Why Elon Musk's million-dollar presidential lottery is ominous

By Sam Butler

Donald Trump and Elon Musk at a campaign rally on October 5, 2024. Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images

Elon Musk can never be president.

Born in South Africa, he is constitutionally ineligible for the job of chief executive. But there is a role he can take: CEO of United States of America Inc.

Earlier this month, Elon Musk quietly incorporated “United States of America Inc” at the address of his family office in Texas, news first reported by Sarah Emerson in Forbes and confirmed by a search of Texas corporate records. While Musk’s precise plans for “United States of America Inc” aren’t yet known, it doesn’t take much of a squint to see the outlines of his vision.

On the campaign trail for Donald Trump, Musk has already begun gathering shareholders of sorts, offering $47 to anyone who refers a swing-state voter to sign his petition, which he says he is using to juice the get-out-the-vote campaign for Trump. He has also turned it into a lottery, and says that a different random signer will win $1 million each day from now until the election, a successful way to buy media attention. (The petition is designed for Trump supporters, but anybody in a swing state can sign, and if liberals participate it might screw up his metrics and his roll out, but that’s a different story.) 

Musk’s Super PAC, which is fueling the lottery, the petition, and an ad campaign, boasts a similarly patriotic moniker, America PAC, and Federal Election Commission records show Musk has already pumped $75 million into it. 

But what is Musk trying to buy here, exactly?

Musk’s vision for America — a place of high personal and economic freedom, where political activity could become criminal, under the rule of tech-controlled joint-stock companies — is one of the most important stories of this election.

Whether a vehicle for political activity, shielding activities from oversight, or more formal attempts at corporate capture of the American government, “United States of America Inc” points in a clear direction: capitalizing on the government for private gain. But there’s little in Musk’s past or present that suggests he’s interested merely in the quotidian government-contracting corruption. His admiration of Argentina’s libertarian president Javier Milei and El Salvador’s crypto-sovereign Nayib Bukele, executives rising out of the philosophical fermement of the New Right, suggest a deeper project may be underway. 

Nick Land is a philosopher known for inspiring the basic ideas of “accelerationism.” In a Wikipedia entry that Land praised as exceptional, accelerationism is described as “the idea that capitalism and technological change should be ‘accelerated’ and drastically intensified to create radical social change,” or to others — “ the theory that the end of capitalism should be brought about by its acceleration.” In 2012, Land published a series of related blogs: The Dark Enlightenment. 

In The Dark Enlightenment, Land cites right-wing academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe, author of Democracy: The God That Failed. Quoting Hoppe, Land argues that democracy is doomed—leaving us at the mercy of “temporary elected caretakers,” who attempt to exploit as much as they can during their time in office.  Kings, so the argument goes, at least engage in long-term thinking while they exploit their subjects.

Looking for a solution, Land and New Right thinker Curtis Yarvin—a blogger and software developer, who developed many of the ideas of the New Right writing under the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug"—envisioned a new form of government: a corporation. (Yarvin at times uses “monarchy” and “corporation” interchangeably—describing a corporation itself as “absolute monarchy,” and has recently leaned more toward monarchism than corporatism, if there’s a difference.)

Instead of being citizens of a state, Americans would be customers of a corporation—run by a CEO, accountable to shareholders who would own the corporate government outright. Those shareholders would be the lobbyists and political insiders who hold informal political power today. By formalizing their power, and making their incentives transparent, Land and Yarvin argue it would make government more efficient. As Land writes in The Dark Enlightenment:

Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp. the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value. There is no longer any need for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics whatsoever. In fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities. If gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for its taxes (sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and if necessary take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice, free exit.

More frankly, per Gil Duran in the New Republic, Yarvin has called to “reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called ‘patchworks,’ which would be controlled by sovereign joint-stock corporations called “realms”:

“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” 

One of the principles of “sovereign corporate management” of these realms, according to Yarvin:

A realm is a business, not a charity. Its goal is to maximize its discounted return on investment. If it somehow manages to forget this, in the long run their realm will deteriorate, develop red-giant syndrome, and become gigantic, corrupt and foul. It may even turn into a democracy.

