Elon Musk's Influence Over The Incoming Trump Administration is Astoundingly Corrupt

Musk represents an outright bursting of the dam, where private power has overwhelmed democratic governance and propelled us into an era of catastrophic corruption.

I recognize that a lot of people will approach the title and subtitle of this with reflexive indignation at the obvious hyperbole I’m engaging in. But I am engaging in no hyperbole. I mean every word. In fact, that it’s not blazingly obvious to everyone how dramatically inappropriate it is—for Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who currently owns and controls X (formerly Twitter), and leads the largest government contractor, SpaceX, while also being CEO of Tesla, xAI, Neuralink, and the Boring Company—is profoundly disconcerting, and drives home how dangerous this populist moment has become to the stability of democratic institutions.

In Musk, this is an unprecedented concentration of power that should alarm anyone who understands the basic principles of democratic governance. Elon Musk simultaneously controls: one of the world's most influential communications platforms, America's primary civilian space contractor, the largest electric vehicle manufacturer, and emerging companies in artificial intelligence and neural technology. Each of these positions individually would warrant careful scrutiny. Together, they represent a dangerous nexus of private power that exists largely outside democratic oversight.

The fact that many view this situation as normal or acceptable demonstrates how far we've strayed from basic liberal democratic principles about the proper relationship between private and public power. The Founders understood, through bitter experience with entities like the British East India Company, that concentrated private power poses a fundamental threat to democratic governance. They would have immediately recognized the danger in allowing a single individual to accumulate this kind of influence over both private industry and government function. That said, there has been a multi-decade effort within conservative legal scholarship to argue that the sorts of restrictions that Congress has put on the president over management and personnel matters within the executive branch are unconstitutional.

This conservative legal movement, often associated with the "unitary executive theory," has gradually normalized the idea that presidents should have nearly unlimited control over the executive branch. While presented in constitutional terms, this theory effectively provides intellectual cover for dismantling the professional civil service and regulatory frameworks that traditionally check both presidential and private power. When combined with unprecedented concentrations of private power like Musk's, this creates a perfect storm: a weakened state apparatus increasingly unable to check private power, while that same private power gains more direct influence over executive authority. The original conservative argument was that Congress had improperly constrained presidential control over executive agencies. But what we're seeing now is something far more dangerous—the potential capture of executive power itself by private interests operating outside any democratic accountability.

Even if one accepts the premise that government bureaucracy is inefficient—there are certainly valid critiques of bureaucratic inefficiency—this does not justify the kind of extra-legal private power that Musk is in the process of accumulating. The fundamental purpose of democratic institutions isn't to maximize efficiency; it's to ensure power is exercised through legitimate, accountable channels. When we allow private actors to bypass these channels in the name of efficiency, we undermine the very foundations of democratic governance. The Founders didn't include explicit powers of taxation and commercial regulation in the Constitution because they thought government would be more efficient than private enterprise—they included them because they understood that unchecked private power, no matter how efficiently wielded, poses a fundamental threat to political liberty.

To defend Musk’s consolidation of power on the grounds of efficiency is to misunderstand the purpose of democratic governance. The Founders did not prioritize efficiency—they prioritized liberty. An efficient tyranny is still a tyranny, and the brakes built into our democratic system are there precisely to prevent such concentrated power from overwhelming the public good.

The genius of democratic design isn't just that it prevents tyranny as a side effect—preventing the dangerous concentration of power is quite literally its core purpose. The inefficiencies in democratic systems—checks and balances, separation of powers, administrative procedures, public comment periods, judicial review—aren't bugs, they're features. They're deliberately designed friction points that slow down the exercise of power and make it more difficult for any single actor, public or private, to accumulate too much control.

When James Madison designed the Constitution's system of checks and balances, he wasn't trying to create an efficient government. He was explicitly trying to create a government where power would be diffuse, contested, and difficult to concentrate. The tedious processes of democratic governance—the committee hearings, the regulatory reviews, the endless rounds of public comment and judicial challenges—serve as crucial speed bumps that prevent the rapid accumulation of unchecked authority.

The "efficiency" defense of Musk's power concentration is so fundamentally misguided. It's like praising a car for how fast it can go while ignoring that the brakes have been removed. The whole point of democratic governance is to put brakes on power, to make its exercise slower and more deliberative precisely because unchecked power, no matter how efficiently wielded, poses a fundamental threat to liberty.

This transformation of constitutional conservatism represents a profound ideological corruption. During the Cold War, conservatives correctly recognized that America's "inefficient" democratic processes were a crucial safeguard against totalitarian tendencies. They understood that the very features that made American governance slow and deliberative—the complex web of checks and balances, the independent civil service, the regulatory frameworks—were what distinguished it from authoritarian systems that could act swiftly and decisively.

The speed with which many self-proclaimed constitutional conservatives have abandoned these principles in favor of concentrated power reveals something important: their previous defense of democratic processes wasn't rooted in a deep understanding of why these safeguards matter. Rather than truly internalizing Madison's insights about the dangers of concentrated power, they simply saw democratic "inefficiency" as a useful argument against state expansion. Now that private power centers like Musk offer the prospect of bypassing democratic constraints to achieve their policy goals, many conservatives have readily embraced exactly the kind of unchecked authority they once claimed to oppose.

This ideological reversal becomes even more concerning when we consider how it intersects with the rise of authoritarian capitalism globally. The success of countries like China in combining market efficiency with authoritarian control has provided a seductive model for those frustrated with democratic "inefficiency." The danger is that in their eagerness to embrace powerful private actors who promise to cut through democratic red tape, constitutional conservatives are unknowingly laying the groundwork for an American version of authoritarian capitalism—exactly the system they spent decades claiming to stand against.

The current situation with Musk bears striking parallels to the Gilded Age, but with crucial differences that make today's concentration of private power potentially more dangerous. During the era of the robber barons, figures like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan accumulated enormous economic power through industrial monopolies. Their control over railroads, oil, steel, and banking gave them unprecedented influence over American life. However, even at the height of their power, these industrial titans primarily exercised control over discrete economic sectors.

What we're witnessing with Musk represents a new and more concerning form of power concentration. Unlike the robber barons, who mainly controlled physical infrastructure and traditional industries, Musk's power extends across multiple domains that are fundamental to modern society: space exploration (through government contracts), public discourse (through X/Twitter), transportation (through Tesla), and emerging technologies like AI and neural interfaces. This diversified control over both physical and digital infrastructure creates opportunities for power leverage that the robber barons could only dream of.

Moreover, the robber baron era ultimately led to a strong public response through the Progressive Movement, resulting in antitrust legislation like the Sherman and Clayton Acts, along with the creation of regulatory frameworks to check private power. Today, we face the opposite trajectory—the systematic dismantling of these very protections that were put in place to prevent dangerous concentrations of private power. The conservative legal movement's push for deregulation, combined with the complexity of modern technology and markets, has made it increasingly difficult for democratic institutions to exercise meaningful oversight.

What we're witnessing is a particularly dangerous form of institutional erosion. Federal ethics laws weren't created arbitrarily—they emerged from hard-learned lessons about how concentrated private power can corrupt democratic governance. When Trump informally delegates authority to Musk, he's not just violating the letter of these laws; he's undermining their fundamental purpose: preventing private interests from capturing government power through backdoor channels.

This informal power arrangement is especially pernicious because it operates in the shadows of legal accountability. While formal government appointments come with strict ethical obligations, oversight requirements, and conflict-of-interest restrictions, informal influence faces none of these constraints. By exercising power through these unofficial channels, Musk gains the influence of a high-ranking government official without any of the corresponding legal obligations or democratic accountability.

The historical parallel here is telling. When Congress first established federal ethics laws, they were responding to exactly this kind of problem—powerful private actors wielding government authority without formal responsibility. The difference today is that modern technology and global markets have made this informal power potentially far more consequential. When Musk can simultaneously influence government policy, control public discourse through social media, and direct massive government contracts through SpaceX, he's able to leverage these informal relationships in ways that the original drafters of ethics legislation could hardly have imagined.

The argument that bureaucratic inefficiency justifies extra-legal concentration of power fundamentally misunderstands how democratic reform is supposed to work. Even if we accept the premise that the civil service has problems—that it's inefficient, politically captured, or failing to meet meritocratic standards—the solution cannot be to simply hand power to private actors operating outside democratic accountability. This "ends justify the means" reasoning is precisely what the Constitution's system of checks and balances was designed to prevent.

The proper venue for reforming the civil service is Congress, where proposed changes can be debated, refined through the legislative process, and subjected to public scrutiny. This isn't just procedural formalism—it's about ensuring that reforms serve the public interest rather than private power. When changes to government function happen through formal legislative channels, they come with built-in accountability mechanisms, oversight requirements, and protection for basic democratic principles.

Consider the difference: A congressional reform of the civil service would involve public hearings, expert testimony, debate, amendments, and ultimately democratic accountability through elections. In contrast, informal power arrangements between a president and private actors like Musk circumvent all these safeguards. Even if such arrangements might seem more "efficient" in the short term, they set dangerous precedents that undermine the very foundations of democratic governance.

This gets at a deeper truth about democratic institutions: their legitimacy comes not just from what they do, but how they do it. If we believe the civil service needs reform—and there may well be good arguments that it does—then we should pursue that reform through legitimate democratic channels, not through the accumulation of unchecked private power.

The concentration of private power we're witnessing isn't just another swing of the political pendulum—it represents a fundamental threat to democratic governance itself. When we allow figures like Musk to accumulate unprecedented control over multiple crucial sectors while simultaneously wielding informal government authority, we're not just bending democratic norms—we're breaking the very mechanisms designed to prevent tyranny. The Founders understood this danger. The Progressives understood this danger. Even Cold War conservatives understood this danger. Yet today, we seem to have forgotten these hard-learned lessons in our rush to embrace efficient autocracy over messy democracy.

This is not a partisan issue, nor is it simply about one man's accumulation of power. It's about whether we will maintain the basic principles of democratic governance that have distinguished America from autocratic systems. The informal delegation of government authority to private actors, operating outside any democratic accountability, represents exactly the kind of corrupt merger of private and public power that our institutional safeguards were designed to prevent.

If we tolerate this erosion of democratic principles—if we accept the argument that efficiency justifies bypassing the constitutional order—we are setting a precedent that will echo through generations. We are telling our children that we value quick action over careful deliberation, concentrated power over democratic accountability, private authority over public good. This leads nowhere good.