The America Party Is From the ‘Musk Playbook’

If Elon Musk ever had to write a cover letter, he might say that he’s the kind of leader who identifies an important problem and launches into action to find a solution — regardless of the odds.

He wouldn’t be lying. It’s one of his primary traits as a business leader.

Musk has a long history of founding and leading companies designed to tackle issues he feels need to be addressed. The latest example is his announcement over the weekend that he was moving forward with plans to create a new political party, the America Party for the “80% in the middle,” to break the impasse formed by the two-party system in the United States.

Musk has shown a tendency to identify a challenge and home in on it as the fixer without necessarily considering whether he’s best suited to do so, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management leadership professor, told BI.

“That is the Musk playbook,” he said.

Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

While Musk’s America Party is his reaction to President Donald Trump’s sprawling spending bill, which will likely add to the national deficit and which Musk has repeatedly criticized, he earlier described his new party as one that would represent voters in the middle of the political spectrum.

The America Party isn’t Musk’s first long shot

Breaking the two-party system is a tall order. None of the many previous attempts have come close. Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party garnered 27% of the vote in 1912, and Ross Perot took in 19% of the vote in 1992 as an independent before forming the Reform Party for his 1996 bid.

But Musk is not one to shy away from the difficult.

“When something is important enough, you do it, even if the odds are not in your favor,” Musk told “60 Minutes” in 2012.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman, with whom Musk is currently engaged in a legal battle, has put it another way.

Related stories

“Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it,” Altman said in a 2023 interview.

When challenges arise at one of Musk’s companies, he “goes all in on it,” Andy Wu, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, previously told BI.

Musk founded SpaceX a decade earlier, easily his most ambitious project, investing $100 million of his own fortune despite having no experience in aerospace engineering. With its reusable rockets, SpaceX overtook legacy aerospace giants to become the dominant launch provider for astronauts, satellites, and commercial payloads. Musk says his goal is to make space travel more accessible and to give life on Earth an option should the human race face extinction at home.

“I’ve said I want to die on Mars — just not on impact,” Musk said during a 2013 keynote at South by Southwest.

Musk became an early investor in Tesla to tackle another problem he viewed as important: the environmental impact of fossil fuels. In 2006, before he became CEO, he wrote he was funding the company to “help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.” While Musk went on to create the most profitable EV company in the world, it has more recently struggled as Musk’s foray into government impacted the brand and confounded investors.

Even The Boring Company, which Musk founded in 2017 to dig tunnels for underground transport, was born from Musk’s frustration with Los Angeles traffic.

“Traffic is driving me nuts,” Musk posted in December 2016. “Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…”

The Boring Company has since completed four operational tunnels in Las Vegas that are open to the public, while other proposed projects, such as a high-speed tunnel in Chicago and a Washington-to-Baltimore hyperloop, have been shelved.

Buying Twitter was part of Musk’s ‘battle for the future of civilization’

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022 was a big swing — a $44 billion one, to be exact — to address another complex issue Musk saw as important.

In the wake of the pandemic and civil rights unrest, Musk said he worried that the freedom to say anything you wanted was at risk. Buying Twitter was his solution.

“This is a battle for the future of civilization,” he said on Twitter in 2022 after acquiring it, six months before he rebranded it as X. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”

Musk has also voiced concerns about the future of artificial intelligence. He’s gone to war with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over that company’s attention to its mission, which Musk helped craft as an early cofounder: to develop artificial general intelligence in a way that benefits humanity. Musk sees AGI as an existential threat, and said it is one of the reasons he founded xAI, the startup behind the Grok chatbot, in 2023.

“I’m going to start something which I call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk told Fox News in 2023, adding that xAI “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans.”

AI is also part of his stated reasoning for founding Neuralink, which designs brain chips so humans can interact with computers. The chip is now in trials and used by a handful of disabled patients, who use it to more easily communicate, operate computers, or play video games. Musk has said that the ability for humans to integrate directly with machines can help ensure human control of AI.

He said in a 2021 podcast appearance that he created Neuralink “specifically to address the AI symbiosis problem, which I think is an existential threat.”

Musk’s political problem-solving

Musk may not be able to apply the same strategy to solving massive political challenges, said Sonnenfeld, the Yale professor, who’s also the founder of Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute.

“He is great as a technology creator and entrepreneur, but not great in turnarounds and has been quite ham-handed in government, if not brutally offensive,” Sonnenfeld said.

With his efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk set out to cut what he described as fraudulent or excessive spending. The group’s cost-cutting efforts spurred widespread layoffs across federal departments — actions that drew backlash from some on the political left.

In the spring, Musk said that DOGE had been effective, though not to the degree he’d hoped. The spending cuts so far have fallen short of the initial target of slashing $2 trillion from federal outlays.

There are signs that Musk, whose plans for a new party attracted support from Mark Cuban among others, is open to taking a measured approach with his latest political play.

Musk said on Sunday that while the America Party may consider “backing a candidate for president” down the line, its main focus “for the next 12 months is on the House and the Senate.”

Sonnenfeld said that Musk doesn’t appear to have the skills and diplomacy needed to build his party, adding that the reaction among many investors and consumers to his political efforts has been “overwhelmingly negative.”

“He’s a brilliant technologist and an entrepreneur who doesn’t know his limits — and he has them,” Sonnenfeld said.