What is power for?

A "No King's Day" essay.

The power progression

Just to recap from last week:

For normies, money is for paying bills, paying taxes, buying things, building a life, caring for loved ones, staying alive. Everyone who depends on paychecks and invoices for income — who exchange labor for cash — is working class.

People who make money off of interest, investments — who exchange cash for even more cash — are not.

For them, money is not merely for living, it’s a measure that quantifies power.

As money/power scales, the emphasis becomes less about what the money is for and more about what the power is for. This is the power progression. At the level of billionaires, the money and the power are expected to accumulate more or less in tandem. It’s positive correlation: when one goes up, the other should also go up.

Also, while this number must never go down, it equally can never be flat for too long. The flat line is deadly.

Look, this isn’t hard: we live in a form of capitalism that emphasizes maximizing shareholder value. A company that isn’t growing is, in a sense, failing. It may be profitable, it may be large, it may employ thousands and pay good wages — but if the chart does not show ‘number go up’, then soon, the vultures will circle. That’s the billionaire mindset. Loss of power is tantamount to death. And they want to live.

This seems strange to people who are not among the ultra-high-net-worth caste. Joe Rogan recently said of Elon Musk that he can’t possibly want more money — he already has so much.

But that misses everything. They’re not stockpiling the money, and they’re not stockpiling the power. They spend power to get more money so they can spend money to get more power.

Which is why they’ll always want more.

Power is never having to say you’re sorry.

Power is a currency, and it is a form of protection. Amass enough power, and you will be free from accountability. Ask any general contractor: the customers who don’t pay the bills are the ones who can afford to pay lawyers instead.

Many very wealthy people are not altogether concerned about either limitless wealth or limitless power. They do not feel a need to be free from all accountability. Let’s set them aside.

The extremely wealthy — the truly powerful — rise to a level at which full accountability is impossible, and consequences do not exist (or can be externalized).

As I said last week, they’re too big to jail.

There's wealth, and there's sovereign wealth.

Do you know who (usually) doesn’t go to jail? Kings. Most kings leave power feet first.

America doesn’t have kings but it has always had very rich people. Still, the level of wealth some of our billionaires possess today would make the Robber Barons blush.

Musk is said to be worth $383 billion. That’s about on par, adjusted for today’s dollar, with John D. Rockefeller.

Still, this is nothing. Our billionaire lists tend to omit a whole class of people. They forget royalty, and specifically they forget the House of Saud.

It is said that the value of that family is $1.4 trillion. With those resources, you can do anything. Build a linear city, 105 miles long, in the middle of the desert. Own English Premier League teams. Take over golf. Murder a journalist in a NATO country with absolutely no consequences.

You know where most of that $1.4 trillion lives? In a sovereign wealth fund that invests in projects both inside the KSA, and all over the world; that personally enriches members of the royal family; that seized some of its assets in an “anti-corruption” purge of some of the wealthiest members of the extended family; and that otherwise, is almost entirely opaque.

You know who else wants a sovereign wealth fund?

Here are the two most important things you need to know about a sovereign wealth fund:

1. They typically are the result of the national government owning some kind of surplus asset the country does not need to govern itself — sometimes cash, but more typically, oil. The United States has surpluses of neither.

2. They typically invest in two ways: they buy stocks, and they buy (typically domestic) companies.

So, how do you rack a sovereign wealth fund without surpluses? Theoretically you could borrow money. But borrowing money to buy risky assets is, uh, risky. The other way is through some creative accounting and coercive fundraising.

A prince/president might levy tariffs, and collect the revenues in — again, just for the sake of argument — an External Revenue Service. Bypass the main treasury altogether, create an alternate account. Depending on the tariff scheme, he could raise anywhere from $100 billion to $2 trillion or more.

Tariffs — just the threat of them — are already influencing what and how much US businesses import, demand for US exports from our closest trading partners, and prices on consumer goods, which went up last month.

He might slash spending by up to $3 trillion. He continues to defy court orders enjoining action on the OMB order that would do just that. Despite many reporters and commentators believing that court orders mean anything, programs all over the world and in all fifty states are being stripped for cash, leaving people stranded overseas, or stuck holding the bag on enacted and previously funded projects at home. Americans are about to feel even poorer.

Our losses, though, are their gains.

It’s not hard to imagine a couple trillion dollar sovereign wealth account funded by these measures. All you have to do is not pay your bills or repay your debts, which Trump doesn’t do anyway. Rather than use savings to pay down debts, the way most Americans do, he could just assign it to an account called Trump SWF.

What then? Well, the sovereign wealth fund Trump seems to admire most is the Saudi PIF, the one with almost no transparency or oversight. What does Trump want to do with the money? Who knows! He’s mentioned buying TikTok¹ (in other words, establishing truly state-controlled media), but that’s thinking too small.

