The Musk of Power

(!) All views expressed here are the author’s own and should not be attributed to any institution, employer or future legal defense fund.

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”

-- Plato

Since 1776, the “most powerful person in the world” has been, with few exceptions, the sitting U.S. President. Napoleon, Hitler, and maybe J. Robert Oppenheimer could be considered for the “few” who broke the precedent, but the list is short.

The term “money equals power” hasn’t always rung true. The robber barons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had nothing on Abe Lincoln and by the time the 1900s rolled around, the world had bigger problems. 

But in the year 2025, a year shy of her two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, America has a new chief exporter of power. A man who needs no introduction…

Elon Musk.

What a hot take, right? The man who owns Twitter (not “X”), the most valuable car company on the planet and who bought his way into a presidential cabinet… is powerful?! What’s next, the sky is blue? 

I previously discussed the break-up of Trump and Musk’s bromance in June and referred to Trump as the “most powerful man (for now,)” and gave a grim prediction on Elon’s future.

Most would still think of Trump as the world’s most powerful man. He has the nuclear codes (ohmygofdjdw) and for a while, the global markets would fluctuate based on whatever he said last.

Thankfully, investors are taking his words less seriously than those of any president ever. Other than the 'Liberation Day' plunge and the first messages that followed, the majority of Trump’s tariff or trade announcements amount to mere rounding errors in the market’s value, sometimes even helping the market’s comeback. 

Although the last couple of months have been rough for Musk, Trump’s summer may be faring even worse. Before every media organization in the world ran with the Epstein stories, who made the first mention of a Trump-Epstein relationship?

According to the Wall Street Journal, Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May that his name was among the many in the Epstein files. On June 5, Musk dropped the “really big bomb.” After a June filled with online chatter about Trump and Epstein, the FBI and DOJ released their unsigned memo in early July. Correlation doesn’t prove causation, but there was no public discussion about Epstein anywhere before the tweet.

Thanks… Elon?

Who It’s Not

Trump has continuously shot himself in the foot since taking office in January. Elon is responsible for a lot of Trump’s problems, but the president has only made each issue worse for himself. 

He keeps opening his mouth about Epstein. It caused him to slip and say he “never had the privilege” of visiting the island. If you wanted a masterclass on how to act guilty, you’re getting one.

Canada was barreling towards electing a conservative prime minister in this year’s election. Thanks to the trade war, Liberal Party leader Mark Carney won. 

The relationship between China, Japan, and South Korea isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. But Trump’s stupidity brought the three together for the first time in years to discuss trade and regional security.   

If anything, Trump is giving the rest of the world an opportunity to catch up. 

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were contenders, but Russia’s poor performance in Ukraine and their economic woes show a new angle of the Kremlin’s house of cards. President Xi still holds significant power, but China’s birth rate is still in deep trouble. That, combined with potential economic strife from a decline in manufacturing and exports, shows a path to a weaker China. 

Contrary to a popular tin foil belief, Bill Gates isn’t in the running for most powerful man. To some, he once was. But Apple’s success and the broader success of the tech sector over the twenty-first century arguably diluted Gates’ grasp. 

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has emerged as a new candidate. The face of a $300 billion business that is reshaping search, jeopardizing Google’s control over the search market.

Like Google, the ChatGPT name has achieved generic status. Curious about a question, “just Google it”, is the go-to response. And just like, “I’ll get you a Band-Aid” or “can you fill up my Thermos”, ChatGPT is synonymous with AI. 

To me, Altman himself doesn’t hold as much power as his product does. Dangerous, for him and of course, for us as well.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has a monopoly over the social media market. The Meta “Family of Apps” consists of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads. Nearly four billion people are active on these sites monthly, including 3.3 billion daily users as of March 2025. The global population at the time of this writing is 8.2 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg in 2025.

Increasing the rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide, substance abuse and online grooming or abuse of minors is Zuckerberg’s main power. One he’s continuously been grilled about by elected officials, but of course, no significant actions have been taken. 

