Silicon Emperor

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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

***

Friends,

Elon Musk is a very powerful man. This much is widely accepted, both in celebration and lamentation.

On Monday, Musk’s perceived and actual power took a colossal stride forward as Donald Trump retook the Presidency. With that in mind, I have been asking myself a question recently: In human history, has anyone ever held more concentrated power than Elon Musk?

The antiquarians among you might dismiss the thought out of hand. My friend, you might intone with amusement, have you ever heard of golden-skinned and sweet-smelling Alexander the Great? What about Genghis Khan, who is said to have been born clutching a blood clot? (This is the theater of true emperors.) If you are not an adept of the ancients, perhaps simply cast your mind back 70 years to the show trials and grim brutality of Joseph Stalin?

These are the faces of power, you might say. Power is the auto-da-fés of Torquemada or the mass castrations of Qin Shi Huang. It is the ability to deliver pain and take it away, to threaten life and come good on the promise.

There is logic to this argument. After all, it is a perpetual sin for the living to overstate the importance of their era. Why so many superlatives? Does it help to believe that we were born in a rare splinter of sunshine rather than the porridge-grey mundanity of most places, most centuries?

But to discount Musk from this discussion would be to miss what power looks like in the 21st century, let alone the 22nd. To cast power as violence alone underestimates the scale of technological control and the steepness of exponential curves. True power is not the ability to deliver pain, to oblige death, but to set the world on a path of one’s choosing. In the most depraved dictatorships, violence becomes the point. More often, though, it is the instrument to achieve an end. If one can succeed with less bloodshed, is that a sign of less power or more?

Let us make Musk’s case. We’ll review his economic, political, ideological, martial, and cognitive capital. There may be other forms of power (just ask Durkheim), but these capture the key levers.

We can start with his economic power. According to Forbes’ “real-time” net worth tracker, Musk is worth $432 billion. Remarkably, this is 1.8x his next closest rival, Jeff Bezos. Musk is 8 years Bezos’ junior and is actively shepherding his most valuable holdings, SpaceX and Tesla. It’s reasonable to expect the gap between Musk and the chasing pack to grow rather than shrink. Over the next decade, Musk could very plausibly become the world’s first trillionaire.

Musk’s wealth is astonishing for our era, but is it really so impressive compared to previous magnates? To avoid muddling economic and political power, let us focus on individuals with independent sources of wealth rather than sovereigns with discretionary access to a state’s capital (See: Putin, Stalin, or Mansa Musa, the 14th-century Malian emperor who gave away so much gold during a visit to Cairo that he skewed the Egyptian economy for a decade).

John D. Rockefeller’s net worth peaked at $900 million in 1913. At the time, the 74-year-old oil magnate’s fortune amounted to 2.3% of America’s GDP. By that measure, Rockefeller still has the lead, but not by as much as you might imagine. Musk’s $432 billion makes up approximately 1.5% of US GDP, with time on his side.

Another historical candidate for “richest person in history” is the memorably named Jakob Fugger, a 15th-century Swabian merchant. You’ll be happy to know that part of his wealth was familial, so there was, indeed, a rich mother Fugger.

Thanks to a mining empire and the clever knack of lending money to the most influential people of the Habsburg empire, Fugger effectively translated economic might into political power. Fugger financed Charles V’s bid to become Holy Roman Emperor, supplying more than 60% of the capital needed to bribe the prince-electors. After doing so, he was happy to baldly remind the regent of this “favor.”

“It is well known that Your Imperial Majesty could not have gained the Roman Crown save with mine aid, and I can prove the same by writings of Your Majesty's agents given by their own hand,” Fugger wrote in a letter. This is not the tone of a man concerned for his well-being, but rather one well aware of where he sits in the power structure.

Still, by historians’ best estimates, Musk’s wealth eclipses Fugger’s, whose wealth equated to roughly 2% of Europe’s GDP. By today’s standards, that would amount to $370 billion, about two Bernard Arnaults. Throw in the United Kingdom, and Musk and Fugger are at parity...