In September 2022, Ukrainian officers made an pressing request for Elon Musk’s Starlink to increase satellite tv for pc protection to Sevastopol. Their plan: to launch a shock drone assault on Russian ships. Musk declined, claiming he didn’t need his firm implicated in acts of battle, although Starlink, a significant web service supplier to the war-torn nation because the Russian invasion in February 2022, had already been used extensively in fight. This rejection raised pressing questions for the Pentagon, which depends on Starlink not simply in Ukraine however throughout a number of operational arenas.
For the reason that Iraq Battle, the U.S. has outsourced most logistical and assist features. Right now, it spends extra on third-party contracts than on authorities workers. Businesses inside the Nationwide Intelligence Program—together with the CIA, NSA and NRO—depend on contractors for over 70 % of their workforce. This privatization has hollowed out public experience and handed delicate infrastructure to firms that reply to not voters, however shareholders. Unelected and profit-driven, tech firms aren’t sure by democratic accountability. When governments outsource core infrastructure, they give up operations and company, and, as states lean on Silicon Valley, they lose the leverage to manage it. Whereas Silicon Valley’s entanglement with authorities isn’t new, over the previous yr, it has graduated from backstage affect to front-row energy, shaping not simply companies however insurance policies.
The European Union has fought again. In April 2025, the European Fee fined Apple and Meta €700 million underneath the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and continues to stress X and Google. American companies nonetheless dominate the lobbying ecosystem in Brussels, accounting for over 20 % of affect. The U.S., against this, operates on court docket precedent and antitrust compliance. When billionaires management the satellites, surveillance, speech platforms and A.I. methods utilized by each residents and states, who governs? And if the federal government can’t regulate them, who can?
The Billionaire Who Turned the Paperwork
Musk started as the scrappy co-founder of Zip2 and PayPal. Now, he presides over satellites, speech platforms, area exploration, neuroscience and transportation. In 2022, he closed a $44 billion deal to amass Twitter, vowing to “restore free speech.” Inside weeks, journalists had been banned, fact-checking was dismantled and the platform’s algorithm started amplifying right-wing content material. In the course of the 2024 election, Musk pledged $45 million per thirty days to a pro-Trump tremendous PAC. Not surprisingly, each Musk’s and Trump’s posts surged in visibility.
On his first day in workplace, President Donald Trump introduced the creation of the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), appointing Musk to guide it. DOGE’s mission: intestine federal bloat. The outcome? Virtually 60,000 federal employees laid off, DEI applications dismantled and significant contracts slashed throughout FEMA, FAA and the Nationwide Climate Service. In February, delayed FEMA contracts slowed the restoration response after wildfires in Los Angeles. In April, Senator Chuck Schumer blamed FAA layoffs for the Newark Airport safety breach that grounded lots of of flights. In Might, cuts to NWS in a single day storm protection employees preceded 42 tornado-related deaths in Kentucky and Missouri, simply weeks after 5 former NWS leaders signed an open letter warning that “climate forecast places of work might be so understaffed that there might be pointless lack of life.” Earlier this month, as flash floods ravaged Texas, killing lots of and displacing multiples extra, Trump’s cuts to FEMA dropped the company’s name response price from 99 % to simply 15.9 %, leaving hundreds of pleas for assist unanswered.
In the meantime, Musk’s corporations are thriving. Final week, simply days after his A.I. chatbot Grok drew backlash for producing Neo-Nazi content material on X, the Division of Protection awarded the platform a $200 million contract. The deal got here lower than 10 days after Musk launched The America Celebration, with an ethos, partially, formed by Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary blogger whose post-democratic writings have gained traction amongst Silicon Valley technocrats—and, after all, his very public breakup with President Trump. In April, one month earlier than Musk’s stint within the White Home soured, a $5.9 billion contract from the U.S. Area Power locked in 28 SpaceX missions. In early Might (on Nationwide Area Day!), the administration proposed 24 % price range cuts to NASA’s moon program, Artemis, eliminating climate-monitoring satellites and redirecting $1 billion to Mars, which Musk has been vocal about colonizing since 2001. As Musk dominates satellites and rockets, Peter Thiel’s empire operates nearer to dwelling—embedding itself within the methods that determine who will get policed, who will get watched and, more and more, who will get to stay.
