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.

Art by Grok. Prompt: “Elon Musk, God-Emperor of the United States”

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:

Why America's future could hinge on Elon Musk

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 peace between nations, who wants to bring human civilization to Mars and accelerate tech progress and so on.

Let us call this version of Elon “Real Elon”.

But it’s possible to imagine another version of Elon, who exists in the perfervid imaginations of his detractors. Let us call this “Evil Elon”. Regular people, observing Elon’s actions in the public sphere, can’t always tell the difference between Real Elon and this fantasy supervillain.

Whereas Real Elon opposed the CR because of concerns over government spending and legislative complexity, Evil Elon opposed it because it contained national security provisions that would have nixed some of Tesla’s planned investments in China:

Cynics note that the shorter replacement CR, which Elon supported, would have actually spent more money than the CR that Elon killed — the main difference being that the replacement CR didn’t contain restrictions on U.S. investment in China:

In fact, while Real Elon loves capitalism and individual freedoms, Evil Elon is a consistent and dedicated ally of the Chinese Communist Party. When Real Elon calls for Taiwan to become a “special administrative zone” of China, he does it because he wants to avoid World War 3; Evil Elon does it because he likes authoritarian rule, and because the Chinese Communist Party has paid him off.

On Ukraine, similar, Real Elon just wants to end the conflict and stop more Ukrainians from dying. After all, Russia is powerful and determined enough that they’ll almost certainly be able to hold onto a piece of Ukraine at the end of the war; why not just trade land for peace and be done with it?

But Evil Elon wants Putin to triumph, because he sympathizes with authoritarian rulers in general. No one knows what Elon and Putin talked about during their frequent conversations since 2022. But believers in Evil Elon suspect that they conspired to bring about a Russian victory in the war.

When former U.S. Army officer Alex Vindman accused Elon of being used by Putin, Real Elon accused Vindman of treason and threatened him with “the appropriate penalty” because hey, we all get mad on social media and like to punch back at people who attack us. But Evil Elon did it because Vindman was on to something.

When Real Elon declared his support for the German far-right party AfD, it was because he saw Germany spinning into industrial decline and suffering from an immigration policy that failed to exclude violent criminals. But Evil Elon did it because he likes that AfD is vocally pro-Putin and pro-CCP.

In fact, believers in Evil Elon suspect that his support for AfD might also be due to the whiff of Nazi apologia and antisemitism that hang around some of the party’s candidates. Real Elon is a stand-up guy — when he agreed with a tweet about Jewish communities pushing anti-White hatred, he publicly apologized, declaring it the worst tweet he’s ever done, and declaring himself a “philosemite”. And when Real Elon accidentally endorsed a Tucker Carlson interview with a Hitler apologist, he quickly deleted the endorsement once he realized what it actually contained.

But believers in Evil Elon think that these are just the kind of public relations moves that a supervillain would do to cover his tracks. They fear that the massive wave of antisemitism that has swamped X since Elon took over is the result of intentional boosting, rather than simply the inevitable result of more lenient moderation policies combined with the reaction to the Gaza war.¹ They do not buy Real Elon’s protests that other platforms have even more antisemitism.

And so on. Essentially, Evil Elon is a somewhat cartoonish supervillain, who wants to set himself up as the ruler of one of three great dictatorships, ruling the world with an iron fist alongside his allies Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin — a new Metternich System to enshrine right-wing values and crack down on wokeness and progressivism and obstreperous minorities all over the world.

Just for fun, I had Grok draw this new Metternich System, and the result was pretty great, so I feel like I have to post it:

Art by Grok

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. A few progressives will be very convinced that he is actually evil, but I think most people will simply wonder and be uneasy. Evil Elon will continue to exist in a sort of quantum superposition with Real Elon in their minds — a Schrödinger's oligarch who will probably turn out to have been a good guy all along, but might ultimately turn out to have been very bad from day 1.

And that will scare them. In fact, all powerful people have this same property — even some of the people who voted for them didn’t entirely trust Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, and so on. Powerful people are simply inherently untrustworthy, because the consequences of misplacing your trust in them are so grave. But for most of modern American history, there have been checks and balances on these leaders, meaning that if they did turn out to be bad, there would be plenty of institutions and opponents in place to limit the damage.

So who or what can check Elon’s power?

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. This is why some people worry about the U.S. becoming an oligarchy, especially in the years after Citizens United.

Up until now, I believe those worries have been misplaced — rich activists like the Kochs, Soros, or Murdoch have of course been influential, but their powers were limited and to some degree they canceled each other out. But in the age of X, SpaceX, and Trump, we may be looking at a very different situation. Not only has technology evolved, but Musk is a singular figure — he has already proven himself to be the one person who can build big successful new high-tech manufacturing companies in the U.S. He might ultimately prove himself to be the one person who can translate a vast fortune and a corporate empire into effective dominance of U.S. politics.

So who or what could balance out Elon’s power? Congress appears prostrate before his online onslaughts and his primary threats. Trump might have fired and denounced him back in 2017 as he did Steve Bannon, but that Trump seems long gone — this Trump is enfeebled by age, bedeviled by lawsuits, and abandoned by many of his old allies. Democrats are still dealing with the collapse of 2010s-era progressivism, and in a few days they will control zero branches of the federal government.

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. So far, though, even super-rich people who have had rivalries with Musk in the past seem inclined to bend the knee and live as best they can under the new regime.

What about the press? Traditional media — newspapers, TV, and radio — has declined steeply, replaced by social media. Musk owns one of America’s main news platforms (and a second one, TikTok, is effectively controlled by the CCP). Meanwhile, more progressive media outlets still seem to be in a state of paralysis over conflicts with their activist staffers and their subscribers over Gaza, trans issues, and general election-related recriminations.

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.

This means that if enough people get tired of Musk’s attempts to influence American politics, he’ll lose his influence. X is somewhat influential, but even with Musk’s algorithmic changes, it’s not a mind-control device, and it’s also not actually that widely used. Musk is America’s most talented entrepreneur and richest man, but even the greatest of men is powerless if he’s rejected by the masses.² This week’s fracas over the CR is unlikely to win Musk a lot of fans — the American people have never liked shutdown brinksmanship. If Elon pulls a few more such stunts, the first year of Trump’s second term could come to be defined by a widespread backlash against his overreach.

Vox populi, vox dei, as they say.

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1. Actually I have a third theory, which is that the antisemitism is mainly driven by Russian and Chinese bots, in order to drive a wedge in American society. I’ve noticed that the antisemitism mostly dried up right after the election. This could have potentially been due to a crackdown by Elon.

2. Someday a few techlords may be able to use AI to rule the world in defiance of the overwhelming mass of humanity, but I wouldn’t bet on it.