I was sitting in my leather wingback chair this morning — the good one, the one June says makes me look like a founding father, which I take as a compliment, and which I take as a mission accomplished — when the news arrived. The market was up. Again. And I knew, as I always know, that my most recent column on the sanctity of localized capital formation had done its work quietly, invisibly, the way great ideas always do. Marmaduke was asleep at my feet, all 140 magnificent, gluten-free pounds of him. He dreams, I suspect, of elk. Tonto was somewhere near the front door, wearing a bow tie — nobody knows why; we have stopped asking. And then the alert came through.
Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire.
[Deep sigh.]
Folks. Folks. I need you to sit down. I need you to pour yourself a glass of whole milk — not the oat variety, not whatever the coastal radicals are drinking this week — and I need you to listen to the conservative from Yale University, because what I am about to say is the most important thing I have said in a calendar week, which is saying quite a lot.
I want to be clear: this is a triumph of American exceptionalism. One man. One trillion dollars. Built from nothing but ambition, government contracts, and the labor of a couple hundred thousand workers we will get to in a moment. We will not get to them. This is the greatest country on Earth, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise, rhetorically, in a firmly-worded column.
But.
BUT.
Who elected him king of space? When did low-Earth orbit become private property? Does Elon Musk own the sky? Who decided that? And why — WHY — are we allowing it?
Let us take a step back and talk about the titans of American industry. I am a historian. I went to Yale. I have read the works of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan — not merely their Wikipedia pages, as one suspects certain colleagues have done, but their actual correspondence, their ledgers, their apologia. These were men of vision. Men of industry. Men who understood that the Protestant work ethic meant building things, controlling things, monetizing things, and — yes — occasionally destroying their competition through legally questionable means that we have since addressed with antitrust law, which was itself a conservative invention, as I have argued in seventeen previous columns.
John D. Rockefeller controlled petroleum. Standard Oil was a hydra, yes, a tentacled beast wrapped around the throat of American commerce, squeezing. The courts ultimately declared it a monopoly and broke it apart in 1911, in one of the great victories of American conservative jurisprudence. Carnegie controlled steel. Vanderbilt controlled railroads. Morgan controlled money itself — or close enough that the distinction barely mattered.
But here is the thing. Here is the thing that keeps me up at night — that has Tonto pacing the hallways in his bow tie and Marmaduke whimpering into his allergen-free kibble. Those men each controlled one industry. One! Rockefeller: oil. Carnegie: steel. Vanderbilt: rails. They were monopolists, yes, but they were disciplined monopolists. The Standard Oil octopus, which terrified a generation of Americans, was, by today's measure, actually moderate. A quaint regional enterprise. A farmers' market. A lemonade stand run by neighborhood children. A church bake sale.
Elon Musk controls space. He controls automobiles. He controls the social media platform on which you are probably reading about how he controls things. He controls tunnels beneath our cities. He has inserted a chip into a man's brain — into an actual human brain — and nobody held a county commission vote. Not a single alderman was consulted. He sells satellite internet to rural families, which, yes, is beautiful and patriotic, and also means he controls the internet access of rural families. He manufactures humanoid robots. He is, at this moment, designing a city in Texas called Starbase, which he apparently intends to govern, because why own one democracy when you can simply build another one and be king of it?
I ask you: is this the republic the Founders envisioned? Is this what Madison meant?
I have read the Federalist Papers. In the original Greek. And I can tell you with absolute confidence that James Madison — a man who understood the concentration of power better than anyone in history, which is why he invented checks and balances — would look at a man who owns space, social media, tunnels, brain chips, a private city, and the world's largest fleet of autonomous vehicles, and Madison would weep.
He would weep. And then he would demand that the county sheriff do something about it. The county sheriff would not have jurisdiction. This would enrage Madison considerably.
This is not a partisan point. This is not left versus right. This is not liberal versus conservative. This is about the most fundamental principle of the American republic: no man shall be landlord of low-Earth orbit. I am quite confident that is a direct quote. The Founders simply didn't need to say it explicitly because they could not have imagined that anyone would be brazen enough to try. They assumed we had common sense. They assumed wrong.
The Constitution was designed, at its marrow, to prevent the consolidation of power in the hands of one man. The separation of powers. The system of federalism. The Bill of Rights. These are not abstract documents. They are warnings. They are the Founders looking at us from across two and a half centuries and saying: do not let one man own the sky. Do not let one man control what you say, how you travel, what orbit you reach. Do not let it happen.
It is happening.
And so I arrive — as the conservative from Yale University always does, through the long and winding road of historical analysis, constitutional interpretation, and righteous fury — at policy.
There is only one truly conservative response to a trillionaire. One response that honors the Founders, protects the nuclear family, preserves the Protestant work ethic, and defends the biological heritage of this great nation from the predations of corporate radicalism. One response that Madison would approve of, that Hamilton would applaud, that even Jefferson — complicated man, complicated legacy, but correct on the dangers of aristocracy — would raise a glass to.
A 90% wealth tax on all assets above one trillion dollars. Effective immediately. While he is watching.
Is this radical? Folks, I went to Yale. I do not do radical. This is constitutional originalism. Why? Because the Founders believed in earned wealth — in the dignity of a man who builds something with his hands and his mind, who competes fairly in the marketplace, who rises through merit and falls through failure. What they did not believe in — what they specifically designed the republic to prevent — was inherited aristocracy. Generational consolidation of power. A single man becoming so wealthy that he transcends the democratic process entirely and simply purchases entire categories of civilization.
A 90% wealth tax above one trillion dollars does not punish success. It punishes excess. It does not take from the entrepreneur. It takes from the oligarch. It protects Main Street from the radical corporate monopolies that are, at this very moment, hollowing out the American family like a drill bit through a walnut. It ensures that the fruit of labor returns to the soil that grew it, rather than being hoarded in a tax-advantaged rocket ship pointed at Mars. Some of us are staying.
This is what true conservatism demands. And I predicted it. I said, years ago — in a column that nobody read as carefully as they should have — that the logical endpoint of unchecked capital formation was a trillionaire. I said it would be a problem. I was playing the long game, folks. The 4D ideological chess that only a Yale-educated economist can fully appreciate. And fully win.
Marmaduke just lifted his massive head and looked at me with what I can only describe as profound agreement. He is almost always correct. Tonto barked once — sharply, authoritatively — from the hallway.
June looked up from her desk. She raised one eyebrow. Just the one. That is her move. It works every time.
She is right, of course. She always is.
The conservative from Yale University rests his case. It was a large case. It took years. It is his finest work.
Tuck Chimes is Senior Correspondent for Business & Economy at IRREVERENT Magazine. He holds a degree from Yale University, which he mentions constantly. He lives in Georgetown with his wife June, an ethics professor, and their two Alaskan huskies, Marmaduke and Tonto. His opinions are his own. His dogs' opinions are also his own.
Editor's Note: The Federalist Papers were authored in English not Greek. As for the "No man shall be landlord of low-Earth orbit" as a direct Founder quote, no such quote exists in any founding-era document.