Elon Musk’s America Party Proves More William Randolph Hearst Than Ross Perot | The American Spectator

It has been over three weeks since Elon Musk even mentioned the “America Party” he promised to launch on his X page. No official filings have been made. The perspective of those in Musk’s circle, Axios reported earlier this week, is that Musk has moved on from his protest of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and back to his business ventures. 

The third-party trial balloon drew comparisons from Musk’s ambition to the eccentric billionaire-turned-politician Ross Perot from the pages of Politico and WIRED to The Free Press. Perot used a tech fortune to build the most successful third-party effort in modern American history, winning 18.9 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election as an independent before starting the Reform Party. 

Perot’s momentum allowed this new party to elect several candidates to important offices, most notably Jesse Ventura as Governor of Minnesota in 1998. Donald Trump even first entered the political stage in the 2000 Reform presidential primaries, but both Trump and Perot withdrew from the party as a litany of groups from American communists to Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservatives descended upon the organization in search of a political vehicle, a scuffle ending in its demise as a force of relevance on the political stage.

Importantly, however, Perot went somewhere, and certainly much farther than even Musk’s realistic best case scenarios would have gone. Ross Perot was the first real American computer magnate. The allure of comparing the third-party grandfather of all tech billionaires to Elon Musk, the wealthiest to ever emerge, is hefty. 

The clearest parallel being drawn was the potential for a maverick Musk effort to elect Democrats to office via vote splitting. Perot’s 1992 run destabilized George Bush’s campaign, even if many of his anti-incumbent voters indicated a preference for Bill Clinton by the end. By his weaker 1996 run, his effort was certainly a setback almost exclusively for Republicans. However, this would have required

However, Perot succeeded by being everything Elon Musk can’t be. He may have made his fortune in computers, but he was a veteran from a hardscrabble Texarkana family. Perot’s success owed to his status as a populist folk hero, a self-made symbol of middle America, not Silicon Valley. 

Others, particularly left-wing critics, pointed to Henry Ford. The comparison is alluring, particularly with the centrality of the car company Tesla to Musk’s image. However, it is unfair, as doing so risks invoking Ford’s infamous record of public anti-semitism. Rather than Ross Perot of Henry Ford, a more apt comparison for Elon Musk as a public figure and political actor might be the long time media leader William Randolph Hearst.

Hearst was by far the most important newspaperman in America from at least the 1890s until the 1940s, at which point he also owned radio stations and a movie production studio. Hearst’s fortune never crossed a billion in the dollars of the day, but with inflation accounted for his net worth would roughly have been $3.5 billion, not far from that of President Trump. Musk is much richer and more influential in turn.

However, Musk’s greatest tool of influence is not Tesla or SpaceX, but X, formerly Twitter. In this new digital age of media, Musk’s role as CEO of X since 2023 is as close to a Hearst as today will allow. Further, both Musk and Hearst had shifting partisan loyalties and fizzling attempts to launch third parties. 

Hearst was initially identified with the Left and sought office as a Democrat in 1904, 1905, and 1906. He lost all three times and became embroiled in intra-partisan conflict not over ideology but over a battle of egos with the populist figure at the center of the Democratic Party, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The story bears a clear resemblance to the Musk-Trump spat.

With an almost identical platform, Hearst launched the generically named Independence Party to counter Bryan in 1908. It went a step further than Musk’s America Party, but Hearst’s puppet presidential candidate won a half a percent of the vote and the attempt sank his own political ambitions by branding him as a wild card. 

Of course, there are countless crucial differences. Musk famously smoked marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast, while Hearst led the effort to recognize the dangers of the drug. However, this comparison hinges on their place and influence on American politics more than any particular platform. 

Hearst tried to form a third-party again after the Independence Party’s failure, launching the “American Constitutional Party” in 1920 and this time getting no farther than the current America Party. The repeated failures taught Hearst that control over the media is never full control over the people or process of politics.

This valuable lesson has been rightfully shoved in the faces of the Democrat-aligned mainstream media since 2016. As he appears to be gradually mending fences with Trump, it remains relevant to Musk.

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