It’s definitely not Zuckerberg’s charisma preventing congress from taking meaningful action against Meta. It’s also not any tangible power other than (META) makes congress money. It makes up about 3.5% of the S&P and about 6.5% of the NASDAQ 100. 

Between April 2 and June 30, twelve members of the House and Senate made twenty-four trades surrounding Meta stock.

Republican Rep. Jefferson Shreve of Indiana sold somewhere between $100,001 and $250,000 of Meta stock on April 7 part of a “portfolio rebalance”. Shreve caught flack for making hundreds of stock trades, including companies that “fall within the jurisdiction of one of his committees” based on a report by NOTUS. Shreve then sold off the majority off his portfolio including another $100,001-$250,000 sale of Meta stock. 

This power isn’t exclusive to Zuckerberg. Money makers and corporations with great lobbyists get breaks. But just like the S&P or Nasdaq, if a company is no longer lucrative or worth enough to be in the circle, they get dropped out.

Jeff Bezos owns the world’s largest online retailer, the Washington Post, controls 30% of the global cloud market with AWS and owns rocket company Blue Origin. Bezos is also deploying Project Kuiper, a satellite mission that aims to rival Musk’s Starlink. 

The recently remarried Jeff Bezos with his second wife, Lauren Sanchez. BRUCE GLIKAS / GETTY IMAGES

So far Kuiper has deployed almost eighty satellites, which pales in comparison to Starlink’s eight thousand plus currently in orbit. Kuiper’s initial constellation goal is thirty-two hundred and it must be accomplished no later than 2029. 

Kuiper is utilizing SpaceX for the second time to get satellites into space. There is no competition, Starlink is dominating. 

The first Starlink launch was just over six years ago. Starlink not only got a head start, but also is deploying them at a much faster rate than any space exploration organization ever. At the rate they’re going, Kuiper would need over three hundred launches to reach the eight thousand number SpaceX is at. So far, they’ve secured eighty launches. 

If you’re asking why Blue Origin hasn’t been brought up, it’s because they haven’t launched Kuiper satellites yet. The first mission is set to be mid-2026. By that point, SpaceX is projected to pass ten thousand satellites in orbit. 

A Monopoly on the Markets

(TSLA) is the only publicly traded company in Musk’s portfolio, which consists mostly of Tesla, xAI (which owns Twitter), SpaceX, and Neuralink. Tesla’s market cap has hovered around $1 trillion. That’s about $800 billion more valuable than the next car company, Toyota. 

Tesla sales fell for the first time in a decade after estimating 50% growth in sales each year back in 2022. Tesla’s yearly revenue from June 2024-June ‘25 was $92.7B, a 2.73% decline year-over-year. Compared to Toyota’s $3.14B revenue and a 3% increase year-over-year. 

SPENCER PLATT / GETTY IMAGES

However, buying Tesla stock is less of a bet on the product and more of a bet on Musk. Since SpaceX and xAI are private, most retail investors must rely on Tesla stock as their in. SpaceX had a recent $400 billion valuation, a claimed valuation for xAI and Twitter of $113 billion, and Neuralink’s $9 billion valuation would leave Tesla with an inflated but more reasonable market cap of about $400 billion… justifying the trillion-ish dollar TSLA valuation. 

To my knowledge, there isn’t a single publicly traded company that sees the amount of investment for the quality of product Tesla offers. If any other company made the monstrosity also known as the Cybertruck, they’d likely be the laughingstock (no pun intended) of Wall Street.

Despite the “armored glass” failing miserably during the original unveiling in November 2019, a two-year delay in deliveries, some pretty lackluster sales numbers in 2025 and a long list of recalls, Tesla is still trading at a P/E of 185. The average P/E multiple is anywhere from 20 to 25.

Musk promised a 90% autonomous car within the next three years. That was in 2013. In 2014, he doubled down, even speeding up the timeline by a full year. By 2015, Elon promised a fully autonomous car, “in about three years.”

By my count, Musk has made almost thirty predictions on autonomous driving. It’s taken twelve years since his first prediction to deliver its first car from factory to customer autonomously. Yet since that first prediction, the stock has gone from under ten dollars per share to over three hundred. 