Trump has also issued an EO demanding an evaluation of whether the US should establish a strategic bitcoin reserve, a national stockpile of digital assets — a class of investment that is almost entirely built on attention/fame/vibes/lulz as drivers of value, rather than any underlying assets or tangible value.

It’s wild how credulous the financial press often is when it reports on people who think this “strategic digital asset reserve” is a good idea. They say it will make people richer, hedge against inflation, but most importantly, accelerate bitcoin adoption.

Here’s a quote that will drive you to drink,

“The government can keep doing what it is currently doing, holding Bitcoin, but create a policy to keep it as a strategic Bitcoin reserve. This policy shift would signal to the market that it’s not looking to liquidate. In response, the market would likely send Bitcoin price higher and increase the asset value, which, in turn, would increase the spending power for millions of Americans,” said Neil Bergquist, CEO and co-founder of Coinme.

I have no idea how the increased price of Bitcoin would increase the spending power for “millions of Americans” but I’m going to assume the millions are all BTC owners². It would do nothing for the rest of us.

The purpose of BTC is to buy more BTC.

In case you missed it, the US government already holds over 200,000 bitcoin, chiefly acquired through asset seizures against criminals. Lots of people have questioned why they haven’t sold it.

But the reason is right there in that quote above — if the US government sells its bitcoin holdings, the value of bitcoin will go down. If it tried to sell them all at once, it would be probably the greatest rug pull of all time.

So, if all the US government can do is hodl, why buy more? The cryptobros believe it would drive the price forever upwards, enriching whoever bought lower than the latest price. It would be nothing but line go up; every cryptobro you know would be flashing diamond hands, nomming tendies all the way to the moon.

If you know who Milo Minderbinder is, you know the punchline: everyone gets a share.³

But that’s not what power is for.

Power isn’t for making everybody else richer. It’s for ensuring you have so much more power that no one can ever surpass you, that accountability and consequences remain in the genre of cautionary tales for other people’s kids.

The thing about being only a billionaire and not a prince is that you are still subject to a nation and its laws. You are still merely a citizen, no matter how good you are at evading consequences. You are, in theory, occasionally curtailed by a system of laws, slightly hemmed in by courts and regulators, irritated by mere shareholders.

After awhile it must be so boring evading the law all the time, avoiding consequences. It would be much better if there simply were no consequences at all.

And so, in the final boss battle of power acquisition, what is it that the billionaires want? Sovereignty.

Let's be legends.

You hear commentators speculate on how Trump might want to protect his legacy, or build an enduring governing majority, or serve “his people”. But Trump does not have a constituency. He has a fan base. They serve him. They rally for him, and vote for him, and pwn the libs for him, and in return, he gets to be president. He repays them with cut benefits, defunded school programs and staff, high prices, diminished incomes, and leaves them to recover on their own. They give him their votes, and their small dollar donations, and they buy his NFT trading cards and his memecoins, and in return, he gets to be in charge.

For the moment, barring some implausible combination of forces, most especially a coordinated turn against him by society, his own caucus and the courts, they have only one way to oust him: elections.

They not like us.

The billionaires and Trump have much more than money in common. Their primary goal has nothing to do with governing. They want the ultimate freedom — the freedom from everything and everyone else. Not a rules-based order, but a rule-free one.

From Peter Thiel’s seasteading fantasies, to Balaji Srinavasan’s “networked states”, the Randian dream of a Galt’s Gulch⁴ — a sovereign nation of the very rich, left to their own devices, ungoverned and ungovernable — is a feature of having so much wealth it seems to have traumatized you.

I know there’s been reporting that the sovereign wealth fund wouldn't be spent on digital assets. But that's not what the White House Crypto czar says. He says, “It’s possible that the sovereign wealth fund could decide that they want to make Bitcoin or digital assets part of its portfolio.”

Imagine you’re already a billionaire — the insanely rich kind, like Musk, or the weak sauce version, like Trump. What is the one way you could ensure that you have power that nobody else can have?

One way is to make yourself rich the way countries can be rich. The United States has about $269 trillion in assets, and about $146 trillion in liabilities. It has a net worth of $123 trillion, or about 321 Elon Musks. Of course, the federal government doesn’t control the nation’s net worth, because federalism, and also capitalism.

But we’re not doing capitalism anymore. Ironically, capitalism makes the playing field a little too even.

One of the most bizarre features of cryptocurrencies as an investment vehicle is that the whole thing is predicated on the idea that the biggest holders won’t sell — or won’t sell all at once. That way the market never crashes entirely. But there is no law preventing the rug pull, in which the major shareholders sell off their holdings to make actual money. Memecoins exist almost entirely for this reason — it takes little to no effort to stake a new coin, and there are no rules against selling it all at once, leaving the little guys holding the bag.

We’re all laboring under the misapprehension that there’s some sort of collective incentive to keep the bitcoin market stable. But billionaires don't really believe in stability. Their beliefs in accelerationism, decline, and their own supremacy are far more appealing to them than any plebeian desire for stability.

