The world’s richest man’s call to tank President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act by swinging resources behind its opponents and pouring money into races against its proponents is the sort of thing that typically gets Washington to listen closely. Only this time, Elon Musk’s demands were broadly met with indifferent shrugs and questions about how serious his latest round of online fights with the president really was.
If he’s paying attention, Elon Musk is about to get a crash course in how Washington really works — a lesson other libertarian billionaire businessmen have learned the hard way. Power in D.C. doesn’t flow from money alone. It comes from organizing voters and proving you can be counted on.
Counseling humility to a man who builds rockets, launches them into space, and lands them upright may sound absurd. But political gravity works differently.
Washington has no shortage of young libertarians — idealistic staffers who devoured Ayn Rand in college and believe Reason magazine when it tells them that the Cato Institute and Mercatus Center are on the front lines of liberty.
The real problem? No sizeable bloc of voters stands behind these guys.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), perhaps the most consistent libertarian in the Senate, barely registered during his 2016 presidential bid. He pulled less than 5% in Iowa and dropped out soon after.
Libertarian Party candidates haven’t fared much better. Across seven presidential elections since 2000, they’ve averaged just 1.1% of the vote — a number buoyed by Gary Johnson’s 3.3% finish in 2016.
The party’s internal dysfunction aside, the bottom line remains: No hidden libertarian majority waits in the wings to back a Musk-led third party. Political outsiders like Andrew Yang or Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) might bring novelty, but not numbers.
Musk is hardly the first to figure this out the hard way, either. When billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch jumped back into presidential politics around the time of the Tea Party revolt, they believed Americans were finally waking up to the moment they’d long championed.
David, who died in 2019, had run on the 1980 Libertarian Party ticket against Republican California Gov. Ronald Reagan and Democratic President Jimmy Carter. He got 1.06% of the popular vote. This time they were going to remake the Republican Party in their own image.
They had the think tanks and donor networks. They had taken back control of Cato from the imperial president they once supported. And they believed the grassroots movement was more than just a backlash against a detached progressive elite.
I remember sitting in a room in 2011 when Charles acknowledged that reshaping the post-Bush Republican Party would take years — full of setbacks and frustrations. “We’re in this for the long haul,” he said.
Five years later, disillusionment had set in. He pulled back large portions of his political ad spending. That summer, at the network’s plush donor retreat, Brian Hooks — the man Koch tapped to lead the operation — ordered American flag imagery and a photo of a coal miner removed from the conference hotel’s lobby displays. Too partisan, he said. In the retreat bookstore, JD Vance’s best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy” sat alongside Milton Friedman’s collected works and Charles Koch’s own “The Science of Success.”
Five months later, Donald J. Trump won the presidential election, and they were out. In those short five years, they’d succeeded in alienating Republican politicians and even a goodly number of the nonprofits they’d funded along the way, piling money in and pulling it out without warning as Hooks’ deep-seated liberalism and Charles’ fickle commitments ebbed and flowed. National Football League and Major League Baseball legend Deion Sanders spoke.
Every year, they roll out new plans to re-engage and make a difference. But it’s too late for that. In politics — a trust-based field — no one earns credibility by being unreliable or duplicitous, no matter how lofty the rhetoric.
This story deserves attention because it explains why the world’s richest man can vow to pour boatloads of money into the midterms next year and still come across as little more than a social media sideshow.
Both Charles Koch and Elon Musk stepped into the center of American power believing politicians simply needed smart business minds to fix the country. They expected gratitude. Instead, they found inertia. When change didn’t come quickly, they grew frustrated and alienated allies along the way.
Musk still has time. He’s young and brilliant, and despite his quirks and blowups, he brings real value to American political life. Counseling humility to a man who builds rockets, launches them into space, and lands them upright may sound absurd. But political gravity works differently.
Both Musk and MAGA could benefit a great deal from working together. But first, Musk will have to absorb a few hard lessons.
Conundrum Cluster: Musk’s rebellion illustrates the danger of political inexperience in an existential struggle
Blaze News: Vance casts tiebreaking vote after Republican defections from Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’
Byron York in the Washington Examiner: Elon goes off again
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