Written by: Oliver, Mars Finance
On July 5, 2025, Elon Musk dropped a bombshell on social media, announcing the establishment of the “American Party.” This is not just another billionaire’s whimsical political stunt, but a carefully calculated radical experiment. The immediate catalyst was his complete break with former President Trump over a massive spending bill that would result in an additional $3.3 trillion deficit. However, the true goal of this movement may not be to win a traditional election, but rather to use the logic of tech elites and the tools of the crypto world to “fork” the entrenched democratic process in the United States—replicating its foundation and then iterating and evolving in a new direction to reshape the way power operates.
Breakup: The Catalyst Forged in the Flames of Finance
The alliance between Musk and Trump was one of the most striking political landscapes after the 2024 election. Musk not only invested heavily in support but also personally took office, heading the newly established “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), vowing to cut trillions in federal spending. However, this honeymoon period came to an abrupt end with the introduction of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA).
The scale of this bill is unprecedented, with its core being the permanent implementation of Trump’s tax cuts while significantly increasing defense and border security spending, and cutting social welfare. According to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will add nearly $3.3 trillion to the U.S. fiscal deficit over the next decade. This figure has become an insurmountable red line for Musk. He has denounced the bill as “utter madness and destruction,” a fast track to “debt servitude,” and openly promised that if the bill passes, “the American Party will be formed the next day.”
Musk’s anger stems from a profound sense of betrayal. The DOGE department he leads has a core mission of fiscal tightening and government slimming, representing the tech libertarian philosophy of “small government, high efficiency, hard currency.” The passing of OBBBA, in his view, is a blatant denial of this mission. This conflict is not merely a policy disagreement but a direct clash of two worldviews: one side follows a Trump-style political logic that consolidates the populist base through massive fiscal spending; the other adheres to Musk-style technocratic principles that embrace first principles, pursue system efficiency, and seek fiscal sustainability. When Trump openly threatened to make DOGE “go back and devour Musk,” the once-alliance was completely shattered, making the birth of the “American Party” inevitable.
Strategy: The Asymmetric Game of “Creating Kings”
When announcing the establishment of the “American Party,” Musk did not propose a grand blueprint aimed at winning the national election. Instead, he unveiled an unusual and highly focused strategy: the initial goal is solely to secure “2 to 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts” in the 2026 midterm elections. The core of this strategy is not to become the majority party, but to become the “critical minority” in a closely divided Congress, thereby playing the role of a “kingmaker.”
Elon Musk uses a clever historical metaphor to reveal his strategic thinking: “We will adopt a variant of the tactics employed by General Epaminondas of Thebes to shatter the invincible myth of Sparta in the Battle of Leuctra, to crack the ‘two-party system’: concentrating highly concentrated forces at the precise location on the battlefield.” In the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, Epaminondas did not distribute his forces evenly; instead, he concentrated his main force on the left wing, achieving a decisive victory over Sparta’s elite with overwhelming local superiority.
Musk’s strategy is a modern political application of this ancient wisdom. He understands that, in the current context of political polarization in the United States and the very small margin between the parties in congressional seats, a third-party group that has even just a few seats but acts in unison can have a decisive influence on key legislative votes. This is a politically efficient investment that seeks to achieve the greatest policy impact with the least cost, forcing both parties to make concessions on core issues such as fiscal discipline and deregulation. This is a typical form of asymmetric warfare, aimed at disrupting and reshaping the entire political market landscape with minimal input.
Foundation: Mobilizing the invisible “crypto constituency”
Any political movement requires a basic support base, and Musk’s “American Party” seems to have found a ready-made, well-funded, and ideologically aligned group: the cryptocurrency industry and its supporters. This circle, which once strayed from mainstream politics, is now rising as a political force that cannot be ignored.
The 2024 election cycle witnessed the industry’s astonishing political donation power. Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs), funded by crypto giants like Coinbase and Ripple, such as Fairshake, have invested over $119 million to influence elections, with the candidates they support having a very high success rate in the primaries, demonstrating their precise and powerful political operational capabilities. This strong capital force provides a solid financial foundation for emerging forces like the “American Party.”
