Elon Musk Tricked Into Doing The Bidding Of The Oil Industry

Elon Musk is now saying that he’s going to start a new political party, because he stormed out of the Democratic Party and then seems to have gotten kicked out of the Trump Party. There’s so much political naivety here, going back years, and it’s quite funny that his next step is to try to launch a new political party to break up the dominance of Republicans and Democrats. How many times has this been tried by now?

Before we get back to that, I think it’s just worth highlighting that Elon Musk essentially got tricked into helping the fossil fuel industry — well, fossil fuel industries, since the GOP constantly works according to the agenda of the oil industry, the gas industry, and the coal industry. What did Democrats do to hurt or help Tesla when they had power for two years? They:

• passed legislation reviving the $7,500 tax credit for Tesla vehicles
• passed legislation that funds more growth of the Tesla Supercharger network (and other EV charging networks, of course)
• passed legislation that provides tax credits to companies producing electric vehicles (e.g., Tesla), companies producing EV battery packs (e.g., Tesla), companies producing EV battery cells (e.g., Tesla), and companies mining or refining materials used in EV batteries (e.g., Tesla)
• raised US vehicle efficiency standards, pushing more automakers to produce and sell more EVs
• held a press conference praising EV leadership in the auto industry, but stupidly excluded Tesla — because they were only focused on unionized workforces (Tesla isn’t unionized and Elon Musk has been convicted of union busting).

Elon Musk fans have largely focused on the final point in that list in the last few years, pushed on by spiteful comments from Elon Musk about it. That and other topics Elon Musk got roped into led to Musk supporting the Republican Party recent elections, and may have been critical to Donald Trump winning the presidency again. So, what has resulted now that Republicans have full power again? Naturally, the oil-soaked Republican Party has decided to kill most of those EV-supportive policy. Meanwhile, the budget bill the GOP just passed is full of pork and Musk hates the bill. Effectively, he was tricked — elaborately — into supporting a party that was going to hurt his main company, Tesla.

Now, some people might point out that he did get some things out of this alliance. In his brief role as the head of DOGE, he got about a dozen investigations into his companies and himself killed. Aside from our own previous coverage on this, you can read articles about what he did here, here, here, and here.

Anyway, back to the idea of launching a new political party, this is where things may turn out for the better again. It depends on how long Musk thinks he can actually win in this effort. No new political party is going to win in a presidential race, or in probably any House or Senate race. It’s not happening. Ask Ross Perot, or someone who worked for him. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t have an effect. If such a new party does build momentum for the next big federal elections, it could certainly take enough votes from one party to provide the other party with a win. At this point in time, I don’t think there are many Democrats at all who find Elon Musk’s politics appealing. He has gone far right, implementing cruel and unhelpful policies and programs. He’s not “center right.” He’s not going to pull a lot of Democrats to his party after what he’s done with the Republican Party. On the other hand, perhaps there are a lot of voters who were in the Republican Party or swung over to voting for it who will follow Elon Musk wherever he goes. I would certainly expect more of such people than people who voted for Kamala Harris in the last election leaving the Democratic Party. So, in the end, if Musk continues forward with this new party, in the end, it could swing the pendulum of power back to Democrats after all. We’ll see … but I’m skeptical about Elon Musk keeping a focus on this long enough to make a difference. We’ll see.