Elon Musk’s political theatrics distract from a much bigger story: how government dependence and political influence have become the true operating system of American capitalism.
Elon Musk’s dramatic announcement of the “America Party” has captivated headlines, but focusing on his billionaire ego misses the real story. Musk isn’t an outlier corrupting an otherwise clean system—he’s simply the most theatrical example of how American business actually works in 2025.
The contradiction at the heart of Musk’s position—receiving billions in government subsidies while attacking government spending—isn’t unique to him. It’s the foundational logic of modern American political economy.
The Scale of Subsidized Influence
Consider the numbers: While Musk’s companies receive around $22 billion in federal contracts and subsidies, that’s pocket change compared to the broader subsidy-influence ecosystem that has quietly taken over American governance.
Defense contractors represent the most obvious example. The big five weapons manufacturers spent over $1.1 billion lobbying from 2001-2021 and received $2.02 trillion in contracts in return during the Afghanistan war alone. RTX Corporation increased Stinger missile prices sevenfold since 1991, charging taxpayers $400,000 per missile sent to Ukraine, while simultaneously announcing plans to buy back $37 billion in stock.
Defense contractors spent nearly $140 million lobbying the federal government last year, with over 500 former government officials now lobbying for defense contractors. That’s not corruption—that’s the business model.
Pharmaceutical companies have perfected an even more sophisticated version. The pharmaceutical and health product industry spent $4.7 billion on lobbying from 1999-2018, averaging $233 million per year, while spending $379 million on lobbying in 2023 alone—making them the top lobbying industry in America.
The genius of Big Pharma’s approach is how they’ve managed to simultaneously benefit from massive government research funding (much drug development relies on taxpayer-funded basic research) while lobbying against price controls. They socialize the research costs and privatize the profits, then spend hundreds of millions ensuring this arrangement continues.
Agribusiness rounds out the picture. Agribusiness spent $523 million lobbying on the farm bill between 2019-2023, while net farm income hit a record $189 billion in 2022. Yet agribusiness lobbyists are calling for even more subsidies in the next farm bill, potentially costing taxpayers tens of billions more.
The Revolving Door in Action
What makes this system particularly insidious is how seamlessly it operates through the revolving door between government and industry. The Department of Defense has used taxpayer money for nearly three decades to send elite military officers to work for top private contractors through the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows program. More than 315 military officers have been placed at weapons manufacturers, with 40% going on to work for government contractors after their military careers.
This creates what researchers call “taxpayer-funded lobbying”—using public money to train the next generation of influence agents. These fellows then return to brief Defense Department leadership, giving contractors “an unbelievable opportunity” that “is better lobbying than any money could buy”.
The pharmaceutical industry operates a similar system, with former FDA officials routinely joining drug companies, while companies hire former government officials to sit on their boards while simultaneously advising policymakers.
The Normalization of Dependency
What’s remarkable isn’t that this system exists—it’s how completely normalized it’s become. We’ve created an economy where:
- Success requires government support: Whether it’s defense contracts, research funding, regulatory approval, or favorable tax treatment, virtually every major industry depends on government decisions for profitability.
- Influence spending is treated as business investment: Companies routinely budget millions for lobbying the same way they budget for R&D or marketing, because the return on investment is often higher.
- Policy expertise becomes private property: The people who understand government programs well enough to reform them are precisely the people who profit from those programs remaining unreformed.
- Crisis becomes opportunity: Whether it’s war (defense contractors), pandemic (pharma), or natural disasters (agriculture), every crisis becomes a business opportunity for subsidized industries.
Beyond Left vs. Right
The brilliance of this system is how it transcends traditional political categories. Defense contractors donate to hawks who support military spending. Pharmaceutical companies support politicians who protect intellectual property. Agricultural businesses back representatives from farming states regardless of party.
This creates what political scientists call “client politics”—where concentrated benefits flow to organized interests while diffuse costs are spread across taxpayers who lack the resources to organize effective opposition.
The result is a political economy that operates more like feudalism than capitalism. Major industries have essentially become government dependencies, while government agencies have become industry servants. The boundary between public and private authority has dissolved.
Musk as System Accelerant
Viewed in this context, Musk’s contradictions make perfect sense. He’s not hypocritical—he’s just more honest about the underlying logic. Every major business in America depends on government favor while simultaneously complaining about government interference.
What makes Musk different is scale and audacity. He’s attempting to formalize what others do informally: converting economic dependency into direct political control. The “America Party” represents the logical endpoint of the subsidy-influence complex—when private wealth becomes so concentrated and government-dependent that it starts to rival democratic institutions themselves.
The Real Constitutional Crisis
The deeper problem isn’t Musk’s ego or Trump’s authoritarianism—it’s that we’ve accidentally created a system where private wealth can purchase public authority through a complex web of subsidies, contracts, and influence campaigns.
This creates a fundamental challenge to democratic governance. When major industries are financially dependent on government decisions, and government officials are professionally dependent on industry expertise, who actually makes policy decisions? The formal mechanisms of democracy (elections, legislatures, bureaucracies) begin to look like theater performed for the benefit of arrangements made elsewhere.
Consider how this plays out in practice:
- Defense policy is effectively made by contractors who profit from conflict
- Drug policy is shaped by companies that profit from illness
- Agricultural policy is written by agribusinesses that profit from subsidy expansion
- Technology policy is influenced by platforms that profit from data extraction
In each case, the public interest becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from private profit.
What This Means for Democracy
The subsidy-influence complex represents a new form of governance that doesn’t fit traditional categories of democracy, authoritarianism, or even capitalism. It’s a system where:
- Economic success requires political connections
- Political authority requires industry expertise
- Public policy serves private interests
- Democratic oversight becomes increasingly impossible
This isn’t necessarily leading toward dictatorship, but it is leading toward something that might be called “managed democracy”—where the forms of democratic governance persist while the substance is determined by the intersection of government dependency and private influence.
Musk’s “America Party” is significant not because it represents a departure from this system, but because it reveals how the system actually works. When someone with $22 billion in government contracts starts forming political parties, we’re seeing the logical conclusion of arrangements that have been developing for decades.
The Path Forward
Understanding this broader pattern suggests that the real challenge isn’t stopping individual billionaires from interfering in politics—it’s redesigning a political economy that has made such interference inevitable.
This might require:
- Ending the revolving door between government and subsidized industries
- Capping government dependency for private companies
- Creating genuine public alternatives to private contractors
- Rebuilding government expertise independent of industry influence
- Democratizing subsidy decisions through transparent public processes
But these reforms face a fundamental obstacle: they would need to be implemented by the very people and institutions that currently benefit from the existing system.
The subsidy-influence complex has become so deeply embedded in American governance that reform may require the kind of systemic transformation that only happens during major crises. Musk’s political theatrics may be helping to create such a crisis by making visible relationships that were previously hidden.
The Real Stakes
Whether Musk’s “America Party” succeeds or fails is almost beside the point. What matters is that we’re clearly in a new phase of American political development where the traditional boundaries between economic and political power have completely dissolved.
The question isn’t whether billionaires will influence politics—they already do, systematically and legally. The question is whether democratic institutions can adapt to govern an economy where private wealth has become so concentrated and government-dependent that it operates as a parallel authority structure.
Musk’s political adventure matters not because it represents something new, but because it’s making visible something that was always there: a system where government subsidies, private profits, and political influence have merged into a single, self-reinforcing whole.
The real story isn’t about one eccentric billionaire—it’s about whether American democracy can survive American capitalism as it actually exists.
The subsidy-influence complex represents one of the great underreported stories of our time. While we debate surface-level political controversies, a deeper transformation of American governance continues largely unnoticed.
System D 