Maybe the real lesson here is this: Never go the full Perot.
After a highly public fallout between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the world’s richest man had declared his intention to launch a competitive third political party. It’s not tough to remember this, since Musk announced the launch of the America Party less than six weeks ago. Musk promised that his new party would answer a call from the electorate to provide a real choice, and that the America Party would “give you back your freedom,” a message crafted to leverage the Independence Day holiday it followed:
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
It certainly seemed as though Musk took this seriously. The previous effort to form an alternative major party took place over thirty years ago, also bankrolled by a wealth industrialist, and it actually had some successes. H. Ross Perot didn’t have a fortune anywhere near the scale of Musk’s, and yet his Reform Party united smaller parties into its organization, fielded candidates, and achieved major-party status at least in Minnesota — where Jesse Ventura won the 1998 gubernatorial race under its banner. And, like Musk, Perot’s main ambition seemed to be resentment towards a Republican president, and more broadly the GOP establishment under George H.W. Bush’s leadership.
The Reform Party finally petered out last year, although it technically still exists. The party lost ballot access in Florida in 2023, its last state where it could compete as a coherent party. They tried to get on board the bandwagon for Robert Kennedy Jr and Nicole Shanahan, only to have their knees cut out when the pair joined the Trump campaign. (Ironically, Perot’s group had briefly flirted with Trump over a potential presidential run in 2000.)
So where is the America Party? According to the Wall Street Journal this morning, it never made it out of the spitballing stage. In fact, Musk now wants to back J.D. Vance for the 2028 presidential campaign and has started to plan in that direction instead:
As he has considered launching a party, the Tesla chief executive officer has been focused in part on maintaining ties with Vice President JD Vance, who is widely seen as a potential heir to the MAGA political movement. Musk has stayed in touch with Vance in recent weeks, and he has acknowledged to associates that if he goes ahead with forming a political party, he would damage his relationship with the vice president, the people said.
Musk and his associates have told people close to him that he is considering using some of his vast financial resources to back Vance if he decides to run for president in 2028, some of the people said. Musk spent close to $300 million to support Trump and other Republicans in the 2024 election.
Plans still exist for organizing the America Party, the WSJ reports, but only conceptually. Musk hasn’t really lifted a finger to put those plans into action, and it appears he has lost interest:
But Musk and his team haven’t engaged with many prominent individuals who have voiced support for the idea of a new party or could be a crucial resource to help it get off the ground, including by assisting with getting on the ballot in crucial states. His associates canceled a late-July call with an outside group that specializes in organizing third-party campaigns, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Participants were told that the meeting was canceled because Musk wanted to focus on running his businesses, the person said.
That’s where Perot had at least one advantage. By the time Perot ran for president in 1992, he had largely cashed out. He had sold his core tech business (Electronic Data Systems) to General Motors, and then GM had to pay him nearly a billion dollars to leave the board after a feud with then-chair Roger Smith. He went on to found other businesses and do venture-capital investments, but Perot didn’t have the same marketplace risks that Musk has by going political. (Perot passed away in 2019, and his son turned out to be a very good businessman as well, cashing out Perot’s second major electronics venture to Dell for nearly $4 billion.)
Is this delay/abandonment about marketplace risks? Those have proven all too real for Tesla, especially after Musk’s alliance with Trump and then the very public falling out. Musk put himself in a position where all potential politicized customers have reason to snub their product; it might even be a weird point of consensus between activists on the Right and on the Left. Musk’s SpaceX interests are more secure, given that NASA can’t get its partner Boeing to perform, so SpaceX is the only reliable space carrier at the moment in the West. But Tesla is a huge key to Musk’s success, and the board is already unhappy with the damage that Musk’s mercurial politics have caused.
The most likely explanation, though, is that Musk finally realized that he’d marginalized himself the past couple of months with his massive overreaction to Trump’s refusal to name his friend to run NASA and the lack of traction DOGE got in the reconciliation bill. Musk wants to influence policy, and even super-billionaire industrialists can’t do that after not just burning bridges but blowing them up and detonating their smoking ruins. Democrats hate him now and are highly unlikely to ever get over that; Trump and Vance are at least open to working with him. It might take 20 years for an “America Party” to even win a House seat, by which time Musk’s policy preference will all be mooted.
So the America Party will almost certainly turn out to be a rare “failure to launch” for Musk. And he’s better off for it, even if he has to eat a healthy serving of crow in the short term.
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