July 7, 2025 - 10:00am

What happens to Elon Musk’s failed ideas? It seems they whirr on somewhere in the background of his mind, just more slowly. For instance, despite not having revolutionized inner-city transport, Musk’s The Boring Company continues pointlessly pushing Teslas from one side of Las Vegas to the other via an underground tunnel. It’s decent PR, even if it has never scaled.

The question is germane because it’s not quite clear what will become of his latest venture, The America Party, when it fails in its primary goal. Musk announced its formation over the weekend in the aftermath of his row with Donald Trump. In response, the President labeled the project “ridiculous”. It will never win any sort of election, but it’s also unlikely to go bankrupt. Rather, it’ll be reconstituted into a powerful influencing machine.

Many have already tried to start a new party in the US. In 1992, Texan businessman Ross Perot got 19% of the vote as an independent presidential candidate, before going on to establish the Reform Party in 1995. He stood again in 1996 but failed to make a dent. Teddy Roosevelt split the electorate in 1912 with the Progressive Party. None have won office. The system is entirely structured to be reactive. Democrats and Republicans might be “two corpses propping each other up”, but they will prop each other up forever.

The first clue as to the party’s real purpose might lie in Musk’s only statement so far on the project. He suggests it could “micro-target close races”. In effect, this is already what a range of special-interest groups, from the NRA to the Israel lobby, do in America through PACs (political action campaigns). Is The America Party just a series of PACs, guard dogs of Musk’s pet issues, ready to be unleashed on whomever catches his ire in a regional race?

The only other clue is in the place and time of the first America Party conference. That is to say, the Tesla boss has asked “the people” to choose it. Running polls has long been Musk’s personal ideology, as seen on X. But now, he might make it a political ideology.

In that, there is a fascinating parallel with the work of another recent political upstart in Britain. Last week Rupert Lowe launched a “policy platform” called Restore Britain. Musk even found time to comment under Lowe’s X announcement by posting a couple of Union Jacks. Lowe claims to be crowdsourcing his policies. Though the exact mechanism remains unclear, he promises a kind of direct democracy, via the membership micro-voting on proposals. Presumably, he is therefore promising to implement their decisions, although how this will be done also remains unclear.

In the same way, Musk hasn’t quite said how he will pull together policy for his own party. But it wouldn’t be surprising if his wildly demotic language and general air of techno-utopianism results in something similar. Lowe’s project is avowedly “not a party”. It is a pressure group, a coalition of citizens — a British PAC, you could almost say.

We might wonder whether, between the pair of them, we aren’t at the threshold of a new exhausting era of direct-drive democracy. The argument against what we might call Athenian democracy has always been that it is too intellectually complex, too unworkable, for every citizen to vote on every law. But today, technology is increasingly making it simpler; populism’s third act could simply be to chuck the keys to the people through an app on their phones.

It might seem like something from a sci-fi film to imagine a world in which politicians have near-zero name recognition because they are term-limited mere ciphers for endless plebiscites. And yet it would be rather ironic if this hyper-democracy is ushered in by the world’s richest man, who has never won an election in his life.


Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes