Elon Musk: The GOP’s Favorite Fake Rebel— The Billionaire Who Cried “Third Party”

Musk’s Techno-Authoritarian Fantasy Amounts To A Revolution Of One

For all his performative carrying on about starting a third party and about how bad the GOP and Trump are, Musk was still the largest single donor to committees supporting Republicans in congressional races. After his “break” with Trump— which many people think was just an act for the sake of the Tesla brand— he spent millions of dollars on Republican candidates. Joe Miller and Alex Rogers reported that Musk donated $10 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund, $5 million each to the two main Super Pacs backing House and Senate Republican candidates. He gave another $5 million to MAGA Inc, Trump’s superPAC. This was on June 27, after Trump fired him and just a few days before he claimed to be forming a third party (of which nothing has come so far).

“The contributions came weeks into Musk’s public feud with Trump,” wrote Jessica Piper, “as the tech billionaire was slamming Republicans for voting for the megabill that he argued would blow up the deficit.”

The multibillionaire South African Nazi’s own super PAC, America PAC, has just $200,000, so he’s certainly not funding it on the level he’s still funding the Republican Party. “Musk,”wrote Miller and Rogers, “had donated $45 million to America PAC over the period, spending much of it on supporting Brad Schimel, a conservative candidate for state supreme court in Wisconsin who ended up losing by 10 percentage points. The world’s richest man, who spent more than $250 million supporting Trump in his election campaign last year, had signalled in May that he would pare back his political donations altogether, amid frustration over Schimel’s loss and a backlash against his businesses over his role at the helm of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).”

Soon afterwards the relationship between Musk and Trump blew up spectacularly, after the billionaire suggested the White House’s signature tax and spending bill was “pork-filled” and reignited speculation that the president had been close to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

In response, Trump said the government might cancel lucrative contracts with Musk’s companies, such as SpaceX and Starlink, and even suggested his former ally could be deported.

On July 5, a frustrated Musk claimed to have formed the “America Party,” saying he would “focus for the next twelve months” on supporting candidates standing against Republicans.

However, there has been no sign of Musk or his allies taking the necessary steps to establish a party, either at a local level or nationwide.

Tensions between Trump and his former donor appear to have eased in recent days, with the president saying he wanted Musk’s businesses to “thrive.”

And for all Musk’s public boasting he would disrupt the midterms with his own political party, so far… crickets. There is no America Party except in his tweets. Instead he’s been busy losing nearly a billion dollars with his idiotic Boring Company. Kiel Porter reported that “the company has started digging just one public project: An underground loop in Las Vegas that ferries conference-goers to and from a convention center and to several hotels. While the city has approved 68 miles of tunnels, Boring has dug about eight miles, and less than four miles are operational… The tunneling venture has either pitched or been selected to carry out more than a half dozen other US municipal projects since 2017, but there’s no evidence that the company has broken any ground outside of Vegas. Most recently, it has pledged to dig 10 miles of tunnel in Nashville and 10 miles in Dubai. Some initiatives have been stalled or mothballed, while the company has walked away from others. These days, the company is building tunnels to connect Musk’s own properties, according to people familiar with the plans. They say the aim is to allow Boring, SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter employees to shuttle back and forth underneath a road in the rural Texas town of Bastrop, where the billionaire has been expanding his business empire.”

It’s not just Musk who has split his responsibilities of late. Boring CEO and long-time Musk deputy Steve Davis has played a leading role in the billionaire’s cost-cutting efforts in Washington. Davis, an aerospace engineer by training who’s known for keeping intense hours and sleeping at work, disappeared from Boring’s Texas headquarters for long stretches as he was doing Musk’s bidding with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

… It’s not hard to see why cities initially go for the Boring pitch: Musk promises the company can execute notoriously difficult underground infrastructure projects at a fraction of the time and cost with its proprietary machines— and it will finance them privately to boot. The result will be a far superior mass transit system.

And yet Boring’s bids appear to rarely leave the drawing board. Infrastructure experts say they see red flags in many of the fundamentals, from the low proposed price tags to the tunnels’ efficiency promises.

“There is no way mathematically that this could be the kind of grand solution to a city’s transportation problems that they’re pitching,” said Jarrett Walker, an international public transit planning consultant who has developed plans for transit systems in Miami, San Jose and other cities. He has not worked or consulted for Musk. He points to Boring’s ultimate plan for Vegas, which calls for a complicated lattice of tunnels allowing a car to go directly from one station to any of the other 103 stations.