For a charitable interpretation, Yarvin compares this to managing a hotel.  “The basic idea is that the proprietors profit by providing the residents with a pleasant place to live, be happy, and of course be productive.  If you’re not nice, they’ll leave, the proprietors won’t have a business, and you won’t have a job.”  (Residents could leave, but every other government would be a tech-controlled realm as well.)  However, Yarvin adds:

You exercise undivided sovereignty … You have no constraint. Your residents are as ants in your kitchen. No combination of them can possibly oppose you. Not even if they all come together in one big angry mob, screaming, jumping up and down, waving their little signs and throwing rocks and gravel. All will be massacred by your invincible robot armies. Pour la canaille: Faut la mitraille! [“For the mob, use the cannons”]

Yarvin and Land compare this system to modern places such as Hong Kong and Dubai, the “lost fragments of the British Empire.” Land writes in The Dark Enlightenment: 

These states appear to provide a very high quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and economic freedom. They tend to be quite prosperous. They are weak only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective.

Hong Kong is an important reference. The former British colony and special economic zone has long been a libertarian dream—capturing the imagination of free market radicals, anti-tax advocates, and business tycoons ever since Milton Friedman debuted his PBS series Free to Choose there, as Quinn Slobodian details in Crack-Up Capitalism. 

Key aspects of Hong Kong government include limited suffrage, a low tax rate, and political participation reserved for corporations. This is a similar system, as far as the comparison goes, to contemporary China, where the arrangement is that the party will run things smoothly and safely for you, and in exchange you will not participate in politics. 

The parallel may strike some American readers as hard to square, but Musk, who does a significant amount of business in China, can no doubt see it. It comes through when he shares his larger vision for Twitter, which he renamed X in pursuit of becoming “the everything app.” As he has often noted, that app already exists in China, called “WeChat.” He has long admired the crown jewel of China’s technology market, and sought to emulate it. “Daily life in Chinese cities is nearly impossible to navigate without WeChat, to the extent that being barred from the country’s super-app has been likened to a ‘digital death,’” write Dan Milmo and Amy Hawkins, in The Guardian. Beyond social media, WeChat is used for utility bills, plane and train tickets, and payments — and Musk would like X to be “just as indispensable in the West.”

“In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications, and the ability to conduct your entire financial world,” Musk said about X in July 2023. Where some might expect the ostensibly libertarian Musk to recoil at the dystopian control of WeChat, instead he is working to have X emulate it. Per Shirin Ghaffary at Vox, in a June 2022 meeting, Musk reportedly told his staff, “You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success.”

Yarvin has similar ideas for X. In a March podcast appearance this year, titled “Curtis Yarvin’s advice for Elon Musk,” Yarvin criticized Musk’s handling of X and saw opportunities for much more. “You have to build Community Notes into something that works as well as a court, if not better, and then you know you’re building real power,” he said. He continued: “It would be amazing to formalize these credentials and make Twitter the primary intermediator for reputation capital.”

Yarvin and Land’s New Right ideas have taken a central place among Trump’s intellectual support structure. Within a month of Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Politico reported that Yarvin “had opened up a line to the Trump White House, communicating with [Trump advisor] Steve Bannon and his aides through an intermediary.” (Yarvin denied reports of speaking with Steve Bannon.)  Peter Thiel—described as a friend of Yarvin, who invested in Yarvin’s startup in 2013 and hosted Yarvin at an election night party in 2016—reportedly became disillusioned with the Trump White House for not taking Yarvin-like ideas far enough. “Thiel fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning,” according to Barton Gellman, who published a wide-ranging interview with Thiel in 2023. “He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.”

VP nominee J.D. Vance, a former employee in one of Thiel’s firms, has discussed similar ideas, citing Yarvin.  In a 2021 podcast appearance, Vance was prompted to give his advice for Trump in a possible second administration.  Name-dropping Yarvin, Vance advised: “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people.” As Gaby Del Valle at The Verge pointed out, the advice Vance offered is Yarvin’s proposal “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE)—intended to “‘reboot’ the government under an all-powerful executive.” 

We can see the osmosis of these ideas into mainstream Republican politics with “Schedule F”: an executive order that would eliminate employment protections for federal workers, and allow the Trump administration to retire all government employees and crush the administrative state. Trump signed this executive order in 2020 — and had Biden not been elected that year, it would have gone into effect.

Vance finished his statements by adding: “We are in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” James Pogue at Vanity Fair notes this language also comes from Yarvin’s New Right ideology: evoking America as Rome in its “late republican period,” waiting for its Caesar to come and take power.

A year later, in 2022, Thiel made the largest contribution ever to a super PAC backing a single candidate in a Senate campaign—$10 million to Vance’s Ohio campaign.

