President Elon Musk
Elon Musk.
The real star of the innauguration.
He has pretty much moved in to Mar a Lago, and accompanies Trump at almost every major event and meeting. Musk has taken a role in the selection of cabinet officers, has met with foreign leaders, used the vast power of his X (formerly Twitter) machine to manipulate the Congress. After pouring an estimated quarter of a billion dollars into getting Trump elected, he now apparently has his sites set on the UK, tapping Nigel Farage to the Britain’s Trump and threatening to invest another $100 million into making it happen. God only know what he is going to do with DOGE, a wholly invented government agency with one employee.
We may have thought we were electing Trump and Vance. We weren’t. We were electing Musk and Peter Thiel, in the guise of Vance, his protege and paid for stooge.
2024 will be looked back upon as a watershed election — not because it was the year that Trump returned to the White House. Trump is only a sideshow. He’s the entertainment, the circus that keeps the media busy and amused. Something much more fundamental is taking place before our eyes.
In the 19th Century, the nexus of power in the world shifted. It was the rise and ultimate dominance of the Industrial Revolution. Factories and manufacturing were the locus of an exploding economy, and the old world of aristocrats and hereditary power were no longer functional or in fact necessary. So the Industrialists effectively took control of the levers of power in the government, both in the US and in the UK, which was then the dominant power in the world.
With the arrival of the capitalists and the industrialists, a thousands years of what had been considered a stable form of government and society suddenly came to an end. Did anyone really care what the King thought or said? Did any 18th century factory owner care about the Duke of Norfolk?
Today, the House of Lords is a joke — no one cares what they think or do. Yet 200 years ago, hereditary peerages, Dukes and Lords ran Britain. No more. The American Civil War was really a war between the genteel landed gentry and agrarian economy of the South and the Industrializing North. You see who won that one.
Today, the old industrial world (now referred to as the Rust Belt) is rapidly being supplanted by the tech world — which has a whole lot more money, power and the future in their hands. Given the choice between GM and Google or Apple, where are you going to put your money? Me too.
Just look at who make up the Dow — it was once Ford, GM, Exxon and so on. Heavy industry. Today, it is Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and so on. We are no longer an industrial world, we are a tech world. Tech has all the power — except in government.
Andy Grove, the founder and former Chairman and CEO of chip maker Intel once remarked that democracy moved too slowly for tech companies. And it’s true. They do. Tech companies move fast. How many members of Congress do you think can even begin to comprehend the power and impact of the coming AI revolution? Marjorie Taylor Greene? 89 year old Nancy Pelosi? Surely you gest. They don’t really have the vaguest idea of what a tech driven society needs.
But Musk and Thiel (along with Zuckerberg, Page and the rest of the Musketeers) do.
So what do they do? They take control of the government.
Soon Congress will be like the House of Lords in the UK. Nice. Pageantry. But ultimately pointless.
The real power is already in Mar a Lago, and it’s not Trump.
I didn't think this up myself. In 1999, James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg predicted it all in their seminal book, The Sovereign Individual. Read it.