… While Boring slogged along, some employees said they felt the grand promise of the tunneling company start to crumble. The reality on the ground didn’t look like the idea of hyperloop pods traveling 150 miles per hour that would whisk people where they needed to go and help them outwit traffic, according to a number of former employees who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Some said they found themselves working 80 hours a week in the relative isolation of Bastrop on a downgraded mission to develop an underground taxi network in Sin City.

Many high-achieving, recent engineering graduates were only making starting salaries of around $70,000 a year, some of the people said… [C]hurn became the norm on Boring’s team, which numbered about 250 people as of the end of last year, according to PrivCo’s estimates.

As for rethinking tunneling technology, former employees and experts say Boring has yet to debut anything that comes close to Musk’s initial promises. The company largely completed the initial phase of the Vegas project with a machine built by a Canadian manufacturer that it purchased and modified.

That machine, which was 12 feet in diameter, previously had been used to dig storm water channels— not transportation tunnels— yet it became the basis for a new machine Boring first unveiled in 2020 dubbed “Prufrock,” according to people familiar with the technology who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Boring has said its machines dig narrower tunnels to reduce costs and construction time. But the smaller the tunnels, the more limited their functionality will be, the people said. Davis pushes the Boring team to build a new, improved Prufrock about every six months— an “impossible” goal it has yet to meet, said former employees. Prufrock 5 is currently in testing, they said.

Boring has made some technological advancements, such as giving the machine the ability to emerge at the surface upon completion, which eliminates the need to build an excavation pit to extract it. But the time and cost savings from that capability are marginal at best, said Mike Mooney, professor of underground construction and tunneling at Colorado School of Mines.

Tunneling speed is a key challenge in an industry where it can cost about $300 million a mile to dig underground. “The notion of a machine rapidly coming out of the ground and porpoising is a bit of a show statement, but it doesn’t really move the needle on the overall kind of cost or effectiveness of building underground,” Mooney said.

At one point, Boring was name-dropped in plans far more ambitious than transforming cities with underground tubes for Teslas, let alone hyperloop pods. “The Boring Company could be the way that we house people on Mars,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC in 2018. 

For now, the company’s technology is being used mainly to connect Musk’s various facilities in rural Texas.

On a recent visit to Bastrop, a Boring machine was making the ground shake as it dug underneath a dual-lane road cutting through Musk’s growing corporate campus that’s surrounded by farmland about 30 miles outside Austin. When there aren’t traffic jams, a steady stream of trucks barrel down this smog-laden road at 60 miles an hour.

Musk’s various facilities are walkable in theory but it involves navigating that traffic without the help of sidewalks or stoplights.

Boring is solving that problem with tunnels. An existing tunnel already connects Boring and SpaceX; the new one will connect SpaceX with Twitter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Boring, SpaceX and Twitter employees work here and some of them live nearby in company-owned, prefabricated trailer homes where they can use pre-tax dollars to rent rooms for less than $1,000 a month. On a sweltering day in May, about a half a dozen of them were milling around the Boring Bodega down the road— one of the only options for socializing— which serves up Flamethrower margaritas among other Boring-themed cocktails. It was too hot to play cornhole outside, so they played ping pong and vintage Nintendo.

Musk has other plans in the works for Boring, including more housing and roads on campus, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The permitting process has been time-consuming, judging by months of emails between the company and state and local representatives despite Boring’s efforts to step up lobbying in the last year.

The company may yet make good on the promise to transform a town— or at least a small corner of one. This one just happens to be a company town.

So… for all his bluster about launching a third party to shake up the system, Musk remains firmly entrenched in the Republican donor class, quietly bankrolling the very forces he publicly pretends to oppose… while digging up Bastrop. His political theatrics— tweeting about the so-called “America Party” while funneling millions to Trump’s Super PAC, MAGA Mike’s Congressional Leadership Fund and Thune’s Senate Leadership Fund— seem to a lot of people less a break with MAGA than a marketing ploy to soften his image among disillusioned moderates and potential Tesla customers. Behind the performative feuds and grandiose pronouncements, Musk is still underwriting the machinery of the authoritarian right.

And while he toys with American politics like a rich man’s hobby, his supposed innovations in transportation and infrastructure are unraveling into vanity projects and broken promises. The Boring Company’s dreams of revolutionizing mass transit have collapsed into a subterranean amusement ride for conventioneers and a glorified shuttle between Musk’s own offices in exurban, rural Texas. Instead of building a new future, he’s building a company town— complete with tunnels, prefab housing, and branded margaritas— where workers live under surveillance, earn low wages and are funneled back and forth like test subjects in his sprawling techno-fiefdom. Musk isn’t disrupting politics or transit; he’s entrenching power, one failed tunnel and cynical donation at a time.