Besides, what if one of these billionaires could be the world’s first individual trillionaire? He could build his own little network state — never mind taking over the Presidio or declaring a freedom city — get yourself your very own sovereign state⁵.

It is not even remotely outside the realm of possibility that the desire for limitless power could lead someone to engage in the greatest pump and dump scam of all time. Get the United States, through its external revenue service, to buy crypto. Drive up the value not only of BTC and ETH, but almost all digital assets (except for central bank digital currencies, which are for suckers⁶). Watch as Redditors buy crypto assets with debt, companies start buying more crypto as a “hedge”, and prices go to the moon. Observe as perhaps one by one, or all at once — the biggest holders sell. Behold the only entity left holding the bag, propping up these fantasy currencies: the United States government, now shrunk to the current market value of ultimately valueless currency.

Taken to an entirely hypothetical, admittedly apocalyptic conclusion, this sort of scheme would be the ultimate rug pull. Nations would collapse. Businesses would fail. People would be bankrupted.

But not the ones who understood what power is for: making yourself a king.

How’s that for dark?

I promise that next week I'll write something about the other view of what money is and what power is for. I'm talking to Rachel Bitecofer this week about what the Democrats should do in exile, and to Mike Podhorzer about collective power and how to organize it.

For now, I'll leave you with this thought.

There is no act of opposition that is too cringe to at least try.

When the authoritarians pursue an “everything, everywhere, all at once” strategy — the opposition needs to do the same thing. I think too many strategists think that the opposite reaction to a force is to invert the tactic. When they go low, you go high... that sort of thing.

But that's not what physics tells us. The equal and opposite reaction is about the direction of force. You push, I pull. We exert energy, shift mass, interact in an opposite direction. If they do everything, everywhere all at once and you wait, assess, craft a single-minded strategy and execute through one central body... I'm sorry, I can't even see that thought through, it's so obviously wrong.

By the time you are done planning, they've already changed the field of play, the rules of the game, the players on the field, and probably what game is being played.

So: Be annoying. Mock. Challenge. Resign. Maliciously comply. Meet absurdity with absurdity. Believe the statement and not the walkback. Call a lie a lie, regardless of who is standing and who is sitting. Stand up for your colleagues even when it doesn’t benefit you. Focus on who benefits, and who gets hurt. Say what things are. Tell the truth⁷. Build solidarity.

And I’ll see you next week.

1. Let me pause for a moment to just be blown away that the Republican Party would ever advocate for a sovereign wealth fund that would effectively nationalize corporations.

2. For more on how many crypto owners there really are, listen to this episode of Cross Tabs, featuring Molly White:

3. Now is as good a time as any for a Catch-22 re-read or re-watch.

4. This old article on The Baffler’s website is fantastic and worth reading if for no other reason than we are right now living in the mother-of-all capital strikes. Just take this one passage, and then read the whole thing:

Inside the bubble of libertarian purity, everyone knows we are suffering under the thumb of a tyrant who is worse than Mitterrand, worse than Pierre Trudeau, worse than Michael Manley—maybe even worse than Allende. You might point out to them that personal taxes are still relatively low in America; that we just finished bailing out the banks; that the stock market is booming; that organized labor is weaker today than it has been since the year 1900; that businesses get whatever they want from state and local governments; that the free-trade agreements just keep coming . . . none of it would make any difference. Inside the bubble, everyone knows that fundamental American values are under attack, that average people are persecuted by arrogant college professors and power-mad bureaucrats, that the free-enterprise system is breathing its last. Inside the bubble, this is a matter of complete conviction. It does not require proof.Ah, but I see I am beginning to wander into one of the perennial dead ends of writing about the Right: thinking that contradictions matter. In truth, Atlas just doesn’t care about such boring details. I mean, how many times have we heard that some libertarian hero earned his pile in Stalin’s U.S.S.R, or made millions off some invention pioneered for him by big government, or spent his entire career at some business-subsidized think tank, never once venturing out into the “free market” that he prescribes ritualistically for everyone else? Libertarian hypocrisy is an old story—and in the bubble world of laissez-faire, it’s a story that counts for nothing.

5. Trump has already made comments about selling public lands to private owners, opening it up to some kind of application process, let the best proposal win. Of course extractive industry will want the land but so will the non-oilman billionaires. With a trillion dollars, you could buy the land, import underpaid (or hey, why not unpaid!) workers, and raise your own army and police force. What do you think Trump’s idea of a good proposal is? Maybe it looks like Starbase, Texas. The history of company towns, by the way, is a history of boom, bust, and eventually, a government bailout of the people the company leaves behind.

6. Meanwhile, the showdown between USDC and Tether has already begun.

7. If that is the extent of your power, use it. Otherwise, we're waiting around for a central command that, by all indications, does not exist. Yet.