There has been a flood of columns, editorials, and opinions about Elon Musk’s growing wealth. Rather than reviewing them, I’ll offer my own view.

I don’t care that Elon Musk is rich. I don’t care that he makes a great deal of money. I do care about how he has made that money.

I agree that Mr. Musk is a genius but I think his genius takes a form that is not widely recognized. He is neither an engineering genius nor a political genius. His real talent is an extraordinary ability to see where government policy, public institutions, and society are headed and to position himself ahead of those trends.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, Mr. Musk repeatedly figured out which way the parade was going and got out in front of it.

It is a pattern. He did it first with PayPal, then with Tesla, and then with SpaceX. The common factor is not government contracts, subsidies, or tax policy. Those are merely different mechanisms. The common factor is that Mr. Musk recognized emerging government priorities before most of his competitors and built businesses that would benefit from them.

His companies might well have succeeded without government action. They almost certainly would not have succeeded as quickly.

That distinction matters. Human lifespans are finite. Capital compounds. If PayPal had grown at a tenth of the rate it did, Mr. Musk would not have become a billionaire until much later. If Tesla and SpaceX had developed more slowly, he would have accumulated wealth, influence, and opportunities at a very different pace. The acceleration mattered.

Those who respond to Mr. Musk’s wealth by demanding higher taxes are missing the point. To the best of my knowledge, no millionaire in American history has ceased to be a millionaire because of higher taxes. The same is true of billionaires. I see no reason to believe the world’s first trillionaire, should one emerge, will be any different.

The lesson is not that Elon Musk should be poorer. The lesson is that government should think carefully about the incentives it creates. If immense fortunes can be built by correctly anticipating the direction of public policy, then we should expect more people to devote their talents to that pursuit.

Mr. Musk did not create the parade. He saw where it was going and got there first. He has now done that three times.

My vision continues to be frustrating for me. My distance vision is better with the off-the-shelf glasses I purchased but is become less clear rapidly. My close vision is always fuzzy. I can only read by closing my left eye and concentrating. It’s exhausting which cuts into the voluminous reading to which I have become accustomed.

My post-operative appointment with my ophthalmologist is next week. I hope I will receive a prescription for glasses that will provide adequate vision most of the time. Until then, as I noted, it’s a strain and strain is something I should avoid while my eyes heal.

I must say that my self-imposed restriction of avoiding commenting on the politics and elections of states in which I do not reside and avoiding commenting on the politics of other countries is beginning to chafe. All I will say is something I have said before.

The ethnic states of Europe and that includes the United Kingdom, France, and Germany as well as San Marino and Albania have challenges before them different from anything that we face in the United States. By “ethnic states” I mean states identified with a particular historic people, language, and culture, however they choose to define citizenship. I don’t know how they can adapt and won’t offer my unwanted advice on what they should or should not do.

Similarly, I avoid talking about political primaries in California, New York, or Tennessee. I don’t live there and I less about their political problems those who do other than what I believe based on first principles. There are some administrative rules that appear universal. For example, they should prune their voting rolls. Based on my more than 20 years as an election judge in Chicago, they undoubtedly include people who been dead or otherwise departed for years, even decades.

I’ve noticed that the reaction to the appointment of the temporary Director of National Intelligence is overwhelmingly negative. The editors of the Washington Post characterize the appointment of William Pulte as a “terrible choice” and remark:

Somehow President Donald Trump managed to find someone less qualified than Tulsi Gabbard to replace her as interim director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former congresswoman and combat veteran. Bill Pulte, named Tuesday by Trump, is a partisan sycophant who has none of the “extensive national security expertise” that the law requires of a DNI nominee.

They characterize him as a “sycophant”. The editors of the Wall Street Journal are just as critical:

Mr. Pulte, a housing scion, at least had some qualifications to regulate the government housing giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He has no experience with intelligence or national security.

