One of the most stubborn misunderstandings about Elon Musk—who has just become the world’s first trillionaire —is that he is a libertarian. In fact, despite the occasional ornamental Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell meme, Musk has never subscribed to the primary principles of libertarianism. His primary focus is not on individual liberty. It is on the achievement of civilizational goals, to which everyone’s energies and wealth need to be deployed. His attitude toward the state has never been one of rejection, but rather—as we saw at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a will to drastically reformat it to align better with his goals and make his own services indispensable.

Indeed, from Musk’s earliest ventures onward, he has relied on the state for support, subsidies, and demand. This was clear from his very first enterprise Zip2, a city directory service that relied on free data from the GPS constellation that had just been completed by the military. PayPal, the source of his first fortune, was only viable because it zapped money between consumer accounts covered by federal deposit insurance. Even as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia, Musk encouraged his superior to invest in Brady bonds —Latin American debt securitized by U.S. Treasury bonds—reminding him that they were “backed by Uncle Sam.”

One of the most stubborn misunderstandings about Elon Musk—who has just become the world’s first trillionaire —is that he is a libertarian. In fact, despite the occasional ornamental Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell meme, Musk has never subscribed to the primary principles of libertarianism. His primary focus is not on individual liberty. It is on the achievement of civilizational goals, to which everyone’s energies and wealth need to be deployed. His attitude toward the state has never been one of rejection, but rather—as we saw at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a will to drastically reformat it to align better with his goals and make his own services indispensable.

Indeed, from Musk’s earliest ventures onward, he has relied on the state for support, subsidies, and demand. This was clear from his very first enterprise Zip2, a city directory service that relied on free data from the GPS constellation that had just been completed by the military. PayPal, the source of his first fortune, was only viable because it zapped money between consumer accounts covered by federal deposit insurance. Even as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia, Musk encouraged his superior to invest in Brady bonds —Latin American debt securitized by U.S. Treasury bonds—reminding him that they were “backed by Uncle Sam.”

But the most overt connection between Musk and the U.S. government has always been SpaceX, the company he founded in 2002, which went public today as the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. It came on the heels of a change in U.S. strategy known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which saw the old U.S. Defense Department bureaucracy as an enemy that had survived the Cold War and needed to be supplanted by streamlined and disruptive practices from Silicon Valley. The “network-centric warfare” that characterized the global war on terror relied on small, easily deployed satellites to coordinate highly mobile special forces and guide munitions to their targets. Musk’s SpaceX was the upstart in the rocket field, and it became a key provider for putting those satellites into orbit. Musk had to sue the government in 2014 to outflank a legacy provider but only so that he could embed his business more deeply inside the government apparatus. Palantir used the same logic in 2016.

In its early years, SpaceX relied almost entirely on government contracts. Over time, that dependency waned relative to the overall business, especially after the launch of the Starlink satellite internet service in 2020. There are now close to 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, accounting for more than 70 percent of all satellites in the sky. This division of SpaceX has been lucrative, boasting 12 million subscribers and generating the conglomerate’s only profits last year. In contrast, the rocket-launch business, though successful, remained extremely expensive, incurring an operating loss of $657 million. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s artificial intelligence segment—which includes xAI, creator of Grok— burned money at an even faster rate, losing more than $6 billion.

Where do Musk and SpaceX stand now vis-à-vis their dependence on government? The fact that Musk has become so closely identified with MAGA creates considerable risks for his business. The choice of partisanship over modularity runs against what had been the most effective part of Musk’s business model until the last few years. When Musk built a Gigafactory in Shanghai and another in Brandenburg, he was able to serve the needs of both China and Germany without his own politics intruding excessively.

We describe this dynamic in our book as “sovereignty as a service”: increasing state capacity through technological means in a way that creates dependency on individual tech oligarchs but also widens the range of possibility for his clients. Now that Musk has been so deeply marked by MAGA, his political identity could undercut his status as a military contractor in three ways.

The first is domestic. Although Musk has secured almost $7 billion in contracts from the Trump administration already in 2026, making SpaceX a core provider for the Golden Dome missile defense project, a change of government—either at the upcoming midterm elections or at the next presidential one—could make those contracts objects of partisan rivalry. Musk took a major reputational hit through his destructive DOGE initiative in 2025 and has only partially offset the resulting decline in demand for Tesla through his pivot to robotics and AI. It would be an easy move for a Democratic nominee to use attacks on Musk as a means of gathering popular support. In office, a Democratic president could potentially end Musk’s contracts or transfer them to one of his competitors.

Outside the United States, Musk’s affiliation with Trump has made other countries wary, as well. One of the enormous markets that Starlink has not been able to enter, despite Musk’s best efforts, is India. This week, India indicated that it would lengthen the approval process because of the use of Starlink technologies in the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, a war that is seen in India as both reckless and unnecessary. The war is having enormous ripple effects on the cost of living for ordinary Indians, many of whom rely heavily on imported fuel and energy. . If Musk equals MAGA, then he also absorbs the blame for MAGA’s security failures.

A third risk is Musk’s vocal and vitriolic enthusiasm for the most extreme factions of the European far-right. For the last year and a half, Musk has been gambling, either consciously or subconsciously, that he can use his 240 million followers on X, along with his considerable celebrity and wealth, to sway politics outside the United States toward candidates of his choosing. Those candidates have, in almost every case, sat on the far right of the political spectrum. Musk has adopted slogans on immigration that, until recently, were considered too extreme even for members of Alternative for Germany. Last week, he replied to a startling post that read: “If I ever have my head cut off by an African/Please politicise my murder/Please use it to push a far right agenda/Please start a Reconquista.” Musk posted two fire emojis and a single word: “Same.”

Musk has been especially diligent in his attempts to foment far-right unrest in the United Kingdom, such as with calls for preemptive violence during anti-government mobilizations in late 2025 and the amplification of racialized narratives surrounding violent crimes in Britain. These interventions have led public figures and commentators to tell Musk, once again, to stay out of the politics of countries in which he does not live.

Surprisingly or not, this interference has not yet led to the commercial exclusion of Musk’s products. Tesla was recently granted a license to start supplying British homes with electricity. But after another six months or a year of such behavior, there is a growing possibility that his interventions will become liabilities rather than assets. Furthermore, figures such as Nigel Farage and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have increasingly kept Musk at arm’s length because dependency on a South African-born U.S. billionaire can compromise one’s supposed commitment to national sovereignty. Here, too, Musk’s partisanship could undercut his credibility as a contractor to government s both foreign and domestic.

What lies behind all of this, however, is the point that Musk made to his boss as a teenage intern: the utility of being backed by Uncle Sam. When SpaceX goes public, it will immediately rank among the 10 largest companies in the world, joining another of Musk’s firms, Tesla. The failure of either company would create not only an enormous hole in the stock market, but also a cascading effect on investor confidence in the technology sector at large. By making himself too big to fail, Musk has made it much more likely that the U.S. government would bail him out if needed. His wager with the SpaceX IPO is that fusing himself even more fully with Uncle Sam is enough to outweigh all the other risks generated by his increasingly polarizing behavior and business decisions. The United States’ status as global hegemon may not be as uncontested as it once was, but its government’s willingness to prostrate itself unconditionally in order to de-risk the ventures of its leading corporate champions remains unparalleled.