Cementing Yarvin and the New Right’s influence, Thiel and tech billionaires reportedly hand-picked J.D. Vance to be Trump’s VP pick — coming after months of conversations between Trump and a cast including Thiel, David Sacks (Thiel’s former PayPal co-founder), & Jacob Helber ( adviser to Thiel’s company Palantir). The same piece quoted a source close to Thiel, saying, “To Thiel, Vance is a generational bet.”

And within days of Trump choosing Vance for the VP candidate, Elon Musk publicly pledged to give $45 million dollars per month to Trump’s campaign.

Since Vance’s VP selection, Musk has become a key figure in Trump’s re-election bid. In August, Trump floated the idea of making Musk a cabinet member. One month later, Trump heeded Musk’s suggestion and pledged to create a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which would be headed by Musk himself. Its function would be to conduct “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms”—such as replacing all government employees.

“Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, David Sacks, and others in the anti-democracy movement,” Robert Reich in The Guardian writes, “believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.”

Musk may have just incorporated it. But he has role models.

Elon Musk at a town hall-style meeting on October 17, 2024 in Folsom, Pennsylvania. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

Since taking office in December 2023, Argentine libertarian Javier Milei has done a speedrun of Yarvin’s and Thiel’s ideas, taking his country through economic shock therapy and privatization in his first year — including cutting pensions for workers, slashing public services (he campaigned with a chainsaw), and opening the country’s resources to foreign corporations. “Everything that can be in the hands of the private sector,” Milei told a local radio station, “will be in the hands of the private sector.” Earlier this year, Thiel visited Milei in Argentina, with the new president’s agenda underway. After the meeting, Thiel reportedly remarked “Milei’s ideas are as relevant globally as they are for Argentina.”

Musk has championed Milei from the start. Just a month ago, he remarked “President [Milei] is doing an incredible job restoring Argentina to greatness!”—and, with eerie similarity to Thiel’s comments, said this to Milei: ”The example you are setting with Argentina will be a helpful model for the rest of the world.” (H/t Jacob Sugarman writing in The Nation.)  Most honestly, perhaps, Argentina ambassador to the US Gerardo Werthei observed that Musk “expressed wanting to help Argentina, and had a very good view of everything we have, mainly lithium.”

Musk has offered similar praise for El Salvador president Nayib Bukele—the leader who adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador, and introduced a “citizenship by investment” program, offering residency visas to foreign investors who put $1 million into the economy through Bitcoin (“available to the first one thousand investors”). The law even offers direct citizenship to foreigners who make Bitcoin donations to the government of undisclosed amounts.

Following a meeting between Musk and Bukele at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Musk tweeted: “Just had an excellent conversation with [President Bukele]. We talked a lot about the nature of reality, future of humanity and how technology like AI and robotics will affect the world. El Salvador has an amazing leader.”  In a video recap that Bukele posted to X, Musk tells Bukele the Tesla site is “three times the size of the Pentagon.”

Musk himself loves public-private partnerships. He lives off of billions of dollars in government contracts through SpaceX, essentially replacing the functions of NASA, and Starlink.  He enjoys billions more in government subsidies and tax credits for Tesla.  (In Q2 2024, nearly 60 percent of Tesla’s revenue came from the sale of carbon credits.)  With a second Trump administration and a new FCC chair, Musk could also be in line for billions more in federal broadband subsidies, which were denied to him by the Biden administration.

This strategy, becoming a monopoly through public sector contracts, is endorsed by Peter Thiel himself in the book Zero to One—with Tesla highlighted as an example. Thiel’s own company Palantir got off the ground with an investment from CIA-linked In-Q-Tel—and recently, secured a contract with the British government to integrate all of the patient healthcare data for the entire NHS into a central repository, part of a slew of public and corporate accounts that has it projected to become the largest AI company in the world.

In The Dark Enlightenment, Land undertakes his own thought experiment of how to transform the government into a corporation owned by shareholders. The first step to do that, he writes, requires: 

that the entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares. 

At that point, the people who hold true political power can be identified.

Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need to entirely exclude them from this calculation, although their portion of sovereignty will be estimated with appropriate derision. The conclusion of this exercise is the mapping of a ruling entity that is the truly dominant instance of the democratic polity.

If anyone were in position to see that “the entire social landscape of political [lobbying] is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares,” it would be person in charge of “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.”

Perhaps the shares would be in “United States of America Inc.”

Sam Butler works on projects and media for worlds we want to see — including community housing, just climate transitions, and people-owned technology.  He is currently developing a documentary on The Dark Enlightenment and the New Right.  You can reach him at write@sambutler.us or Signal at SamButler.01, and find his latest work at pss.pm/sam.