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What are the checks and balances on the power of Elon Musk?
The question we'll all be asking over the next year or more.
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The U.S. political system was designed by its founders to have a system of checks and balances, so that no individual or institution would have absolute power. But that system was designed with only government leaders and government institutions in mind — although the founders did worry about private individuals controlling the government, this wasn’t their prime focus, and they ultimately ended up declining to put institutions in place specifically to guard against economic power. James Madison believed, for example, that the federal system of the U.S. government was protection enough against small cabals of wealthy oligarchs.
In recent decades, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, many have voiced worries that the U.S. has become an oligarchy, where wealthy individuals are capable of buying power and influence — either by campaign contributions, lobbying, or other means. These concerns came largely from the progressive left, who often claimed that the U.S. has become an oligarchy. But many on the right also worried about the influence of George Soros and other progressive billionaires.
But the research backing up the “oligarchy” claim was very patchy and weak — in fact, most political scientists found that policy in the U.S. tends to align closely with the interests of the middle class. And popular concern was vague and diffuse — Americans will tell you that their economic system “unfairly favors the powerful interests”, but this could mean anything, and most Americans are not concerned about the wealth of billionaires.
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. In order for the U.S. federal government to spend money, it has to pass “appropriations” bills. There are always big fights over those bills, so sometimes they just pass a “continuing resolution” to keep spending going. If the CR doesn’t pass, the government shuts down, and its employees — including the people in the U.S. Military — stop getting paychecks. Over the past three decades we’ve seen a lot of instances in which this process became an avenue for political brinksmanship, with the party in power threatening to refuse to pass a bill and shut down the government — or, even worse, hit the “debt ceiling” that stops the government from borrowing money.
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:
Musk, who spent more than $250 million getting Trump elected, posted about his opposition to the original spending deal well over 100 times over the past two days, with threats to fund primary challenges to anyone who voted for the plan, which was six weeks in the making.
“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk posted Wednesday afternoon on X.
Later in the day, Trump himself came out against it, making it clear the bill was done.
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…
A second GOP lawmaker said, "If Elon and Vivek are freelancing and shooting off the hip without coordination with [President-elect Trump], they are getting dangerously close to undermining the actual 47th President of the United States."
Overheated rhetoric is common, so we shouldn’t take this as gospel. And it’s also worth noting that Musk approved of a modified CR, but that one was torpedoed by conservatives in Congress. Also, Musk’s threat to primary anyone in Congress who voted against the approval of Matt Gaetz wasn’t enough to keep Gaetz from withdrawing. So Musk actually isn’t the all-powerful emperor he’s depicted as in the header image of this post — at least, not yet.
But it’s undeniable that Musk has power that goes far beyond that of any normal super-rich political influencer. He’s not just the owner of X but its poster-in-chief, who manipulates the platform’s algorithm to show everyone his own tweets first and foremost. He’s also the owner of SpaceX, upon which the U.S. government depends for pretty much its entire space program. And he’s more or less the leader of a right-wing faction in the tech industry that has become a key Republican constituency over the last election cycle.
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. He can whip up instant right-wing mobs on X to attack any Republican who doesn’t toe his line. He can (and does) dump hundreds of millions into elections. He could probably use SpaceX’s government contracts as leverage as well, if he chose. And with Donald Trump — the oldest President ever elected — now clearly in his twilight years, Elon’s vigor and activity level often allow him to act as the President’s stand-in.
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.
What does it mean for the country to have so much government power concentrated in the hands of a single unelected private individual? It’s hard to say. 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. Various industrial-age tycoons wielded a lot of influence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rupert Murdoch created Fox News. But Musk’s clout may eclipse them all — X is a new kind of media, Trump is a different kind of President, and so on.
Many people I know in the tech industry are cheering Elon’s power. But I think for a lot of regular Americans it’s scary, because they won’t be able to trust Elon to do the right thing, in the same way that lots of people in tech do. To see this, let’s do a thought exercise: What if Elon were evil?
Imagining “Evil Elon”
In a post back in October, I wrote that America’s future could hinge on whether Elon Musk decides to play the superhero or the supervillain:
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Musk’s friends and confidantes expect the former. They probably know him as a reasonable guy — a Reaganite conservative who was driven to the center-right by the excesses of wokeness, who loves free speech and free enterprise and small government and responsible fiscal and monetary policy and