This is an adapted excerpt from the July 8 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”

Every so often in American politics, some rich guy with a big ego briefly entertains the idea of leading a new political party. Case in point: In 1999, Donald Trump explored the possibility of running for president under the Reform Party.

As we know, Trump ultimately did not run for president as a third-party candidate. When he finally did become president 18 years later, he did it the way every other American president has, by winning the nomination of one of the country’s two major political parties.

But the cycle of rich guys trying to form third parties, often because they think there is some sort of demand for their leadership from the American people, has been a constant in this country. From billionaire Ross Perot to former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to tech bro Andrew Yang, all of them have tried and failed to topple America’s two-party system.

Now, thanks to a bitter friendship breakup with Trump, Elon Musk has become the latest rich egomaniac to fall into this trap. Over the weekend, Musk announced he would be forming a new political party called the America Party. Musk said the party would caucus independently from Republicans and Democrats, making them the deciding vote on all matters that divide the two parties.

In characteristic Musk fashion, he’s already bragging about how easy this will all be. In a post on X, the billionaire wrote that breaking the grip of the two-party system is “Not hard tbh.”

However, new reporting about this nascent effort confirms what you have probably already guessed: Musk has no idea what he’s doing. This is how The New York Times described it: “As with many of his tweet-length proclamations, Mr. Musk’s plans for the new party are opaque. His private conversations about it so far have been conceptual and not focused on the details of what it would take to bring it to fruition, according to two people briefed on those talks.”

Play

‘Incredibly self-destructive.’ Tesla loses $68 billion in value after Musk unveils third party project July 7, 2025 / 07:01

According to the Times, Musk’s team “has not yet taken many operational steps to stand up the party,” but he has “ingested feedback about the effort — including what the party’s logo should look like — from Grok, his company’s artificial intelligence chatbot.” (That’s the same AI chatbot that went rogue on Tuesday and started spewing antisemitic hate while calling itself “MechaHitler.”)

The truth is that there are a lot of barriers to building a new political party in this country. For starters, every state has its own unique laws for how to get on the ballot. As election law expert Derek Muller pointed out, the state of New York “expressly prohibits a political party from having ‘American’ or part of that name in a party title.” That seems like a huge problem right out of the gate for Musk’s America Party.

Recommended

MS NOW Opinion

Elon Musk threatens war against the entire GOP

Zeeshan Aleem

Latest

AI-enabled Marco Rubio impostor reportedly targets top officials

Ja’han Jones

But the biggest impediment to Musk’s idea is the American political system itself. America has what’s called a “first past the post” election system, meaning whichever party gets the most votes wins. In the past, whenever a third party has entered the picture, it inevitably became a spoiler for the major party that most closely aligned with its views, like Ralph Nader in 2000 or Jill Stein in 2016.

Musk just spent six months taking a hatchet to the federal government and making an enemy of Democratic voters everywhere. It’s hard to see how a new political party born of that legacy would attract any left-leaning voters to Musk’s cause.

Musk has cited his own unscientific X poll that found 80% of respondents want to see a new party. But actual polling from the Pew Research Center finds that 80% of voters in both parties think rich donors, such as Musk, have too much influence in politics. That may be part of why the billionaire himself is viewed negatively by a majority of Americans, according to a poll from Quinnipiac University. There’s also Musk’s forays into politics in places like Wisconsin, which suggest he’s not exactly an expert when it comes to winning voters over to his side.

None of this is to say that America’s two-party political system is perfect and should never be questioned. That is exactly why there are places where they have done things a little differently. States like Alaska and Maine have adopted novel reforms like ranked choice voting, which experts say helps empower minority parties and gives voters more say in who they elect. Independent candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Angus King have found ways to get elected by working with the major parties.

But is Musk actually interested in any of that? Does he want to empower voters or work with existing parties? Or does he want to start a new party simply because his effort to buy one of the two major parties didn’t work out the way he thought it would? Or maybe it’s all just a vanity project to get the world’s most insecure billionaire some attention.