At its zenith, England was known as a nation of shopkeepers, where trade followed the crown; this was however interchangeable ~ the East India Company accumulated an empire, many times the size of the mother country. While some daring soldiers and civil servants were rewarded with fancy titles for colonial conquests, the real beneficiaries of the British empire were textile traders, mine and mill owners, and diamond merchants, who built their fortunes by helping the British Government in looting colonies.
Thus, while the common Englishman, mostly a miner or sharecropper, wallowed in poverty, the lords, ladies, and knights, lived in vast estates, with a retinue of servants, and all the luxuries that money could buy. The US, where capitalism came “on the first ships,” was built on the foundations of private property, acquisitiveness, and individualism. Now led by a billionaire President, who has no qualms about receiving an aircraft as a gift, that too from a foreign government, and who is accused of a whole gamut of financial improprieties including massive unethical trading in crypto tokens and stocks, the country seems to have slipped into a grotesque parody of capitalism.
Nowhere was it so apparent as at the humongous US$86 billion (Rs.8 lakh crore) IPO of Space X, a company largely owned by Donald Trump’s friend, Elon Musk ~ by far the world’s richest man. The stated objective of the IPO was establishing a one-million-person colony on Mars, establishing other outposts in space, launching data centres the size of football fields into orbit, and also outdoing rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence. According to classical political science, except the last goal, the rest are best left to the Government.
The IPO, which has passed muster by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, has been criticised as hugely discriminatory, with shares held by Musk and other insiders having 10 votes per share. Musk also has the voting power of shares yet to be allotted to him, while all others have a single vote per share, leaving Musk with control over 85 per cent votes. Also, in the case of disputes, a mandatory arbitration clause leaves shareholders with no remedy in courts of law. This is not the first occasion that Musk has appropriated sovereign functions; Space X has been in the business of launching rockets and satellites since long; its technical prowess could be gauged from the fact that a SpaceX craft rescued NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who had been stranded in space for more than nine months.
Like a knight errant, Musk stepped in the thick of the Russia-Ukraine war, offering off-grid high bandwidth internet access to Ukraine through his Star link constellation of 3,335 active satellites. Around 150,000 Ukrainians use Star link: Ukraine Presi dent Volodymyr Zelensky uses it for his nightly broadcast, and the military uses it for C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). Ukrainian soldiers upload images of potential targets to an encrypted group chat where the best located soldiers take on the target, and Ukrainian drones use Starlink to hit targets. Russian hackers have been unable to penetrate the highly advanced Starlink system, and Russia has been unable to jam it by conventional methods.
Musk has been careful not to let Starlink operate in Russian controlled territory, including Crimea, and Russia has desisted from using missiles against Starlink satellites, as they are positioned outside Russian territory. Even otherwise, because of high latency, knocking out a few satellites would achieve nothing, and knocking out many satellites may not be easy. A full-scale missile attack on Starlink satellites in Western airspace may escalate hostilities, which Russia does not want. Thus, Musk has become vital to Ukraine’s war efforts. Currently, the Polish Government pays Musk US$ 50 million per year for the use of the Starlink system by Ukraine, but given political vicissitudes, Ukrainians are always haunted by the fear of Musk cutting off satellite communications, which has kept their hospitals, military bases and troops online.
Matching his boss, Trump, in braggadocio, Musk warned that the “entire front line would collapse if I turned it (Starlink) off.” Artificial intelligence (AI) has already taken away entry-level accounting, customer service, reporting, and administrative support jobs. Significantly, in the first ten months of 2025, AI was responsible for 11 lakh layoffs in the US tech sector. With an investment of US$700 billion, and with much more in the pipeline, AI is sure to endanger the future of ordinary US techies, yet AI is being actively promoted by uber rich tech czars.
Last year, Musk announced that Tesla will manufacture the AI-enabled humanoid Optimus robot, which will be capable of working 24X7 with five times the productivity of a human being. Optimus will retail for US$20,000 to US$30,000 ~ the price of a mid-sized car. Advent of the AI-enabled humanoid robots, promised by Musk, would mean that all tasks, even those involving complex decision-making, can be automated, and completed, without human interference. With higher-order machines controlling lower order machines, the need for humans in a futuristic office, or factory, will be minimal.
This is not science fiction; Musk posted on X: “AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store.” Realising that the disruptive effect of Optimus on the job market was sure to draw the lawmakers’ ire, Musk was quick to add that Optimus would soon eradicate global poverty, and make top-class medical care available to everyone. Tesla shareholders, and acolytes like New York-based financial analyst Dan Ives, who see Musk as a “modern day Albert Einstein, a Thomas Edison,” support this vision. Though not produced commercially so far, demo models of Optimus had been seen handing out candy on Halloween, performing Kung Fu with Jared Leto, the American actor and musician, and dancing onstage at Tesla’s shareholder meeting.
Musk has predicted that aided by the Optimus robot, the global economy will grow by a factor of ten, or even one hundred. Going even further, Musk claimed that Optimus could change the way we live; for example, Optimus would make jails redundant, because the robot could “follow you around and stop you from doing crime.” As regards displaced workers, Musk suggested that they could be pensioned off on a fixed sum, a sort of Universal Basic Income (UBI); a sentiment echoed by his fellow robber barons, Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI), Chris Hughes (co-founder of Facebook) and Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay).
None of these plutocrats have bothered to think about the comprehensive or long-term effects of their innovations; for example, how would a self-respecting person feel when made to survive on doles, or what opportunities would be available for someone wanting to better his lot? The progeny of UBI beneficiaries would most probably be forced to subsist on UBI, while Musk, and his multiple progenies, would lord it over the world, living the high life, roaming at their will on their private jets. Consider India’s farm sector, which employs more than 26 crore workers. Mechanised agriculture, aided by humanoid robots, could bring down agricultural employment to a trifling figure. One can be sure that the fate of the more than 26 crore jobless farmers would not be of much interest to Musk.
Just as most countries had enacted laws to regulate human genetic research, and are in the process of regulating the use and development of AI, with persons like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and even Musk, publicly calling for immediate regulation of AI, it is time that the development of humanoid robots, and space exploration, by private individuals, is also regulated. In the alternative, we could face catastrophic disruptions ~ brought about by a plethora of Frankenstein’s monsters ~ which could destroy humanity. Anthropic, the present leader in AI technology, has called for stricter regulation of AI. Anthropic publicly warned of mass joblessness, and even creation of new bioweapons, should AI remain unregulated ~ only to be ignored by the US Government. Earlier too, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft had warned: “Artificial Intelligence will evolve to become a superintelligence. We need to be mindful of how it’s developed and ensure that it aligns with humanity’s best interests.”
We can only ignore these warnings at our peri
(The writer is a retired Principal Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax)