Musk as Sovereign

There is a great essay by Shylock Holmes where he says that "it’s not nearly as obvious as you might think where exactly the next competent authoritarian might come from." He asks when would you have recognized Napoleon as the most able man to consolidate power and stop the leftward spiral? His key observation:

It is a mistake to place too much weight in the man’s politics before he seizes power. Those destined to rule seem to instinctively know that the first thing to do is actually acquire the power to rule, by whatever means necessary, otherwise all your grand visions amount to very little.

We have been reëvaluating Elon Musk over the past two years, based on new events and information. In October 2022, he completed the acquisition of Twitter and has turned it into a free speech platform with quite liberal policies. Last year we read the Issacson biography and discovered that Musk does have some very intelligent ideas, like his Idiot Index (the ratio of the cost of a finished product to its bill of materials) and his Algorithm for making manufacturing processes more efficient. We also noticed that his politics have changed:

He's tackling the border crisis, criticizing the Ukraine war, pointing out that the empire is in decline, going after Soros, mentioning white genocide, and taking on the ADL. People are asking whether Musk wants to be the "Red Caesar".

This weekend, Musk spoke at Trump's rally in Butler, PA, where he said, "As you can see I am not just MAGA — I am Dark MAGA."

If Musk's views can change, so can ours. Freedom of speech is of paramount importance in resisting communist takeover, and in buying Twitter (at enormous personal expense) he has done more for freedom of speech than almost anyone in history. The securities fraud and accounting fraud at Tesla now seem like minor footnotes. The first thing to do is to acquire power by whatever means necessary, and in Musk's case that included things like capitalizing scrap inventory and faking a leveraged buyout of Tesla.

Charles Haywood reviewed the Isaacson biography earlier this year and has great thoughts on how Musk's future intersects with ours as the "inevitable hour of decision" is coming:

I am predicting that the Regime will try to stymie Musk in reaching his goals, and that in response, he will break the Regime, becoming a locus of mass revolt. The Regime cannot allow Musk any more power; his success gives the lie to every one of their ideological shibboleths, all based in the denial of reality. He is a living refutation of Regime ideology; this cannot be tolerated. Musk is very linear; he knows or will know, that he has to go, or the Regime has to go. He has already shown, extremely dangerously in these days of elite over-production, that at least eighty percent of all workers at large companies produce zero or negative value. He cannot be allowed to keep demonstrating that yesterday’s accomplishments can be multiplied ten or a hundred times, simply by creating and empowering teams of smart white men. Musk is, at core, and ironically given his own background, the condensed symbol of heritage America. The goal of the Left is to expropriate heritage Americans, then exterminate them. To do that, they will have to first bring Musk low.

Haywood asks how Musk will respond to this, suggesting that perhaps Musk will create a "private security force." It made us think: what elements of sovereignty does Musk have, and what does he lack? Could he simply replace the regime?

That might have seemed absurd prior to Hurricane Helene. (History is happening faster and faster.) But when communications in Appalachia were wiped out, who restored them? Not the incumbent regime, but Musk's Starlink system. 

Casey Handmer has a great essay about the technical accomplishment of Starlink, which is soon going to offer service directly to conventional mobile phone handsets. 

Pretty soon everyone will have access to Musk's worldwide communications network that is outside the reach of national governments. That means that users of Starlink will be able to 

* exchange information (using the Twitter social network, the #1 most important), and
* exchange money (either existing cryptocurrency or a new one that he could create)

Controlling money and information are major elements of sovereignty. Byrne Hobart just yesterday was discussing what seizing power looked like before mass media. 

[T]he first stop for a successful coup was wherever the reigning monarch lived, but the second stop was often the nearest mint, to start creating coins in the new ruler's image. William the Conqueror was putting his face on coins two years after the Battle of Hastings, Charlemagne did it after getting promoted to emperor in 800, and one of the reasons Caesar upset the Roman Senate was that he'd made the then-unprecedented decision to mint a coin with the portrait of a living person (him).

Musk might consider a cryptocurrency with a coin called the Musk, just as Napoleon created 20 and 40 franc coins. 

The only other thing he would need to be a sovereign would be a superior ability to neutralize opponents that are contestants for sovereignty. He already has ICBMs, indeed the best rocket technology in the world. It would just be a question of what he could do with conventional payloads unless he is going to build nuclear weapons too.