Is Musk the New Hamilton?

Unconventional solutions are required for the unconventional and unprecedented problems the Republic faces. Brainpower and innovation has carried the field in the past, and will be required to again.

As I am prone to do from time to time, I recently resumed a serious appetite for reading. I prefer history, geography, exploration, and warfare over fiction and philosophy, but like to take in wisdom of all types and am willing to read all genres in moderation. The lull between the 2024 Election and Trump’s inauguration presented me this window of opportunity, and I’ve used it to polish off some pretty heavy stuff, including Ron Chernow’s 800+ page biography of George Washington (Washington: A Life) and the classic political book of the ages, Machiavelli’s The Prince.

While I fully expect to do some reflecting on Machiavellian wisdom in these pages, it is the Washington work that has remained embedded in the forefront of my mind as I’ve gasped in wonder at the opening salvos of the energized Trump 47 administration. I think we have all watched a so-called conservative Governor, or even a Republican President or two, tout reforms aimed at efficiency while rolling out graphics and charts showing the quarterly impacts, but when one compares the enormity of the national, and then global, fiscal situation, it becomes clear that said improvements are akin to a child shooting a super soaker full of water out of the pool and onto the lawn, or a 600 pound salad dodger losing a pound of water weight. In other words, they don’t move the needle.

To put it lightly, even though I had zero doubt President Trump was going to bring hell with him back to Washington, D.C., to leave his permanent mark on American history and avenge the many grievances inflicted upon him, the revelation of the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk and, at the time, Vivek Ramaswamy, didn’t even make it into my top five among things I was most excited about. Especially since DOGE was announced with an expiration date already in view, I figured any discoveries would give President Trump another soap box to demand reform with, point out more drops in the bucket of fraud, waste, and abuse, and for lack of better words, tell us a bunch of crap we already knew.

Man, was I wrong. The initial foray into the corruption of USAID is enough to make the blood of any American not directly enriched by this tremendous evil and theft of wealth question why we pay taxes at all to this reckless, abusive government. If we as a people refuse to take issue with this criminality, we might as well go crawling back to the King of England and apologize for all the trouble and beg to be let back into their declining empire. To make things even more compelling, DOGE is just getting started and has started X accounts for every agency they are going to rip to shreds. The IRS is just one example, and one that promises to put everyone on notice:

Watching the daily fireworks forces me down memory lane. Most of my in-depth analysis and thoughts are now shared right here, on SubStack, and I post only sparingly to Telegram and Truth Social, as I promised to do in order to restore balance to my life post-election. On X, where I gained tons of traction and subscribers in the run-up to Election Day, I only hang my SubStack articles. I cannot stand the constant drama, infighting, and childishness that takes place on that platform, with people hiding behind avatars and doxing, threatening, and harassing people they’ve been told to hate by others who wouldn’t have the balls to say a word of their evil to someone’s face in-person, and believe me, with hundreds of events over the past three-plus years, there has been ample opportunity to do just that to me. I have remained true to my roots and haven’t proliferated myself to be what the dissidents like to call someone who has gone mainstream and left the people who brought him to the party behind. If I wind up locked out of the bigger discussion on election reform, then perhaps not going mainstream to the furthest extent possible will have been my undoing.

Nevertheless, I remember when Elon Musk was taking over Twitter, and the usual ideology-obsessed people were lamenting the fact that he isn’t a true conservative, doesn’t appear to hold himself to a Southern Baptist way of life, was once a loyal regime supporter, and wears strange costumes to Halloween parties. Not wishing to be dragged into rumor mongering, cult theories, and other nonsense, I generally held my opinions about Musk, but now that I’ve finished digging through the biography of our first President, who declined limitless power time after time, it finally occurred to me:

Elon Musk reminds me of Alexander Hamilton.

Some of you, especially those who love history, may be saying, “What? You think Elon Musk is reminiscent of one of America’s Founding Fathers?” If that is where you are right now, hold your fire. I am willing to bet we will agree that we are at a sink or swim moment in American history, mired in a Fourth Turning that is bound to cycle over into a First Turning by the end of the decade, and should we prove successful in saving this Republic, we will have a new group of men, and perhaps women, who are viewed by posterity as Re-Founding Fathers (or Mothers). For his many achievements in this crucial time, Musk certainly fits the mold, and now I will tell you why.

Both Hamilton and Musk came from foreign shores. Hamilton was born in 1755 on Nevis, of the modern island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, then a British possession, in the Caribbean. He left there as a young man to attend college in British America in what would become Columbia University. Musk, as most know, was born in South Africa in 1971, and immigrated first to Canada, and then to the United States, on the path to becoming the world’s richest man. The trail lightens between the two when considering Hamilton’s heroic service in the Revolutionary War, in which he caught General Washington’s attention as a daringly bold Captain of Artillery instrumental in winning many key battles in the New Jersey campaign.

Whereas Hamilton caught Washington’s eye in battle, Musk caught Trump’s eye in business. It is natural to expect two billionaires to be familiar with one another, and perhaps even cordial, but Trump is not on good terms with most well-known billionaires who are intent on destroying or subjugating the world, such as George Soros and Bill Gates, or thin-skinned wannabes like Mark Cuban. Trump appears to have at least drawn Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Jeff Bezos into some sort of cooperative agreement, but with Musk, Trump dreamed big and saw the ability to reshape the modern world.

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Chernow:

Washington assembled a group of luminaries without equal in American history; his first cabinet more than made up in intellectual firepower what it lacked in numbers.

Hamilton’s steadfast loyalty to Washington, who had the arduous task of standing up the very first executive branch of the federal government authorized by the 1787 Constitutional Convention, brought with it his own selection as the very first Secretary of the Treasury. This was no easy task, and certainly not limited to printing paper currency. Robert Morris, an extremely wealthy Founding Father, had been Washington’s initial choice, but Morris declined and recommended he reward Hamilton with the post. Hamilton oversaw the federal government’s assumption of the debt of the states, which helped foster the stability Washington believed was necessary to prevent the infant nation from dividing into warring tribes that could be easily swayed by foreign powers at the first sign of struggle or crisis.

Hamilton and Washington wound up creating serious animosity with Southern states (including Washington’s Virginia), and the seizure of so much control by the new federal government, which may have been necessary by Washington’s theory of needed security and stability, spawned the first partisan factions in the very first presidential administration. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two future presidents, became the prominent leaders of the Anti-Federalists, which stemmed from the Democratic-Republican societies of the day. In this sense, politics has always been bloodsport and the reason you know about the ugliness of it today is because we have much more access to information than our ancestors did.