The tweet above is flat-out incorrect. Google’s Waymo is already in five cities, including Austin, where Tesla is headquartered. They’re also testing in Tokyo, Vegas, and upstate New York in search of “winter conditions.”

Tesla seems to be nowhere close to that. They are still, in their own words, 'lagging by a couple years.' At the speed technology is moving today, a couple years could prove to be a death sentence. But the hype train rolls on. 

Tesla “rolled out” their robotaxi in June, during a “supervised launch open only to a few invitees.” It didn’t go great, but none of them crashed and blew up, so, there’s that. 

In response, Tesla shareholders are suing Musk and the company for securities fraud, hyping up the launch and “concealing the significant risk posed by the company's self-driving vehicles.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into 2.6 million vehicles over a remote driving feature in January and is now, according to Bloomberg, opening a new investigation into the robotaxi launch.

Tesla stock fell about 1% following the news.

Recently, Elon Musk was awarded a $29 billion pay package from Tesla. It’s his first “meaningful compensation in eight years.”

Musk is currently in a legal battle over a 2018 pay package worth about $56 billion. He never received that package after it was struck down by the Delaware Court of Chancery, twice, after a shareholder sued him and the board. It would’ve been the largest compensation award for an executive in the history of the public market.

The new package comes after the board adopted a bylaw assuring anyone who wants to challenge his pay must hold at least 3% of Tesla stock. That after their move to Texas from Delaware. 

Now, the $29 billion package is the largest, surpassing Palantir CEO Alexander Karp’s $6 billion package… that is unless Palantir stock goes up another 500%. However, Musk can still be awarded the $56 billion package if a judge agrees to dismiss it. If that were to happen, the new pay package would be thrown out. No double dipping, even for him.

One side of the coin shows Musk growing shareholder value almost 300-fold since it hit the market in 2010. Helping to pioneer the electric vehicle market into a nearly $800 billion industry in 2025. 

But the bonus comes at a time where Tesla is posting the steepest sales decline in over a decade. Tesla’s brand reputation cratered in an Axios Harris Poll, from the eighth best in 2021 to the 95th. Placing “dead last in ‘character’, while placing near the bottom in areas like ‘ethics’ and ‘citizenship.” 

Yet the board, who Musk has wrapped around his finger, feels it’s necessary to provide Musk with extraordinary compensation. They haven’t paid him in eight years, after all and as we can all tell, he’s really struggling with inflation and egg prices. Even resorting to letting his son punch him, likely because he can’t afford toys for little X. 

Coming after he pretty much ditched his post as CEO to campaign with Trump, then failed to save the government $2 trillion as he had promised, throwing up a ‘nazi salute’ in the process…

Rewarding the world’s richest man for killing the world’s poorest children, with an amount of money that would’ve covered last year’s United States Agency for International Development (USAID) costs and then some.

Congratulations to the Tesla board; somehow you’re worse than him.

A Monopoly on the Courts

Musk gets away with a lot. Can any other CEO hit a blunt on The Joe Rogan Experience? I mean, good for him. I guess if I could, I would too. 

This tweet in 2018 led the SEC to charge him with securities fraud after the stock jumped 10% that same day. All in all, after the boost and eventual dip, since funding was not secure, Tesla investors lost $12 billion in the ten days following.  

Musk settled with the SEC for ​$20 million and agreed to step down as chairman. Tesla also paid a $20 million settlement and the $40 million would be “distributed to harmed investors as part of a court-supervised process.” $40 million in exchange for $12 billion in losses. But that’s what you get for playing the game.

Musk was also sued by shareholders for the tweet, but won the lawsuit after testifying that his tweets did and do not cause the stock to change. That defense “secured” a unanimous verdict in California.

As we well know, Musk stepping down as chairman really didn’t have much of an effect on things. He remained the CEO and the undeniable face of the company.

