstanding the merits of the industries which the America Party may want to subsidize, Libertarians categorically reject corporate welfare in the form of subsidies, so that is off the table.

However, the demand-side policy of tax credits is something which Libertarians can stomach. Taxation, after all, is just a euphemism for extortion. Thus, a policy whereby someone buys a Tesla battery for a photovoltaic system, for example, and gets a tax credit of $3000 to offset other tax liability, means that government extorts less money from that someone. If loss to government can stimulate production in private industry, then pro tech policies would be more commonalty between the proposed America Party and Libertarians.

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Presuming that the drama unfolding between President Trump and Elon Musk is not staged but rather a tragic case of a legacy party politician betraying an erstwhile ally, that alone may be the biggest commonalty between Musk’s envisioned America Party and Libertarians. We’ve been knifed in the back so many times by legacy candidates whom we’ve helped that every Libertarian registration should include a free tetanus shot! Experience, unfortunately, does little to lessen the sting.

But Libertarians are getting smarter, and quickly. We are the USA’s third largest party and rapidly growing. As this country becomes alarmingly polarized and the population further balkanized along the lines of intersectionality, the very paradigm of the government imposing one set of values on the whole country becomes untenable. It is time to minimize government to the essentials on which we all agree; national defense, the judiciary, and basic infrastructure. This is what the Libertarian Party proposes.

If all this makes sense to Elon Musk and those supporting the creation of the America Party, then have your people call my people and let’s talk turkey!