Before he goes too far in setting up his new America Party, Elon Musk should talk to Meg Whitman about how being a tech billionaire doesn’t make you a political wizard.
Whitman thought her wealth could buy the governorship of California in 2010. Of her $1.5 billion net worth that year, she blew $177 million on her campaign. Rival Jerry Brown spent just $36 million and crushed her, 53.8% to 40.9%. Her 4.1 million votes cost $43 per vote. His 5.4 million votes cost just $7 per vote, one-sixth as much.
There are many differences between the two situations which make things even harder for Musk. Whitman ran for the job herself and first garnered the Republican Party’s nomination. Musk is starting a third party from scratch and isn’t running.
Musk is the world’s richest man. He also has become a lightning rod for controversy, beginning with spending $277 million last year to elect President Trump and other Republicans. Then he became the unpopular head of the Department of Government Efficiency. Lately he’s been a gadfly attacking Trump for signing the Big Beautiful Bill adding $3.4 trillion to federal deficits over the next decade.
Whitman didn’t have anywhere near these liabilities at the outset of her candidacy for governor.
But there are similarities between the two. The main one is their shared belief that money is more important in politics than it really is. Certainly, money is needed – lots of it. But as Whitman’s foray showed, it’s not the only thing. She spent her money badly. Brown spent his money wisely, harvesting it until the final weeks of the campaign, when his spending equaled hers.
He also leveraged his name recognition as a former governor, attorney general and mayor of Oakland. And he had the strong support of the state’s most powerful force, the public-employee unions, whom he called his “troops.”
The key was Brown knew California politics better than anyone at the time, whereas Whitman was a neophyte. In Musk’s case, he explained his strategy on his X platform: “One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.”
Maybe. But as 1980s Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously put it, “All politics is local.” How is Musk, a fanatically micro-managing engineer, going to master 13 political races in highly divergent states or districts in this wildly diverse country of 340 million people? While also running Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, the Boring Company, X Corp. and xAI?
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Musk’s split from Trump alienated him from the still formidable MAGA movement. Any America Party candidate will be attacked by both Republican and Democratic opponents for the Musk association. As Whitman found out, politics isn’t a tech startup. It’s a quagmire.
John Seiler is on the SCNG Editorial Board
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