What are the checks and balances on the power of Elon Musk?

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

The question we’ll all be asking over the next year or more.

Highlights from Article

And yet in the past week, we have witnessed the spectacle of a single rich man making critical decisions about United States national government policy in real time.

What was different about the latest CR was the personal influence of Elon Musk, President Trump’s most important donor and political ally, and the owner of one of America’s major social media networks. Musk launched an all-out attack on the resolution:

What’s interesting about this is that everyone seems to agree that it was Musk, not Trump, who torpedoed the CR. Fox News reports:Some House Republicans are privately fuming after Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy got involved in congressional talks on government funding…

Musk therefore has many enormously powerful levers to personally influence the policies of the United States. He can (and frequently does) threaten to primary any Republican who strays from his personal desires.

This isn’t just supposition on my part; it’s clear to both foreign and domestic leaders where the power lies in the incoming U.S. regime. House Speaker Mike Johnson called up both Trump and Musk to try to get a CR passed. And Musk now regularly accompanies Trump to his meetings with foreign heads of state. After watching Musk kill the continuing resolution, the American public as a whole is now waking up to this reality.

• Musk has an enormous amount of influence.

There are potentially some historical precedents here — William Randolph Hearst’s control of print media terrified politicians over a century ago, Mark Hanna had a great deal of influence in the McKinley administration.

To see this, let’s do a thought exercise: What if Elon were evil?

• Interesting thought exercise!

But Evil Elon wants Putin to triumph, because he sympathizes with authoritarian rulers in general.

But anyway, the point here is that when normal Americans look at Elon and his words and deeds, they can’t be 100% certain that he’s not Evil Elon.

As I said at the beginning of this post, one weakness of the U.S. political system is that there are few institutions in place to check the political power of private actors.

It’s possible that a bunch of other super-rich people will unite to balance out Musk. The thought of needing oligarchs to stop other oligarchs is not particularly appealing, but it might be better than the alternative.

Ultimately, of course, power resides with the American people. Musk’s power comes from his ownership of capital, but the way he exercises it is fundamentally a democratic one — if he’s able to primary Congressional Republicans, it’s because his primary challengers are able to win votes, and if he’s able to start a rage-mob on X, it’s because people like what he says.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

See other recent things I’ve read here.