Elon Musk says he has created a new U.S. political party
The world's richest person — and Trump's biggest political donor in the 2024 election — had a bitter falling out with the president after leading the Republican's effort to slash spending and cut federal jobs as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk has clashed with Trump over the president's massive domestic spending plan, saying it would explode the U.S. debt, and vowed to do everything in his power to defeat lawmakers who voted for it.
Now he has created the so-called America Party, his own political framework, through which to try and achieve that.
"When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy," the Space X and Tesla boss posted on X, the social media platform that he owns.
"Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom."
Musk cited a poll — uploaded on Friday, U.S. Independence Day — in which he asked whether respondents "want independence from the two-party (some would say uniparty) system" that has dominated U.S. politics for some two centuries.
The yes-or-no survey earned more than 1.2 million responses.
"By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!" he posted on Saturday.
Musk also shared a meme depicting a two-headed snake and the caption "End the Uniparty."
It is not clear how much impact the new party would have on the 2026 midterm elections, or on the presidential vote two years after that.
The Trump-Musk feud reignited in dramatic fashion late last month as Trump pushed Republicans in Congress to ram through his massive domestic agenda in the form of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Musk expressed fierce opposition to the legislation, and ruthlessly attacked its Republican backers for supporting "debt slavery."
He vowed to launch a new political party to challenge lawmakers who campaigned on reduced federal spending only to vote for the bill, which experts say will pile an extra $3.4 trillion over a decade onto the U.S. deficit.
"They will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth," Musk said last week.
After Musk heavily criticized the flagship spending bill — which eventually passed Congress and was signed into law — Trump threatened to deport the tech tycoon and strip federal funds from his businesses.
"We'll have to take a look," the president told reporters when asked if he would consider deporting Musk, who was born in South Africa and has held U.S. citizenship since 2002.
On Friday after posting the poll, Musk laid out a possible political battle plan to pick off vulnerable House and Senate seats and become "the deciding vote" on key legislation.
"One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts," Musk posted on X.
All 435 U.S. House seats are up for grabs every two years, while about one third of the Senate's 100 members, who serve six-year terms, are elected every two years.
Some observers were quick to point out how third-party campaigns have historically split the vote — as businessman Ross Perot's independent presidential run in 1992 did when it helped doom George H.W. Bush's re-election bid resulting in Democrat Bill Clinton's victory.
"You are pulling a Ross Perot, and I don't like it," one X user wrote to Musk.
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With most of the apartments and hotel rooms sold off years ago, Trump's ownership stake is comprised mostly of some 70,000 square feet of retail space that he had hoped would produce millions of dollars a year in rental income. Designed below street level with little visibility to passersby, those floors remain empty 16 years after the building was finished. Things did not go measurably better with Trump's redevelopment of the Old Post Office in Washington, which opened as a hotel in 2016. He never recorded a profitable year there - despite its becoming a destination for acolytes of Trump during his first administration. He sold his interests in 2022 to a private equity firm for $375 million, a price that elicited excitement from the Trumps. "To say the result is a financial success would be an understatement,' Eric Trump wrote in an email to company employees. But company documents filed in the fraud case show that the sale did not cover Trump's costs on the project. 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Not looking to build Trump rarely escapes to anywhere on weekends and vacations other than his own golf courses, where he goes to exercise, relax and be seen. He has said that those 14 courses do not represent a "major business' for him, rather investments that reflect his love of the game. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars remaking them to his tastes, often with ornate clubhouses and elaborate artificial waterfalls. Those investments have not always paid off. A golf course appraisal expert for the New York attorney general's office examined the financial records of all but one of Trump's golf courses for 2011 through 2021 and found that at least half of them reported negative cash flow for multiple years. One email showed Allen Weisselberg, the company's longtime head of finance, notifying Trump's two elder sons that the Trump Organization produced only $2.2 million in 2017, before taxes or disbursements to the family. A primary culprit was the golf courses, where the Trumps had spent almost $13 million more than planned on maintenance and improvements, while the courses brought in $15 million less in operating profits than expected. Trump has also described his courses as real estate development projects in waiting. But the Trumps have not created a record of success toward that goal. Their efforts to add homes to his two courses in Scotland, for example, stalled. The Trumps did win approval in January for a major development in the parking lot at Trump National Doral, a golf resort near Miami. The project would include nearly 1,500 condominium apartments and more than 140,000 square feet of commercial space. But that plan does not appear to be the one that will restart the Trumps' real estate development business anytime soon. During his deposition in the fraud case, Trump said that he might build there in a decade, leave it for his children to develop or "sell it to another developer for a lot of money and let them do it.' He said he often sought zoning approval to develop, just in case. Regardless, Trump added, "we're not actively looking to build.' In 2021, Deutsche Bank, which held Trump's mortgage, hired the firm Newmark to appraise Doral, Trump's highest-revenue resort, with four courses and 643 hotel rooms. The resulting analysis concluded that Trump had spent $379 million buying and renovating the resort, and that it was worth only $297 million. The appraisal included an even more jarring finding. While Doral, like several of Trump's properties, was known to benefit from people looking to buy proximity to a president during Trump's first term, his managers believed even more potential customers stayed away because of him. Trump's divisive public comments over time had pushed down bookings and room rates for six years running, his managers told the appraisers. The managers believed that "the Trump brand has negatively impacted' revenues at Doral. Newmark's experts agreed, writing that "we believe that with a different brand, the subject might perform better.' Spigot turned back on The Doral appraisal highlights perhaps the starkest turn in the Trump family's finances. The value of the Trump name as a brand on real estate projects and mass-market consumer goods made by others, both here and abroad, was central to sustaining his businesses during his peak years on "The Apprentice.' The annual reports that the Trumps sent to their lenders showed television and licensing profits totaled $259 million from 2011 to 2017. But even with that deluge of cash, Donald Trump still reported an overall negative cash flow of $46.8 million from his empire. Donald Trump Jr. testified glowingly during the fraud trial about those licensing deals. Compared with real estate development, they required no investment and little labor. "I don't want to say it was free revenue,' he said, but "it was a pretty spectacular system that we were able to create.' But the cash gusher from entertainment had slowed to a trickle by the time the elder Trump entered politics, and after he entered the White House in 2017, the company fell into a dry spell for new licensing deals. Some of that was because the Trump Organization pledged not to sign new foreign deals in an attempt to avoid conflicts of interest. After Trump left office in January 2021, the Trump Organization did not announce a major new branding agreement until late 2022 — for a golf resort in Oman. The spigot of foreign branding deals did not fully turn back on until after Trump clinched the Republican nomination and a second term seemed within reach. After that, nine deals were announced in rapid succession: one each for developments in Vietnam and Serbia, two in India and five on the Arabian Peninsula, including a golf resort in Qatar, a residential tower in Jeddah, another tower in Dubai and two more in Riyadh. All but one of the new licensing contracts came from relationships that predated Trump's first presidency. And some of those paying for the Trump name have made clear that his official stature was part of the attraction. Kalpesh Mehta, a real estate developer in India, signed his first licensing deal with the Trumps 12 years ago. Mehta has said he met Donald Trump Jr. while they were both studying at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Donald Trump Jr. has joked that they are "like an old married couple.' During inaugural events in January of this year, Mehta met with Eric Trump at Mar-a-Lago and the president-elect at the Trump golf course in Virginia. Weeks later, the Trumps and Mehta signed a new licensing deal for a commercial office tower in Pune, India. They announced yet another deal - their sixth - in April. Mehta did not respond to requests for comment but has said that Trump-branded properties draw heightened interest