Elon Musk, Sparta vs. Thebes & the New 3rd Party

Elon Musk announced his intentions to launch a new political party to challenge the two-party system, prompting a sharp response from the billionaire’s former ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, who called the endeavor “ridiculous.”

After toying with the idea over the past weeks, the owner of Tesla and the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) posted on X that he had set up a 3rd party named the “America Party.”

The Tesla boss, who was a close ally of Trump and led the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which was tasked with cutting federal spending, used a historical analogy of the battle of Leuctra in ancient Greece between the invincible Spartans and the Thebans to lay out his plans to rock the American political system.

Thebes, under Epaminondas, defeated the Spartans by concentrating their attacks on specific vulnerable points of contact on the battlefield, avoiding a frontal attack across the entire line of contact.

“The way we’re going to crack the uniparty system is by using a variant of how Epaminondas shattered the myth of Spartan invincibility at Leuctra:

Extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield.”

Some analysts suggested Musk’s post revealed his strategy to focus on securing key battleground areas and swing states across the country to break the Republican and Democratic “Uniparty” system by winning enough seats in the U.S. Senate and Congress to play a key role in blocking or backing bills.

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, stating, “I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a train wreck over the past five weeks.”

In the 1992 U.S. Presidential elections, Ross Perot’s “Reform Party” managed to gain 10.51% of the popular vote, while four years later, the industrialist gained 8.4% of the popular vote, making it the most successful third-party campaign.