In addition to strong capital, a pro-crypto political ecosystem has quietly taken shape in multiple states across the United States. From Arizona to Ohio and Texas, several key states have either passed or are considering legislation that allows digital assets like Bitcoin to be included in government reserves or public pension funds. This political map reveals a clear trend: in the battleground states that determine control of Congress, there is already a voter base that is friendly to cryptocurrencies.
Looking deeper, Elon Musk’s repeated use of the term “uniparty” resonates strongly with the core beliefs of the crypto community. The birth of Bitcoin itself is a rebellion against the “centralized unity” of traditional finance (TradFi) and government central banks. When Musk uses the same language to describe the establishment in Washington, he cleverly links dissatisfaction with the political status quo to the crypto world’s inherent critique of centralized power. This transforms the “American party” from merely a political party into an extension of a decentralized revolution in the political arena, thus turning potential supporters from ordinary voters into steadfast ideological allies.
Means: From the Dogecoin Legion to Political Finance (PolitiFi)
If capital and the voter base are the fuel for the “American Party,” then its mobilization and operational methods may completely subvert traditional campaign models. Musk’s interaction with the Dogecoin community has long rehearsed a brand new political mobilization manual based on internet culture and decentralized networks. Through memes and personal charisma, he has transformed a loose online network into a highly effective force.
Today, this model has evolved into “PolitiFi” - meme coins created around political figures or events. Imagine the “American Party” issuing an official token, where the personal wealth of supporters is directly linked to the party’s reputation and success. This mechanism creates a powerful positive feedback loop: in order to increase the value of the tokens they hold, supporters will spontaneously become the most enthusiastic missionaries and evangelists. They will create memes, promote the party’s ideals on social media, and recruit new members, as every successful promotion could directly translate into the growth of their own wealth. This effectively gamifies political participation, transforming passive supporters into active, economically motivated stakeholders, with a mobilization efficiency and stickiness that traditional parties cannot match.
Finality: Political Parties as Protocols and Political DAOs
The ultimate form of this experiment may be to establish the world’s first large-scale political decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). A DAO is a blockchain-based organization where rules are written in code and governed collectively by its members, without a centralized leadership structure. Applying this concept to political parties means that core functions such as party platform formulation, candidate nomination, and fund management can all be conducted in a public, transparent, and immutable blockchain environment. This is the most thorough technical realization of Musk’s commitment to “returning power to the people.”
A political DAO can integrate various innovative governance mechanisms advocated by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and others:
Liquid Democracy (: Members can vote directly on issues they care about, while delegating their voting rights in areas they are unfamiliar with to experts they trust.
Quadratic Voting ): This mechanism encourages people to allocate votes to the issues they care about most, resulting in decisions that are more nuanced and better reflect the collective true preferences than simple majority voting.
Reputation-Based Governance (: Voting rights come not from wealth but from contributions to the community, rewarding merit rather than capital.
By using a combination of these models, a DAO political party can build a highly flexible, transparent, and censorship-resistant governance framework that fundamentally addresses the dilemma of modern political decision-making being monopolized by a few elites and financial backers.
Conclusion: A New Branch of Democracy
Elon Musk’s “American Party” is far from a simple political disruptor. It is a singularity where a series of powerful forces converge: a profound ideological struggle, a lean “kingmaker” strategy, a fully mobilized cryptocurrency voter base, and a disruptive campaign mobilization manual.
And all of this ultimately points to a grander and more radical vision: to “protocolize” political parties themselves, constructing a decentralized autonomous organization driven by code and consensus. This is not only a challenge to the traditional party model but also a stress test of the entire representative democratic system.
This experiment of “fork democracy” brings the disruptive spirit of Silicon Valley, the ideals of decentralization in the crypto world, and the vast capital that both can mobilize into the political arena in an unprecedented way. However, this prospect also brings complex and profound challenges. On one hand, it may lead to unprecedented democratic innovation; on the other hand, it raises concerns about a new type of “technocratic elite politics.” When voting rights can be bought and market sentiments can directly influence political direction, the stability and fairness of democracy will face new tests.
Regardless of success or failure, this movement has presented a sharp question to the world: When politics itself can be encoded, tokenized, and “forked”, where will the democracy we know go? This struggle, which began in the corridors of power in Washington, may ultimately write a new chapter for the governance model of the 21st century on the distributed ledger of blockchain.