That same year, Musk used Twitter, to put it lightly, express his disagreement with Tesla employees forming a union. Well, he threatened to revoke stock options for employees if they were to vote in favor of a union. Claiming that a union wasn’t necessary and that Tesla’s safety record was “2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.”

MAYA HITIJ / GETTY IMAGES

To clarify, the Tesla plant in question was never a union shop. The Fremont Factory was previously owned by Toyota and General Motors, but once GM filed for bankruptcy in 2009, that era was dead. So was the United Auto Workers’ time in that facility. 

Musk also claimed that the facility was safer under Tesla’s management than the Toyota plant, which can also be disputed by reports documenting the early years at the facility. 

Tesla’s “serious nonfatal injuries” that resulted in leaves of absences, restricted duty, or job transfer was 69% higher than the industry average in 2014 and 103% higher than the industry average in 2015. That’s an average of about 7.5 injuries per 100 workers in those two years. 

Tesla promised safer conditions, Musk called the claims "disingenuous or outright false”, even sleeping on the factory floor since he had no time to “go home and shower.” One can only imagine the smells.

Back to the point, Musk won the court battle over the tweet. Originally, the National Labor Relations Board deemed the statement an “illegal threat.”

Tesla appeared and from there, three judges from a New Orleans court upheld the decision. Tesla sought a rehearing, where the judges deemed, by a one-vote margin, that Musk’s actions were not illegal.

To focus on poor working conditions a bit longer, a report by Reveal in 2018 found that in-house medical staff was “forbidden” from making calls to 911 “without permission.” Utilizing Lyft rides for injured employees instead of ambulances, "including one who severed the top of a finger.”

“The goal of the clinic was to keep as many patients off of the books as possible,” 

-- Anna Watson, a former physician assistant at the plant via Reveal News

Watson was fired after raising safety concerns. 

Tesla hired an outside company, Access Omnicare, to run the on-site medical clinic. In their proposal, they made statements like, “prolonged absence from work is a tangible detriment to the health and welfare of the injured worker, both physically and psychologically." 

If an employee was injured on the job during “off-hours”, the employee would be instructed to visit the clinic the next morning, “regardless of whether or not they required an emergency room visit.”

Even with that proposal, the report quotes a former high-level Access Omnicare employee who alleged Tesla was “bullying and pressuring [the company] to do things people didn’t believe were correct.”  It sounds like a chapter in a modern-day version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but it’s reality inside the country’s largest and most American auto company. 

The acquisition of Twitter wasn’t smooth sailing either. Musk was sued for failing to disclose his stake within the legal timeframe. You are required to disclose trades after exceeding a 5% stake in the company within ten days, but it took him eleven. The Washington Post reported Musk made $156 million by simply delaying the disclosure. 

The SEC sued Musk as well, obtaining private texts between Musk and board members.

“Elon – everyone excited about prospect of you being involved and on board. Next step is for you to chat w three of them so we can move this forward quickly. Maybe we can get this done next few days.”  

– text from “Board Person B” as described in suit

The SEC is seeking a jury trial and is requesting Musk be forced to “pay disgorgement of his unjust enrichment” along with other penalties. Musk’s legal team has until August 29 to respond after they were granted two six-week extensions. They’ve called the suit a “sham.”

A Monopoly on the Skies

We discussed Starlink in the Market section above. A brief background; Starlink is a satellite internet provider launched using the SpaceX rockets. Let’s put it into scale, just how far ahead they are:

As of June 2025, Starlink has six million subscribers in 140 countries with over eight thousand active satellites. 

Starlink's satellite train visible from the night sky. VITO TECHNOLOGIES, INC

Kuiper currently serves zero in zero countries, about two dozen active satellites. 

OneWeb, a European competitor, serves mostly business and government clientele and doesn’t have any public consumer numbers. They have more than 630 satellites in orbit.

Chinese endeavor Quinfan plans to have 650 satellites by the end of the year. They have less than one hundred satellites currently in orbit, but never underestimate how fast things can be built in China. 

The rest of the pack has about a third of the number of satellites OneWeb has. Of course there are new, exciting prospects that pop up all the time, but Starlink’s strength is in the numbers and that’s the only meaningful metric. 

Starlink’s subscriber growth doubles every year. By that logic, this time next year they’ll be serving the population of Belgium and by 2028, the population of Spain, the 31st most populous nation on earth. Yes, if Kuiper or OneWeb takes off, that growth rate would stunt, but not by much. Starlink has achieved, like ChatGPT, Google, and Band-Aid, generic status. 

They’ve also secured a partnership with T-Mobile, exposing their 130 million customers to Starlink technology and securing 650+ satellites, only further justifying more launches. 

Airlines like United, Virgin Atlantic, and more have partnered with Starlink to provide actual high-speed internet on flights. 

Musk now controls two thirds of all active satellites, as of September 2024. He’ll have complete domination in only a couple of years if left unchecked. But nothing points to him being stopped anytime soon. 

Unlike Tesla, the product is incredible and reaching places most traditional providers can’t, like the Pitcairn Islands. A tiny speck in the South Pacific you can mistake for a crumb on your map. 

Providing much needed upgrades for the FAA, working with the Pentagon and the US Navy, so why would there be any checks on new launches? Competitors like Kuiper can’t reach their goals without using SpaceX rockets. 

The biggest application may have been in the weeks following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. SpaceX and USAID delivered 5,000 satellite terminals to Ukraine, 3,667 of which were donated by SpaceX, with USAID purchasing the remaining amount. It kept the nation online during the early days of the war and is now becoming a testing ground for direct to cell service, messaging and mobile satellite broadband. 

However, reports this summer showed Musk ‘ordered a Starlink shutdown’ in September 2022 during a “crucial counteroffensive measure” in the port city of Kherson. SpaceX deactivated at least 100 terminals, causing a communication blackout that led to the attack’s failure, according to Reuters. 

SpaceX has called the report “inaccurate” and Musk claimed he’d “never turn off the terminals.” But the reality is he did, and he can. 

To quote the man formerly known as Kanye West, “no one man should have all that power.” Especially when it comes to the modern-day space race. 

In the sixties, it was the United States versus the Soviets. Now it’s one man versus the rest of the world. 

Supervillain shit.

To Wrap

You can’t blame retail investors for buying a share into a real-life Tony Stark. Even though he wasn’t even the founder or lead visionary of PayPal or Tesla, he gets the credit. 

More credit than Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, and Peter Thiel, the founding members of PayPal. More than Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, the founders of Tesla. 

It’s possible the stock hype is backed up by the very claim I’m trying to make. Musk’s share in the future is growing exponentially, especially if he begins making more progress on the AI front.

It’s possible that his feud with Trump or his increasing unpopularity dilutes the impact he’ll have in the EV, or autonomous driving, or the artificial intelligence market. But Starlink and SpaceX alone may pose enough of a threat to centralized power in one man. 

President Trump and Elon Musk in the Oval Office in March 2025. ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

The fears of Trump’s increasing unchecked powers are real ones. The chance of a potential MAGA dynasty, with JD Vance or Don Jr. leading the way in 2028, isn’t unlikely either. For some bizarre reason though, I’m optimistic the country will make better decisions in 2026 and eventually 2028, than we did last November. 

What will take Trump down won’t be the Epstein files, his immigration tactics or any other controversy he’ll find himself wrapped up in, it will be the economy, just like that of his predecessor. But that’s a different story for a different day.

The point is, the people still have a decision. If Trump decides to run a third term or have one of his sons, whether that be his real or adopted ones, they’ll still have to get through the American system.

One I, stupidly or not, still believe in. A testament to my radical optimism, or the result of great propaganda… probably the latter.

Whatever happens in the midterms or in 2028, Musk, as long as he keeps his ketamine addiction in check, will still have control over the technology of the future. Some of the best. 

Even though great PR and some “relatable” podcast appearances helped him coast through the first quarter of the 21st century, his investment and hand in cruelty and a couple of slip-ups reveal the true intentions of a man. Like this one:

Ponder that.