Democracy by Money

Watching the historic Tesla shareholder meeting that approved Elon's trillion-dollar pay package, it struck me how capitalism is fundamentally democratic. Public companies effectuate the freedom of each individual to truly vote with their dollar. Buy or sell a share of ownership, buy a product or the competitor's.

In the recording, you see people clamoring for child labor investigations, carbon emissions performance metrics, and new governance structures. Turns out Elon is not a technically the dictator at this company but more of a benevolent leader. And thankfully for my portfolio, shareholders reject these proposals as misaligned.

Having run small businesses myself, I find it fascinating how cleanly various principles apply to vastly larger operations. At Shuffle with our team of 3-10 people, neither my cofounder, our employees, nor our customers would have wanted us to form a distracting committee that wasted our scarce resources investigating our own labor practices.

Why change company planning to allow Austin's dad to arbitrarily step in and decide things for us? In the name of shareholder representation of course. For democracy, we are told by random faceless people we don't trust.

These policies were already thoughtfully designed by us, before the company even existed. Our customized structure was fundamentally and inextricably part of our founding compact to launch the thing! Nobody has the right to retroactively take away our decisions and rewrite our company's history or mission. That would contradict our existence in the first place.

The Chinese Communist Part actually has many lovely things going for it. And all the things I agree with are rooted in top-down universal reason, not subjective representation. It's an open question whether making Jack Ma go on a painting trip is best in the long run for the people of China, but you can guess the kind of truth I'd bet on surfacing in the history books of 2075.

Staying private on principle, famously like Stripe and SpaceX, is a sadly reasonable course of action. I used to be annoyed Tesla didn't own everything else Elon does, so I could selfishly participate more fully in his upside. After observing the call, however, I'm glad xAI is structurally separate so it isn't slowed down by Bureaucratic Shit.

I use Grok every day now. I love my car more than my left foot. These products are moral goods due to the benefits over existing alternatives, just like a nice swell water bottle (saving you from plastic optional). At worst, I'd concede they are neutral technologies. Giving humans more capabilities to achieve their ends can indeed be scary sometimes.

You don't want Amazon to go away, do you? Not when you're buying a holiday gift at the last minute the night before the party. As long as Elon is of sound mind, just like Warren Buffett, he's earned my complete trust and respect to run his operations. He's not killing people, he's employing and serving them as best he can. And I certainly couldn't be troubled to make myself a better car.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself fully. Or rather, that readers of this post will truly comprehend all the implications of what I'm saying here. This is why I'm passionately creating Capitalism Unlocked to repeat myself ad nauseam until I die.

Somehow even people deeply involved in capitalism don't seem to ardently defend it. Just look at the humans of New York, the city I almost moved to instead of SF...

If you like the stuff you own and have access to—if you like Netflix or airplane rides to see your family at Thanksgiving—or even if you're thoughtfully uncertain about potential negative externalities, then please read the amazing 1974 lecture below. As a New Yorker, Mr. Ackman should definitely reference it.

I may have discovered a sad cultural answer to Peter Thiel's slowdown question. Perhaps the engine of progress is spiritual rather than scientific. Regardless, it's velocity impacts all of humankind. Ayn Rand speaks simply, profoundly, and prophetically to the entropic conditions of today...and tomorrow.

Trigger warning: you may want to buy some bitcoin afterwards.