Donald Trump is not a king. He never was. Or, if he was, he’s close to being dethroned. It took just one election for Americans to deliver a rebuke so strong he’s been hobbled and humiliated.
The United States is however not a single domain. It consists of several domains, a few controlled by kings who, unlike Trump, do have with near absolute authority. They are the unfathomably rich and powerful royals who control America’s frontier tech companies, especially SpaceX, Meta, and Anthropic.
Yes, these monarchs are all men. Yes, these monarchs are all wealthy beyond imagining. Yes, these monarchs all have a degree of control that other royals can only dream about. Yes, these monarchs are all immune to anything as irritating as checks and balances. Yes, these monarchs can all afford to ignore public opinion. Yes, these monarchs all have servile enablers. Yes, these monarchs all derive some of their power by speaking a language most of us do not understand. And yes, these monarchs all pull levers that in theory, perhaps in practice, threaten our safety and security, even our lives.
Elon Musk is of course one of the three kings to whom I allude.* For several reasons he stands out from the two others, most prominent among them his forays into politics. Not content to dominate his own domain, Musk has tried to conquer others, specifically America’s civil service and electoral process. Into the former he poured some of himself; into the latter some of his money.
Neither paid off which, in many quarters, unleashed unvarnished glee. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg crowed that after Trump, “there was no bigger loser on Election Day than Elon Musk, who spent over $400 million backing Republicans.”
But Goldberg misses the point. For Musk $400 million is chump change. More importantly, for Musk politics is a hobby. It is not his passion now and it never was. His stepping into the political arena was more an amusement or experiment than central to anything that Musk genuinely cares about. Which is not politics but technology. Not people but things. Not earth but space. King Musk’s passion is not colonizing Washington. It is colonizing Mars.
Notwithstanding the results of last week’s election, Musk’s empire remains so far whole. His control over his companies is absolute: his boards are weak; SpaceX has a dual-class stock structure that ensures his continuing supremacy; he aims to merge SpaceX and Tesla which would dwarf every other vaguely analogous American enterprise; and his reach and grasp are so far that no less than the United States military depends on Musk’s very own, privately controlled, offshoot of Starlink, Starshield.
So, make no mistake about it. While last week’s bloodbath bloodied King Donald, King Elon remains unscathed and his empire intact.
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*Because of their companies’ governance structures, the two other imperial CEO’s are Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic’ s Dario Amodei.