His main appeal to Mr. Trump is that he supports the President’s Iran policy and is known for his personal loyalty to Mr. Trump. That’s better than Tulsi Gabbard, the recent DNI who resigned in May to attend to her ailing husband. But it was no secret in Washington that Ms. Gabbard, a long-time isolationist, had lost influence in the White House.

They echo a point that I made:

Its first director, John Negroponte, quickly hired hundreds of people who duplicated the job of the analytical side of the CIA. It’s now a vast political bureaucracy. James Clapper, Barack Obama’s DNI, was a political partisan credibly accused of misleading Congress about the data the government collected on American citizens. He also contributed to the false Russia-Trump collusion narrative in the 2016 election and 2017 that did so much damage to public trust in government.

The intelligence state is large enough without the DNI. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the rest can do the job. In a better world, Congress would use Mr. Pulte’s appointment to eliminate the DNI and send its staff back to other agencies. DOGE could have made a valuable contribution if it had looked at the intel world and recommended such a streamlining.

The recurring problem is not who occupies the office but that the office lacks direct command authority over most of the agencies it ostensibly coordinates. Every DNI, regardless of competence, faces the same structural limitations. DNI is a a sort of “matrix management” position. Matrix management only works for otherwise strictly hierarchical organizations whose members are subject to the UCMJ, i.e. the Department of Defense Department of War. It should be abolished.

The position was established in 2004 in the aftermath of 9/11. It was, as I noted at the time, a mistake then and is a mistake now. Actually, the DNI combines the disadvantages of two organizational forms. Like a matrix manager, the DNI lacks direct command authority over the agencies it coordinates. Unlike a matrix manager, the DNI possesses a large independent bureaucracy that duplicates functions already performed elsewhere. If every discussion of the DNI rapidly devolves into arguments about presidential loyalty, political trustworthiness, and ideological alignment, perhaps the office is structurally political rather than operational.

We now have two decades of evidence. Has the DNI reduced politicization? No. Has it reduced bureaucratic rivalry? No. Has it prevented intelligence controversies? No. What it has unquestionably done is create another large intelligence bureaucracy.

I do not think that William Pulte is the proper appointee to the position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) but my reasoning is somewhat different from what either the Republicans or Democrats have presented.

Under ordinary circumstances arguing for a “seasoned intelligence professional would be appropriate but present circumstances are not ordinary. Ignore Trump. How should an ordinary, prudent president proceed? The problem is that we do not know that the DNI has been “weaponized” by Democrats and we do not know that the DNI has not been “weaponized” by Democrats.

We do know that the intelligence itself was sound (the bipartisan Senate committee found that) and we do know that the procedures followed were quite unusual. We do not know whether the decision to commission the intelligence was politically motivated or not.

Under the circumstances the ideal candidate for the position would combine independence from the intelligence bureaucracy with sufficient knowledge to evaluate its practices. Such individuals are rare and bipartisan trust may be impossible to achieve in the current political climate.

To my eye William Pulte has not demonstrated the combination of independence, credibility, and commitment to evidence that the current moment requires. The country does not need a defender of the intelligence community nor does it need a prosecutor of the intelligence community. It needs someone capable of determining and convincing the public what actually happened.

I’m feeling a bit as though I had been preempted. I had been preparing a post on President Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund but his announcement that he was not implementing it has made that unnecessary. I’ll just mention a few of my thoughts.

First, I thought that the president was pointing to a very real injustice—that the Supreme Court had found that the federal obstruction statute had been applied too broadly. But it was the wrong remedy for the problem. Those who pay taxes and those who feel monetization of the debt most acutely were paying for something over which they have little control while for those doing the enforcing the incentives did not actually change.

My ideal situation is that the law be enforced vigorously and even-handedly and those doing the enforcing be held responsible if they do so unjustly. With the “anti-weaponization” fund, we are no closer to that ideal than without it.

