The Incredible Shrinking Presidency

I n September 2022, the Ukrainian military attempted to attack a Russian naval base in Crimea. The plan failed because Elon Musk, the owner of Starlink, denied Ukraine access to the communications system, which would have been critical to the ambush. Musk later said he turned off the access because he worried that, if the attack was successful, Russia would launch nuclear weapons in retaliation.

It was, in effect, a private citizen directing battlefield strategies in a war in which the United States has a direct interest. And it hasn’t ended there; Musk’s status as the world’s richest man has on occasion allowed him to talk secretly with Russian president Vladimir Putin about, among other things, shutting off the Starlink internet system over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. (In 2021, Musk earned a $1.8 billion contract from the U.S. government to operate Starlink for NASA and the U.S. military.)

Of course, private companies have always played a role in U.S. military efforts, from auto factories converted to make guns, trucks, tanks, and aircraft engines, to the Lionel toy-train company manufacturing compasses for warships. Weapons used in wars don’t make themselves.

Musk has allowed Starlink to be used by Ukraine, even though there are now complaints that Russia has also figured out how to log on. But the Crimea Starlink affair was the most notable example of an owner of one of these large companies actually dictating what happened on the ground. Musk, of course, hadn’t been elected to anything — even if he weren’t foreign-born, his erratic behavior and alleged frequent drug use would make him an unlikely candidate for the presidency.

But what if Musk, or any of the other tech billionaires roaming the earth, could use their wealth and their products to consolidate presidential-like powers among themselves? What if they could begin changing Americans’ everyday lives in ways that dwarf what the president or Congress is able to do?

In the past, rich guys obviously had an effect on our lives in important ways, from the stuff we buy, to how it gets to showrooms and shelves, to how much we pay for it. But the inventions of the tech billionaires are permeating our everyday lives in ever-new ways.

Owners of artificial-intelligence companies, for example, will influence both how children learn and how adults work. Car companies are equipping their automobiles with internet signals that record facets of your driving and then send that information to insurers. Tech billionaires will determine what we read, what news we see, and what television shows we watch.

These are powers that will often exceed those granted to the chief executive sitting in the most powerful office in the land.

This is all happening at the same time that the president’s powers have been greatly expanded. As the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy explains in The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (in an excellent new updated edition), much of the polarization we see today has come about because “the president increasingly has the power to reshape vast swaths of American life.” Whether it’s been Barack Obama’s “pen and phone” policy-making, Donald Trump’s extralegal attempts to fund his border wall, or Joe Biden’s effort to “forgive” student loans only to be blocked by the courts, every successive president adds to the list of what he (or maybe she) thinks the chief executive is able to do.

But the newly minted powers of the rich guys are in addition to these new powers claimed by presidents, not in place of them. And there is no check on anyone with a couple of billion dollars to throw around, as long as no laws are broken — no Congress to disapprove, no Supreme Court to rein in the oversteps. If your neighbor makes a deepfake video of you defecating on the Pizza Hut buffet and sends it to all your friends, there is no elected official or court that’s going to help you out. (In some circles, you may face more criticism for eating at Pizza Hut than for despoiling its offerings.)

Similarly, if you don’t want someone wearing internet-enabled glasses to be able to look at you at a coffee shop and see your name, address, social-media posts, and the like, tough luck — rich guys are working on that technology right now.

So what power would you rather have — “forgiving” student loans for a million college grads by way of presidential decree, or owning a cash app that gives you every American’s bank-account information?

And their powers won’t be limited to our borders. As is the case with Musk, we may be entering an era where the wealthy can take foreign relations into their own hands. Historically, it’s been tough for private citizens to get their hands on a nuclear warhead, but they’re acquiring different kinds of awesome power by way of a keyboard.

A software magnate who wants to punish a European country for not acceding to U.S. interests could, for example, launch a product that allows him to spy on leaders of that country or sow seeds of distrust within the government. Think of the Kremlin’s attempts to destabilize America, only in reverse and not sanctioned by the government.

This isn’t meant to suggest, of course, that government should be involved in reining in rich guys who want to spend their money any way they see fit. Government moves at the pace of Moo Deng running a marathon — by the time they pass any of their innovation-killing regulations, new technologies will be miles ahead of them. But as Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. A light governmental touch on tech will in some ways make our lives better, but in other ways it could change our lives negatively in monumental ways. It will be up to us as humans to adapt.

Donald Trump spent years decrying Big Tech. Now that he’s endorsed by a man who has those powers, he seems to be just fine with them. After Musk purchased Twitter (now X), the site began its lurch to the right, promoting right-wing posts and disfavoring left-wing ones.

This culture shift at X was necessary given the site’s history of censoring conservative content. But the switch has no doubt further confused the American electorate, making crazy conspiracy theories seem normal and amplifying unfounded rumor and innuendo. (Musk himself frequently posts about his site being the antidote to “Orwellianism,” as his companies try to perfect a computer chip to implant in people’s brains.)

And, of course, Kamala Harris isn’t immune to the influence of the obscenely rich, either. She has been endorsed by more prominent billionaires than has Trump, ostensibly because when billionaires cause chaos, they want to cause it themselves and not the president.

Next week, voters will choose either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as their president. But in a few years, when billionaires are affecting our daily lives in more profound ways than any president ever has, will next week’s vote even matter? And will the tech billionaires be working for the president, or will it be the other way around?