I Don't Get The Panic Over Musk, Either

At The Hill:

Senate Republicans fear Elon Musk’s beef with President Trump could become a wild-card factor that could cost them seats in 2026 if Musk follows through on his threat to create a new political party to compete with the GOP.

GOP lawmakers note that third-party candidates have swung presidential and Senate races in the past and worry that Musk’s bid to establish an “America Party” is likely to peel off more Republicans than Democratic voters in key races.

First, I think "Senate Republicans" overrate the performance of third-party candidates. most recently John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992. According to Wikipedia,

Although the Carter campaign feared Anderson could be a spoiler, Anderson's campaign turned out to be "simply another option" for frustrated voters who had already decided not to back Carter for another term. Polls found that around 37% of Anderson voters favored Reagan as their second choice over Carter. Anderson did not carry a single precinct in the country.

. . . By the end of the campaign, much of Anderson's support came from college students. . . . Anderson capitalized on that by becoming a visiting professor at a series of universities[.]

Regarding Ross Perot in 1992,

Though there were widespread claims that Perot acted as a "spoiler", post-election analysis suggested that his presence in the race likely did not affect the outcome. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, the 1992 election had several unique characteristics. Voters felt that economic conditions were worse than they actually were, which harmed Bush. A strong third-party candidate was a rare event. Liberals launched a backlash against 12 years of a conservative White House. The chief factor was Clinton's uniting his party, and winning over a number of heterogeneous groups. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight described the theory that Perot was a spoiler as "unlikely".

But there's a bigger problem: Trump, who got to know Musk well after the election, and whose instincts about people tend to be accurate, says Musk's recent public remarks mean he has gone "off the rails." Musk had media attention in the early months of the Trump administration, not necessarily all that favorable, since DOGE was often portrayed as arrogant and insensitive -- but to Musk, it was attention, and he basked in it, notwithstanding it was bad for the Tesla brand.

But on one hand, he was forced to end his role as a special government employee at the end of May, which inevitably took him out of the spotlight. He'd also begun to wear out his welcome with Trump's inner circle via episodes like his demand that all federal employees send a weekly e-mail documenting five bullet items covering what they'd done:

Federal workers across the U.S. government received an email on Saturday afternoon asking them to account for what they did in the past week — and Elon Musk says they will lose their jobs if they don't respond.

. . . "Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump's instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week," Musk wrote on X, which he owns. The post ends: "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."

. . . But some agencies told employees to ignore the missive.

New FBI Director Kash Patel sent a message to the FBI workforce that the agency will review its own processes and employees should hold off on responding to the email from OPM. The FBI email was confirmed by an individual at the bureau who isn't authorized to speak publicly.

The State Department also let its employees know that the department plans to respond on their behalf, so employees aren't required to report their activities directly to the OPM email, according to a screenshot of the communication obtained by NPR.

Musk seems to think he's enitiled to operate this way, I assume because some key people think he's a genius. But not everyone agrees, even in Muskworld:

Linda Yaccarino announced on Wednesday that she's stepping down as CEO of X, offering little in the way of an explanation.

The link quotes a New York Times story behind a paywall that says,

Yaccarino’s exit caps a tumultuous period at X, which has been remade in Mr. Musk’s image since he bought the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Since then, Mr. Musk has shed three quarters of the company’s employees, loosened speech restrictions on the platform and wielded X as a political megaphone. Advertisers to X were at one point spooked by the changes and the social media company’s ad business declined.

In fact, Musk's purchase of X was an impulse buy that threatened disaster for his empire. Only rescue financing from Larry Ellison averted this, but the instability at X in many ways presaged Musk's time in the Trump administration. The link concluded,

The rest of the article essentially suggests Yaccarino's job was partly to handle Musk, who has "frequently made her job more difficult, including using expletives to tell advertisers that he would not be changing his ways.

Given what's gradually come out from Musk's time with the administration, he seems to be an unstable guy who often acts impulsively. The most recent episode was yesterday, when Musk responded to a post on X by Roger Stone noting that Steve Bannon had spent time with Epstein before his 2019 arrest by saying, "Bannon is in the Epstein files."

This appears to have been quickly deleted or made private, since I can't embed it (I'd love to see the letter from Bannon's attorney to Tesla's chief counsel). But it's an indication that despite what must be urgent demands from the Tesla and SpaceX boards that Musk focus on business, he can't resist keeping himself in the public eye, no matter how bad it makes him look:

Elon Musk’s favorability dropped again this past week amid his renewed feud with President Trump and move to launch a separate political party.

In the last week, Musk’s net favorability in the aggregate kept by Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) dropped 3.4 points, falling just more than 20 points in the negative. The percentage that view the onetime Trump ally unfavorably reached its highest point of the president’s second term at 55.8 percent, while the percentage that view him favorably reached its lowest point yet, at 35.4 percent, as of Monday.

For Musk to have any success starting a third-party movement, he would need to assemble a team of savvy political advisers, especially if he intends to be its standard bearer -- but even there, notwithstanding anything else, he can't run for president himself a la John Anderson or Ross Perot, since he isn't a native-born US citizen. If he sonehow intends to have surrogates run for congressional seats, he's going to need people with good political instincts.

As Rush Limbaugh used to say responding to people who asked him why he didn't run for office, "I know how to get a radio audience, but I don't know how to get votes." Musk has a somewhat similar problem: it isn't completely clear if he knows how to run a business, because his bad instincts often get in the way. But it's even less clear if he knows how to get votes, and preliminary data suggests the one thing he's good at is wearing out his welcome.