There has been an ongoing conversation in comments about wars in the post-war period. Since 1945, very few major wars have ended in the sort of decisive, politically unambiguous victory that characterized World War II. The Falklands War and the Gulf War are among the clearest examples. Others haven’t been wars, they’ve been single operations or counter-insurgencies, or haven’t been victories as such, they’ve been withdrawals, ends to the hostilities.

Take the Korean War, for example. It was definitely a war but there was not a clear victor and North Korea and South Korea have been separated ever since.

An example that has been raised is the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. I would characterize it primarily as a counter-insurgency rather than a conventional interstate war. Whatever label one chooses, it did not end in a decisive victory; the Soviets eventually withdrew.

There were notable similarities among the Gulf War, the British-Argentine War, and World War II. The similarities include:

• All involved what the ultimate victors deemed to be unacceptable territorial aggression, Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.
• All involved naval, air, and ground forces.
• All involved conventional militaries.
• All involved alliances, e.g. the Allies in WWII, the UK, US, and France in the war against Argentina, and a broad coalition in the Gulf War.
• All resulted in decisive victories.
• The victor used overwhelming force against the defeated and had clearly enunciated goals.

I would be remiss in not mentioning a very different explanation of war and success which is that all wars involve some degree of what we are increasingly calling criminal behavior. Before the start of World War I there was an accord to which all parties were signatories, the forbade the use of chemical weapons. That was violated by both sides, increasingly so as the war wore one. In World War II the Allies treated the morale of the Axis nations as a legitimate target of war. That was the rationale for the firebombing of Dresden and the Tokyo air raids, which killed tens of thousands of civilians. General Curtis LeMay later observed that if the United States had lost the war, those responsible for the bombing campaign might well have been prosecuted as war criminals. Whether one agrees with that assessment or not, it illustrates how even the most successful and widely supported wars often involve actions whose legality and morality remain disputed decades later.

Even the “good wars” remain controversial. Critics argued that coalition bombing in Baghdad stretched the laws of war, while opponents of the sinking of the ARA Belgrano contended that it violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the declared exclusion zone. These are rationalized as mistakes.

The longer a conflict continues, the greater the probability that mistakes, misjudgments, or violations will occur. Don’t be surprised if, as the war against Iran wears on, we make more mistakes.

I strongly recommend you read this post from the Multipolarity Substack. Here’s a concluding snippet:

Dr Powell’s model suggests that the war is rapidly nearing a tipping point. Ukraine is approaching the fulcrum beyond which the weight of the war tips its forces into rapid depletion, allowing the Russian military to start achieving much more significant territorial gains. In turn, this would lead to accelerated Ukrainian losses through the ruthless reality of the square law. This road heads toward an eventual Ukrainian collapse.

Ukraine’s effective combat power (a composite of manpower, machinery and munitions) is depleting, the model shows, at a net rate that outpaces its replenishment, while Russia’s holds steady or grows marginally. This imbalance, compounded by recent reductions in Western support, suggests a tipping point where Ukrainian force density thins below viability, triggering rapid territorial losses and operational collapse.

That could be foreclosed by, for example, Western troops from any of the various NATO countries but that in turn risks widening the war into global thermonuclear war.

Ukrainian esprit de corps makes little difference. Innovations in warfare make little difference. What matters is how many troops can be fielded by each side.

The TL;DR version: come up with a minimally livable solution quickly.

It has been ten days since my right eye was operated on and almost 25 days since my left eye was operated on. Without eyeglasses I see roughly as well as I did five years ago (without eyeglasses). I use off-the-shelf eyeglasses for the near-sighted I purchased from Amazon for walking around and watching television. Reading, either with or without eyeglasses, is a strain. Driving, with or without eyeglasses, would be dangerous.

My vision is not monotonically improving. Today, for example, my vision using eyeglasses is worse than my vision using eyeglasses was yesterday. I have hopes that the new prescription eyeglasses I will receive after I heal in two-three weeks will enable me to read, drive, and generally function.