Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization
Silvio Berlusconi invented the modern oligarchy. Musk is expanding it.
Back in 2021, I wrote a blog post for American Purpose on “Silvio Berlusconi and the Decline of Western Civilization.” In it I argued that when historians 50 or 100 years from now investigate how and why Western civilization collapsed, they would point to Silvio Berlusconi as the chief villain. The former Italian Prime Minister was the inventor of the modern form of oligarchy, in which a rich individual uses his money to buy his way into political office through the purchase of media properties, and then uses his political office to protect his business interests. The fact that Berlusconi used this strategy so successfully in the 1990s was why Italy was never able to engage in a reform of its institutions as it could have done following the collapse of its old political order after the Cold War. This pattern was then taken up by oligarchs all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, from Igor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov in Ukraine, to Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic (who may return to power this coming year). All of them used their business incomes to buy up declining legacy media companies, companies which in turn helped them protect their businesses. These oligarchs have threatened democracy in a very basic way, by exerting undue political influence and promoting corruption.
Well, guess what, we now have our own home-grown American oligarch in the Berlusconi mold: Elon Musk. Musk’s purchase of Twitter for $44 billion was derided at the time as a very bad business decision, and with its subsequent loss of market value, it seemed like that was true. But as in the case of Berlusconi and the ex-Communist oligarchs, Musk wasn’t purchasing the platform for economic reasons, nor was he interested in defending free speech as he suggested. Rather, he wanted to buy political influence, which he did in spades. X turned from being a slightly left-of-center platform to becoming a MAGA megaphone, which Musk uses many times a day to broadcast his own political opinions. That plus the $250 million he donated to the Trump campaign did a lot to help Trump get elected, and Trump has now given him political roles as co-head of DOGE and all-purpose advisor. There is no need to document the huge conflicts of interest Musk will be able to benefit from in his present role, given the importance of the federal government to Tesla and SpaceX.
The Trump-Musk partnership was not one made in heaven. Two large egos like theirs would have trouble sharing the limelight, and there is evidence that Trump is already tiring of Musk’s presence at Mar-a-Lago. If Musk were to truly follow the Berlusconi path, he would seek to go into politics himself. And indeed, he would make a much more plausible successor to Trump than any of Trump’s children. Not to worry: the president-elect has already pointed out that Musk can’t run for his office since he wasn’t born in the United States. But there are plenty of other public offices he could aspire to, and I wouldn’t count him out of American politics even if he gets ejected from Trump’s orbit.
There are a couple of longer-term implications here. Social media is rapidly displacing legacy media as the primary way Americans get information. No one should pretend that they are neutral town squares; rather, they are political actors that can influence the outcome of elections. The real problem is that they are too big and powerful. So were the three over-the-air TV networks in their heyday, but their political influence was checked by the FCC and old-fashioned norms about media neutrality. No such constraints exist today for the large platforms in online space.
That power needs to be diminished, and the only feasible way I see to do that is through the proliferation of middleware that would essentially take away their editorial power. The middleware idea was the subject of a study group I led at Stanford in 2020, and has been elaborated recently in an excellent new report by the Foundation for American Innovation that you can access here. Back in 2020, we said in our report that the large internet platforms were like a loaded gun sitting on the table in front of us, and we could only hope that no bad actor would pick it up and shoot us with it. That scenario is the one that has now played out with Twitter and Elon Musk. So reducing platform scale and power remains very much on the agenda, but reform is blocked because the platform now wields a very large gun.
Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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Good analysis of Musk--yes, good comparison to Berlusconi. The one disagreement I have is calling pre-Musk Twitter a "slightly left of center" platform. It was a platform where if you said that a man is not a woman you were called a "fascist." I wouldn't call that "slightly left of center."
I agree with your analysis of social media companies wielding too much power and "capturing" a market. I ask if the answer to this is getting the FCC to require a Federated model, like Mastadon and Bluesky, where there can be lots of "focused" servers rallying around political causes, but single social media companies are effectively broken up. In effect, call it a "standards-based" approach to social networking and require interoperability between companies. Take away their exclusivity. The result is to make each of them a "common carrier" to one huge Social Media Cloud, where no one company owns too much of it.