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This post is a second part of a post from March 11th of the same name placing Elon Musk in the tradition of the “over-mighty subjects,” a more common phenomenon a half millennium ago. The historical analogues to Musk were those magnates that were so powerful, both in wealth and the capacity to make war, that they threatened the sovereignty of the king. In America we have no king, whatever a lawless president might think, but we do have a sovereign: the American people. The analogy applies. Musk has so much power that he threatens the sovereignty of the American people, not only their right to their sovereignty but their right to be free, both collectively and individually.
Just today, Musk is more or less openly breaking the law against vote buying in Wisconsin. He thinks — and there’s a decent chance that he’s right — that no one will indict him for increasingly brazen criminal conduct because his mix of money, a global communications megaphone and his hold over critical national security technologies makes him untouchable. The blowback would be too great for prosecutors, even those who don’t work for the President of the United States. I want to say a little more about the precise nature of that power, the interplay of different factors creating a power beyond anything we’ve seen in a single individual.
A couple years ago, The New York Times put together a very strong package about the power of SpaceX. SpaceX is not only, by most people’s estimation, the premier orbital delivery service in the world, it also controls, according to the Times, more than half of the currently functioning satellites in near-earth orbit. They are owned by and thus under the control of SpaceX and Elon Musk. That’s the basis of Starlink. Again, more than half the functioning satellites orbiting the globe are under the control of a single man.
Musk built SpaceX on U.S. government subsidies and contracts, much as he built Tesla on the back of electric vehicle subsidies. Under our system, he gets the benefits of those decisions and that good fortune. But the U.S. government also has many laws that make it clear that if and when a government contractor’s decisions threaten the national security of the United States, things change. In the case of SpaceX, Musk gets the profits. But there are, in theory, limits to where the decisions remain his.
These laws and powers are seldom invoked. There are, presumably, red lines out there. Just to make an obvious point, Musk couldn’t just say, “Okay, I’m now only going to launch Chinese military satellites. Sorry, Pentagon, what I say goes. Private company, etc.” These aren’t limits or powers most or really any military contractors have had much interest in testing. U.S. policy, for better or worse, provides plenty of markets where U.S. military contractors can sell their weapons or very slightly outdated versions of them.
And so, Musk has been running what amounts to his own foreign policy, carrying on his own private dialog with Vladimir Putin and other global strongmen. This came out early in the Ukraine War when it emerged that Musk was making his own arrangements with Vladimir Putin, which looked very much like they were running counter to U.S. foreign policy, which, at the time, was Biden’s to make.
This might seem like it tests the limits. It might, for example, seem to run afoul of the Logan Act, a 1799 law which targets any citizen who engages with a foreign government “in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.” There’s a long history of purported Logan Act violations by private American citizens. It’s never been very clear what the law actually means or how and when it should be applied. And the truth is that if you or I go to Russia or China or Venezuela and talk down the United States or brainstorm with one of its leaders, it doesn’t really matter that much — we’re private citizens, and what we say or do just doesn’t really matter. But Elon Musk controls Starlink and is willing to turn it on or off where it pleases him. So it actually does matter. It also goes without saying that no other national security contractor and no one with high-level security clearances could get away with having unreported discussions and cutting private bargains with an adversary foreign power.
Here is where we get back to the question of over-mighty subjects. Musk has vast wealth and control over core national security technologies which give him the ability, along with his wealth, to rival the power of the U.S. on the foreign policy stage. And here is where the the 2022 acquisition of Twitter becomes a much bigger deal than many realize, not only then but even now.
Musk has this over-mighty power but the U.S. government in extremis has laws and power to limit and curtail that power. But when Musk took personal control of one of the country’s and the globe’s most powerful and pervasive communications mediums and began using his limitless money in the political arena, he made himself essentially too big to touch. You can see this in his vast grip and sway not only on U.S. politics but now in the UK and Germany. He wasn’t able to get the results he was pushing for in the recent German election. And his brazen and heavy-handed attempt to do so may even have backfired. But if it marginally backfired it is only because his power and influence in a state in which he doesn’t even live was recognized by voters as so great that it threatened the sovereignty of that state itself. Even today, after that possible defeat, if it was one, the most powerful European states know the costs and risks of crossing Musk are very great. Could he build even more of an echo-chamber, mobilize more money and even meddle in national information architectures in another try to turn an election? I doubt most countries want to find out. And what is crystal clear is that no U.S. government wants to find out either — not the Biden administration — which, in a sense, did find out — and not the Trump administration either, iron alliance notwithstanding.
The Trump-Musk entente appears very much intact in the third month of the Trump administration. But Musk’s latent ability to retaliate palpably bounds and shapes it. We know Trump’s mode of operations. Everyone needs to be humiliated to show who calls the shots. Everyone has to get humiliated and say they like it. That’s when you really become part of the Trump world. Ask Marco Rubio. And every one of Trump’s people eventually gets tossed on the junk heap, a husk of their former selves. It’s all the constant performance of power we know, kicked to the curb in a Truth Social post, sent to the cornfield as a laughable ritual slaughter. Trump has tried a few times to bound Musk’s power. Sort of. And he could probably still wake up one day and say Musk is done. But not without great cost. Everybody knows that Musk isn’t a Scaramucci or a Bill Barr, who disappears or grouses here or there at a constrained, low volume. Trump might be able to win a Trump-Musk brawl, but Musk could bloody Trump badly. He could fund an infinite number of challengers. He could turn Twitter into a nonstop attack machine. The costs are obvious and real. That bounds and shapes and really is the basis of the relationship. This is why the combination of Twitter, plus the vast wealth, plus the critical national security technologies created something genuinely new under the sun.
It’s also why the whole country is now in a live-specimen experiment at the outer edge of oligarchical and over-mighty subject governance. Donald Trump is now modestly unpopular, with just a small net approval deficit. Elon Musk is really unpopular. And as the cocky, transgressive and rapacious face of DOGE, he’s getting more unpopular. But why should he care — as long as Trump doesn’t clip his wings? Donald Trump may never face an electorate again. But every member of the Republican House and many Republican senators will in 18 months. At some point these forces are going to come into collision. And we don’t know what will happen when that moment comes.