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Comment by RustyConsul | Hacker News Reader

'Oligarchs' historically have gained influence and fielty to a nationstate. We are at a new form of Oligarchy, where the business magnates are able to operate internationally on a scale never seen before.

Historically, taxation has been the most profitable form of revenue generation. But thats no longer the case. With globalism and multi-national product creation, a single person in a nation can be many times richer than any nationstate, with technology above and beyond any nationstate. What happens when musk has electric jets and fully-reusable ICBM's, has remade the world power grid in his image, is one of few entitys even able to get to mars let alone command and control the resources of the astroid belt.

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> can be many times richer than any nationstate

The US economy flits around $22 trillion per year and the US budget last year was 30% of that. There isn’t a single trillionaire in the world. The US government has the historically unprecedented ability to project hard power around the globe within hours of deciding to do so. Musk has little more than influence, and congress doesn’t seem to like him very much.

While saying any nationstate might be hyperbole, it's fair to say they surpass all but the richest.

The most recent figures I can find for Amazon's operating budget list it at well over $500B, which puts it within an order of magnitude of the single richest country in the world; it would end up in the top 10 if it were itself a country[1]

Keep in mind also that a large part of the US's wealth is derived from having these nation-state-level corporations within its financial jurisdiction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

If profits > tax && MultinationalProfits == True { totalWealthPercentage = totalWealthPercentage + Profits; Nationstate = nationstate + tax }

Run that through alot of loops and eventually corporations aree biggeer than any nationstate Vec<Nationstate> by design of the system.

Internet, Grid, Rockets, astroid belt.

You know there's a giant ball of platinum floating around just outside mars thats worth 1.7 Quintillian?

Today does not represent tomorrow.

My new personal pet peeve has been the torturing of the word oligarch. It’s now come to mean “rich person I don’t like.”

From my vantage point, it’s hard to see how Elon Musk is making any governmental policy decisions - and thus isn’t an oligarch. But maybe you have some examples?

Musk is extremely rich and can buy a lot of stuff. That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does.

You’re right in the sense that people often use the term imprecisely and hyperbolically, but in this discussion they are more right than wrong, at least by this measure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy#Putative_oligarchies

> That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does

You’re making a mistake of your own by conflating oligarchy with tyranny. They often go hand in hand, with the former generally preceding the latter. So it’s probably better to cry oligarchy before it’s a given rather than afterwards.

A better term for what people are trying to articulate is plutocracy.

The poorest 70–90% of Americans effectively have no representation – there is almost no correlation between their policy preferences and the voting record of their representatives.

On the other hand, enacted policy aligns quite well with the interests of large corporations, and I'm not aware of any causal explanation besides the obvious one.

If Elon steers Tesla and SpaceX, he is indirectly steering congress (or at least has his hand on the wheel).

That's still a far cry away from an oligarch.

Being a lawmaker in the current capitalist society doesn’t make you the ruler (see lobbying). I’d say the few that rule are those with large amount of capital and influence, so oligarch is well applied here

Edit: also one of the perks for rulers on the worse regimes (authoritarian regimes, monarchies) is that law is not the same for the few that tule than for the rest, law is definitely not the same from the point of view of this wealth maxers

Why would you lobby someone who doesn’t rule?

I’m still waiting for examples of how Musk has exercised his sovereign power.

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