in India. Donald Trump's deals on the Arabian Peninsula all share a connection to one man: Ziad El Chaar, a Lebanese-born construction executive who first brought Trump into a branding agreement in 2013, for a golf course in Dubai, through a construction company based there called DAMAC. El Chaar has since become CEO of DarGlobal, a subsidiary of Dar Al Arkan Real Estate, a large Saudi Arabia-based construction company with ties to the Saudi government. He has signed five more deals with the Trumps since last summer. During a DarGlobal event introducing the Oman project, El Chaar said the Trump name "immediately put the project on the global map.' Through a spokesperson, El Chaar declined to discuss DarGlobal's contracts with the Trumps. Financial support from Saudi Arabia has also helped Trump's golf courses. Since 2022, the Saudi-backed LIV Golf league has paid him to host annual tournaments at his resorts in Doral, Florida, and Bedminster, New Jersey. Neither the league nor Trump has revealed the amount of money involved. Trump has used his presidential bully pulpit to advocate for a merger between the U.S.-based PGA Tour and LIV Golf, which could reunite the world's top golfers on courses Trump owns. On his federal financial disclosure forms, Trump has not been required to divulge the full amount promised to him in any of his licensing deals, only what he receives during a given year, which sometimes includes a management fee. What information he has released suggests that the Trumps have raised the price for use of their name. Trump's tax returns during his television celebrity years showed payments in round numbers when he signed a licensing contract, typically $750,000 or $1 million. Financial disclosure forms he recently filed showed payments of exactly $5 million each for the deal in Vietnam and one with El Chaar's company. But in terms of the potential for anyone, from anywhere, to transmit hundreds of millions of dollars to a U.S. president, the recent wave of licensing agreements was only a warmup. A massive stockpile Last December, just months after Trump and his two eldest sons made their first public comments in support of digital currencies, Eric Trump was invited to appear as the keynote speaker at a bitcoin conference in Abu Dhabi. He addressed the question he presumed to be on everyone's mind: Why are you here? "I know all of you are thinking: 'Eric, you're from real estate family. You've spent your entire life in real estate, concrete, drywall,'' he said. "I built Trump Chicago,' he added twice, referring to a four-year project completed when he was 24. Sixteen years after completion of the Chicago tower, the Trumps still invoke its memory to establish business gravitas and their chosen identity as real estate developers. But their recent moves into crypto and other enterprises bear more in common with Donald Trump's licensing deals: little or no investment, risk or operational responsibility. Trump, and to a lesser extent his sons, generally serve as a means to draw attention and convert the president's political supporters into investors and paying customers. Trump has invested nothing in Trump Media, the parent company of the social media site Truth Social, and has no official duties. But he received more than half of the company's stock, a stake that has fallen in value but is still worth $2 billion. In crypto, the Trumps have entered into a series of partnerships. Their partners were the ones who have invested most or all of the capital, or raised money through token sales, and run the businesses. The crypto coins issued to the Trump family through its first foray into the sector, World Liberty Financial, have recently been worth at least $236 million. The Trumps' sale of meme coins, otherwise worthless collectible digital trinkets, has been particularly lucrative. The fees collected by Trump and his associates on those sales have so far totaled $320 million, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm. The meme coins have proved to be a multimillion-dollar leap from the Trump-branded Bibles, guitars and watches that the Trumps sold during last year's campaign. The long-term viability of the new businesses remains unclear, as does the liquidity of some of Trump's holdings in them. He cannot yet sell most of his crypto coins. And he would most likely crush Trump Media if he unloaded his stock, even as the company continues to lose money and struggles to produce $1 million per quarter in revenue, roughly the average of a single McDonald's restaurant. But the new cash has already helped solve old problems. Last month, the Trumps paid off the $115 million mortgage coming due on 40 Wall St. Analysts had said that the building's low rental income would make banks squeamish about refinancing. Going forward, the new enterprises represent a massive stockpile with the potential to cover legal judgments, mortgage payments and holes in balance sheets for years to come. This article originally appeared in The New York Times © 2025 The New York Times Company
