The suspense is finally over. Elon Musk, the visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX, officially declared the formation of a new political party on Saturday, July 5, 2025. His stated aim: to challenge the long-standing dominance of both the Republican and Democratic parties.
“Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom,” the controversial tech entrepreneur announced on X (formerly Twitter) at 3:46 PM ET.
By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!
When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.
Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom. https://t.co/9K8AD04QQN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2025
The creation of the “America Party” is nothing short of a bombshell, particularly given Musk’s significant financial contributions and political alignment with Donald Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. Last year alone, Musk spent nearly $290 billion to support Trump’s return to the White House. This timely alliance granted the self-described “Techno King” an unprecedented level of influence for a tech entrepreneur in American politics. Trump, in turn, entrusted Musk with a custom-created federal department: the now infamous Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
DOGE, however, quickly became a lightning rod for criticism, seen by many as emblematic of the very dysfunctions it was meant to fix within the federal government. Its methods and decisions, including the closure of federal agencies and drastic cost cutting at essential institutions, provoked widespread rejection of the billionaire.
This backlash manifested in protests outside Tesla showrooms, a drop in the electric vehicle maker’s stock price, and a noticeable plunge in profits and sales. Tesla’s sales erosion continued into the second quarter of 2025, during which the carmaker’s global deliveries fell by 13.5%. Tesla’s reputation, and that of Musk, suffered significantly, especially as the carmaker’s customer base heavily includes progressives and liberals who viewed his political alignment as a sharp departure from their values. Under increasing pressure from the markets, Musk formally withdrew from his government role at the end of May.
His public fallout with Trump began almost immediately after his departure, marked by a public spat between the two powerful figures on June 5. After a few weeks of relative calm, Musk reignited the feud by sharply criticizing the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” President Trump’s signature piece of legislation. He then publicly vowed to launch a political party and do everything he could to defeat Republican elected officials who voted for it.
As promised, on June 30, Musk formalized the political party he had previously hinted at, following the bill’s signing into law. The initial post announcing the party’s formation generated more than 3 million views in less than an hour, signaling the immediate and widespread attention it commanded.
Reactions on X, Musk’s social network, were acutely mixed. Users who visibly supported the MAGA movement and the Grand Old Party (GOP) expressed palpable disappointment and anger. Many lamented that the billionaire’s decision would, at best, fracture the conservative vote and, at worst, pave the way for Democratic victories in upcoming elections, particularly the crucial 2026 midterms.
“Why not just try and take over the GOP with more America First candidates?” asked one user, clearly disheartened by the billionaire’s move.
Why not just try and take over the GOP with more America First candidates?
— Joey Mannarino 🇺🇸 (@JoeyMannarinoUS) July 5, 2025
Roger Stone, a long time ally of President Trump, weighed in, commenting, “I have huge respect for @elonmusk and everything he has done for free speech and to ferret out waste fraud and corruption in federal spending. But I would rather see him pursue his efforts at electoral reform within the Republican Party primaries rather than having a new party splitting the vote of sane people and letting the Marxist Democrats gain control again.”
I have huge respect for @elonmusk and everything he has done for free speech and to ferret out waste fraud and corruption in federal spending, but I would rather see him pursue his efforts at electoral reform within the Republican Party primaries rather than having a new party…
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) July 5, 2025
Another disappointed user questioned the legitimacy of the decision: “So a little over a million people across the entire world take your poll and you’re convinced this is what Americans want? And you do understand Democrats (who now despise you) would vote yes, knowing that you’ll end up splitting the Republican party. Don’t do this.”
So a little over a million people across the entire world take your poll and you’re convinced this is what Americans want?
And you do understand Democrats (who now despise you) would vote yes, knowing that you’ll end up splitting the Republican party.
Don’t do this.
— EllyKayUSA (@EllyKayUSA) July 5, 2025
“@elonmusk you need to rethink this one,” one user pleaded. “All you can hope to accomplish is to hand power over to democrats for decades with a successful 3rd party.”
@elonmusk you need to rethink this one. All you can hope to accomplish is to hand power over to democrats for decades with a successful 3rd party.
— @CharlesleeTX1911 (@Charles07788205) July 5, 2025
An angry user directly challenged Musk’s character: “Has anyone thought about the fact that Elon Musk turned his back on someone he called a friend because things weren’t going his way? This is the kind of person you want to get behind?”
Has anyone thought about the fact that Elon Musk turned his back on someone he called a friend because things weren’t going his way?
This is the kind of person you want to get behind?
— Fist Punch Skull (@FistPunchSkull) July 5, 2025
“This will fracture the right and split the vote. I’m against this, and so should you,” another user declared.
This will fracture the right and split the vote. I am against this, and so should you.
— Michael Entropy — x/acc (@TimeInvarianceX) July 5, 2025
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Elon, because if you don’t, you’re about to hand over the Democrats to Congress, and then we’ll be completely out of options,” another user cautioned.
I hope you know what you’re doing Elon, because if you don’t, you’re about to hand the Democrats Congress, and then we will be completely out of options.
— Walter Curt (@WCdispatch_) July 5, 2025
Conversely, other users, many of them avid fans of the billionaire, seemed amused by the announcement, which did not appear to surprise them. “You do throw a decent party 🎉😂,” joked Jason Calacanis, a well known tech investor and friend of Musk.
You do throw a decent party 🎉😂
— @jason (@Jason) July 5, 2025
“Good split the GOP vote,” rejoiced another user, while another enthusiastically proclaimed, “Rest in Peace to the Republican Party!”
Good split the GOP vote
— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) July 5, 2025
Prominent political scientist Ian Bremmer commented simply, “The people have spoken.” Another user expressed confidence in Musk’s judgment: “Your instincts have a good track record. I hope they are correct once again.”
the people have spoken
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 5, 2025
Musk remains convinced that neither the Republicans, who currently control the government, nor the Democratic opposition adequately represent a significant portion of Americans. He appears confident that the political environment is favorable for a new movement. Data from a 2024 Gallup study suggests broad dissatisfaction with the two major parties: 43% of Americans identified as independents, while only 28% identified as Republican and 28% as Democrat.
With a net worth estimated at $361 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaire Index as of July 4, Musk certainly possesses the financial capacity to pursue his ambitious political endeavor.
Source link
#Elon #Musks #Political #Party #Sparks #MAGA #Backlash #Online
![Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/East-Antarctic-Fan-shaped-Basin-Province.jpeg "Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics")
![Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics](https://i0.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/East-Antarctic-Fan-shaped-Basin-Province.jpeg?ssl=1 "Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics")
Post Comment