Tough Questions About Tech’s Shadow Rule
Earlier this week, The New Yorker published a lengthy feature article by Ronan Farrow titled “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule.” Ronan Farrow, as you might recall, was the author of an earlier article in The New Yorker, and a subsequent book, that investigated allegations of sexual abuse against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Thankfully, there’s nothing of that sort in Farrow’s treatment of Musk. Nonetheless, Farrow’s latest feature article does pose some uneasy questions, not so much about Musk personally (though there’s plenty of biographical background that provides pertinent context) but about the implications of outsourcing increasingly critical government services, funded ultimately by taxpayers, to unelected tech executives. How is accountability and responsibility maintained? Do unelected tech chieftains become unofficial government officers, with de facto executive powers? How can these tech leaders be constrained from abusing the public trust that accompanies taxpayer-funded initiatives and projects?
While a large part of the article deals with US government services that have been outsourced to SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration and satellite communications company, Farrow also explores the relationship between Musk’s Tesla and China, representing a potential conflict of interest for Musk personally given SpaceX’s commitments to the US defense industry.
The following two paragraphs from Farrow's article helped explain the narrative context:
The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the First World War, J. P. Morgan lent vast sums to the Allied powers; afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., poured money into the fledgling League of Nations. The investor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations underwrote civil-society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel, as part of his support of Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.
Caught Between the Responsibilities and Corruption of Power
Regardless of the disputed and seemingly varied provenance (it goes back a little further than the Spiderman franchise), the well-known adage, “With great power comes great responsibility,” is widely recognized as a valid axiom. But there’s another cogent and popular quote about power, attributed to John Dalberg Acton (he was also known as Lord Acton, but there will be no aristocratic airs and graces on my watch). That one, which I’m sure you know, goes as follows: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Is it wise to take it entirely on trust that a single person, functioning as an unelected and fundamentally unaccountable quasi-government official, will be capable, entirely of their own accord, of exercising power’s honorable responsibilities without succumbing to its corrupting influences? Why would anyone accept that proposition entirely on blind faith?
In the case of Elon Musk, if Farrow’s investigation is to be believed (the article appears assiduously researched, based on interviews with scores of knowledgeable sources), there’s a legitimate concern that a potentially compromising imbalance has been reached. At one point, Farrow quotes a Pentagon official: “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces. That sucks.”
There are ways, of course, that the Pentagon and other government agencies and departments can rebalance the relationship and regain a measure of control. Government officials are not without recourse to disciplinary controls and punitive measures. Since Farrow’s feature article was published by The New Yorker, Reuters reported this week that the U.S. Justice Department has sued Musk’s SpaceX for allegedly discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees in hiring its hiring practices.
Was this legal salvo related to wider government dissatisfaction at having to live off Elon Musk’s “good graces”? There’s no evidence to corroborate that view. In fact, it’s entirely conceivable, even probable, that this matter is unconnected with the problematic and strained situation detailed in the pages of The New Yorker. Still, what Farrow describes seems a uniquely modern set of circumstances, and how the tale unfolds from here will tell us a lot about future relationships between elected governments and the technology world’s richest and most powerful leaders.