Elon Musk, CEO USA

It's a show called The United States of America, Starring Donald J. Trump, Written by The Heritage Foundation, Directed by Elon Musk

The world’s richest man is a sovereign state. I’ll begin with a digression of sorts. Until the advent of the Billionaire Next Door, which is to say in the pre-internet days, the wealthy among us still car-pooled, and flew commercial. Even the first two most public billionaires, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, engaged in society, and were reliably pro-America. They thought themselves smart, to be sure, and lucky to boot, but they didn’t see themselves as nation-states.

Today’s über-rich are deeply sequestered. They fly private, they cruise on private mega-yachts, they vacation on their own private islands. They are in fact, islands unto themselves. As their fortunes have grown, they have become more concerned with maintaining that wealth and less concerned with country.

These individuals are sovereign states with the wherewithal to resist government oversight, taxes, and the rest of the rules the rest of us follow.

Now, onto Elon Musk, the wholly unaccountable billionaire who has the President-elect’s ear, and then some. Musk enjoys triple citizenship (kind of underscoring the point about allegiances). Born in South Africa, he emigrated to Canada at 18, and added citizenship there, in his mother’s country of birth. In the early 2000’s he came here, ostensibly to attend Stanford, but instead started a digital city guide that Compaq bought for a few hundred mill, then it was onto billions via Pay Pal, and U.S. citizenship.

In addition to Tesla, he has interests in social media, commercial space travel, and AI.

Musk not only has 6000 SpaceX Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, granting or denying access to internet users the world over, he also controls X, formerly Twitter, meaning he has unprecedented control over both the rails and the boxcars of telecommunications. (Starlink is the satellite business and SpaceX is the transit company—the largest and most profitable rocketry company in the world.)

From the ever-dependable Bob Reich:

Private citizen Elon Musk has the power to decide what a large swath of the world’s population sees as “news.” And as he launches more satellites, he becomes even more powerful. This isn’t democracy flourishing. This isn’t monarchial rule returned to the heights of 18th Century colonization. This is non-state-actor Imperialism.

I admit to being a little confused when Musk first tried to buy Twitter, then tried to back out, only to be forced by a court of law to make good on his asset purchase agreement and complete the acquisition for $40 billion. He seemed reluctant at the time. But once he was forced into ownership, he came to a different realization. It centered on the fact that he is centi-billionaire, and losing, or in more precise terms, leveraging, his $40B bet on Twitter had no real impact on his unfathomable wealth. When you have half a trillion dollars, $40B is a rounding error.

So he shed the financial mindset and replaced it with a global power mindset. The power to control what increasing numbers of the world’s people see and hear.

He fired the content management teams and allowed the banned baddies—racists, misogynists, antisemites, anti-abortion-ers, LGBTQ+ antagonists, liars and political fire-starters (including Donald Trump, and his toadies and bootlickers who had all been banned after the January 6th insurrection)—and created an unabashed white male platform that he called free speech. (It’s actually a place where if you express your negative views of the favored people and groups there, you will be savaged for daring to enter their man cave.) It is free speech for the bros and few others.

Credible journalists and journalism businesses abandoned the platform in droves. What was once the go-to source of breaking news became a cesspool of indignation and hate.

To see Elon Musk flying his private jet into Tel Aviv, being greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and toured through Gaza, is to come to the chilling revelation that an unelected man wields more power than any leader who doesn’t possess an army, navy, or air force—and many who do.

There is a possible upside, however. Musk came into the collective consciousness when he started Tesla, after becoming a billionaire through the start-up PayPal. His stated reason for an a electric car company was that climate change threatens the planet and humanity to the extent that we must stop burning fossil fuels.

Donald Trump has often said that he is not a believer in human-caused climate change. “Drill baby, drill” is a mantra that follows him around like the tail of an unmoored kite. But, unless they are associated with lowering his taxes, Trump is rarely policy-driven. We can hope that his new “first buddy“ will keep him from enacting some of the environmentally-damaging ideas that he has put forward.

I’m trying to balance that against the scythe Musk intends to wield against Medicare and Social security and whether he’ll really get the chance before The Donald, tired of playing Second Fiddle, yells, “You’re fired!”

©2024 Jon Sinton