The Surveillance State
Thiel’s surveillance software program, started in 2004 with CIA seed cash and a Tolkien reference. Its Gotham platform, able to hoovering up huge swaths of presidency and personal information, now powers predictive policing, immigration raids and battlefield focusing on. Since 2013, it’s been utilized by the DHS, CBP, the Pentagon and LAPD. Final month, Palantir’s function in ICE raids and predictive patrols in Los Angeles drew public ire. Mayor Karen Bass referred to as L.A. a “check case for what occurs when the federal authorities strikes in and takes the authority away from the state or native authorities.” It was not, nonetheless, the primary time a significant U.S. metropolis piloted surveillance applications for personal contractors. From 2012 to 2018, Palantir partnered with the New Orleans Police Division to check its Gotham software program, producing “warmth lists” of people deemed high-risk for violent crimes. Across the identical time, the LAPD launched Operation LASER utilizing related predictive logic. A report from Cease LAPD Spying flagged algorithmic bias and over-policing, disproportionately affecting Black and Latino communities.
On a global scale, governments throughout Europe turned to American companies through the 2015 refugee disaster to handle migration flows and counter terrorism. A number of international locations, together with Germany and France, adopted Palantir’s Gotham software program. Whereas a minimum of 4 contracts had been canceled lower than 5 years later, citing flawed evaluation, racial profiling and privateness violations, Palantir stays embedded in army operations worldwide, elevating sharp questions on its accuracy and bias. Each Ukrainian and Israeli forces reportedly use Gotham to course of real-time battlefield information from drones, satellites and troopers on the bottom. In response to The Nation, Israeli forces have used Palantir’s A.I.-assisted focusing on in Gaza, intensifying scrutiny as humanitarian employees, journalists and medical personnel are killed in strikes.
Thiel believes know-how will in the future substitute human judgment solely, in every little thing from governance to warfare. Gaza exhibits what’s at stake when life-or-death selections are outsourced to an algorithm, however battle zones aren’t the one testing floor for tech-run governance. Billionaires are constructing cities.
Privatizing Energy, One Metropolis at a Time
In 2009—a yr earlier than co-founding the Seasteading Institute on aspirations of autonomous, floating city-states past authorities attain—Thiel declared he “now not believes that freedom and democracy are suitable.” Although Seasteading pale, the institute seeded a imaginative and prescient of privatized governance, inspiring such neolibertarian manifestos as Patchwork, Yarvin’s 2017 define of a political system that imagines a post-democratic world dominated by corporate-owned “patches,” revealed underneath the pen identify Mencius Moldbug. Former Coinbase CTO and Silicon Valley futurist Balaji Srinivasan expands instantly on Yarvin’s imaginative and prescient in The Community State, advocating for digital-first communities that manage on-line to lift capital, outline shared objectives and purchase land. Srinivasan calls this method a type of “Tech Zionism,” drawing on the concept of diaspora-fueled state formation, however with company land buys as a substitute of territorial conquest.
Próspera, a privately ruled startup metropolis on Honduras’ Roatán Island, is Silicon Valley’s sovereignty experiment in miniature. Backed by U.S. enterprise capital, together with Thiel and Srinivasan, Próspera operated underneath the ZEDE framework, levying its personal taxes, imposing corporate-friendly laws and establishing non-public courts with little nationwide oversight. However the initiative drew fierce opposition: human rights protests, environmental considerations and, in 2021, the abolishment of ZEDE zones underneath new Honduran laws. Próspera responded by suing Honduras for $11 billion—almost one-third of the nation’s GDP.
This push for privatized governance isn’t restricted to Honduras. In Texas, Musk has ramped up political spending, hiring extra lobbyists than ever this yr and lavishing state lawmakers with tens of hundreds in meals and items. In Might, residents of Boca Chica—many SpaceX workers—voted to rebrand the Texas metropolis as Starbase: a de facto firm city with full management over improvement and zoning. Environmental teams, Indigenous communities and non-SpaceX residents warned it might prohibit entry to sacred websites and speed up harm to protected lands. The identical logic now extends to public land. Trump’s Massive Stunning Invoice, debated this spring, aimed to permit privatization of federal land for company improvement. After a last-minute push by environmental advocates, the invoice was rewritten to exclude the sale of almost 300 million acres.
Nonetheless, the broader imaginative and prescient stays alive: privately owned “Freedom Cities,” floated throughout Trump’s 2024 marketing campaign as low-tax, corporate-run enclaves—supported by the identical buyers behind Próspera (Thiel and Marc Andreessen, by their agency Pronomos Capital). From authorities surveillance to non-public cities, the road between state and startup has all however dissolved. Over the previous decade, tech firms have embedded themselves in public infrastructure. Right now, authorities companies rely upon them for important operations, from catastrophe response to nationwide safety. However public skepticism is rising as prices change into seen: delayed restoration efforts, mass surveillance and widening accountability gaps, all whereas taxpayer {dollars} circulation into non-public contracts. As digital ethics students Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias argue of their e book, Information Seize, immediately’s tech monopolies deal with public infrastructure, privateness and private information as a digital terra nullius—colonial no-mans-land. However they aren’t happy with energy within the cloud. Like conventional colonizers, they need land, too.