Elon Musk for President, 2028

Get ready for black baseball caps.

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It’s probably the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard.

And that should scare you.

When you think for a minute, it’s also the most obvious thing you’ve ever heard. We live in a different world now, one where the least likely thing is actually the most likely thing. Elon Musk for president. It’s plausible, even probable. While everyone else is chasing Trump’s latest scandal or political fail, this is the thing operating in plain sight that everyone laughs off.

First, about Donald Trump…

For someone who doesn’t want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, Trump sure spends a lot of time talking about the Epstein files.

He’s getting ratioed on his own platform.

MAGA influencers are enraged. Steve Bannon declares Trump “has become the deep state” he threatened to dismantle. Musk is dunking on him with glee as he announces the formation of a new political party. It truly seems like Trump has finally lost control. Mainstream news is expressing quiet delight as Trump’s failure to spin this case tears apart his base.

So, is this the end?

Well, not quite.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last few years, it’s that you can’t predict what Trump or his base will do—not easily.

What happens next with MAGA feels like one of countless questions we’re all struggling to answer these days. The future used to feel fairly predictable, even if we knew disasters and black swans could happen every now and then. Now, every day feels like a black swan stretching its wings.

There’s a theory for that.

In the late 2000s, a French risk analyst named Didier Sornette developed a framework he called Dragon King Theory, based on the ancient Chinese god who controlled the weather and the seas—and dragons.

Sornette described dragon king events as extremely rare but extremely powerful ones that “reveal the existence of mechanisms of self-organization that are not apparent otherwise” because they look trivial at first. But these “meaningful outliers” wind up turning order into chaos. When Sornette talks about dragon kings, he specifically means the meaningful outlers everyone overlooks, but sometimes the phrase also describes the gigantic disasters they spawn.

Dragon kings cause dragon king events.

Sornette studied city sizes, financial meltdowns, seizures, and disasters to conclude that maybe you can’t predict black swan events months into the future, but you can spot one when it’s starting to happen, still way ahead of everyone else. You just have to pay attention to the outliers and anomalies that everyone, especially the wishful thinkers, try to dismiss early on.

You also have to pay attention to “ruptures, phase transitions, bifurcations” and “tipping points.” Experts miss warning signs because they don’t notice when a system starts following a different set of rules. They keep trying to predict what’s going to happen based on the old ones. Those little anomalies they could write off once upon a time become key factors influencing the future.

Also, they amplify each other.

Look around, and you see nothing but outliers and phase transitions, one state of matter becoming another. You see it in the climate crisis. You see it in politics. You see it in human behavior. And you see a bunch of “experts” trying to predict what’s going to happen by looking at analogue moments in history, without understanding all these different outliers, or the new paradigm.

Everyone still wants to treat Trump as an outlier.

He’s a dragon king.

So, should we try to predict what’s going to happen with MAGA, using Dragon King theory? Let’s give it a shot.

First, let’s talk about the Epstein case:

Consider what we know about Trump. On the one hand, we know he doubles and triples down on lies. We also know he field tests dozens of versions of one big lie, like throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks with his base. We’ve seen this pattern a few different times. Whenever there’s a falling out, Trump and his team work overtime to find the right frequency. Eventually, they land on the right version of the big lie that his base can accept.

We also know that Trump is happy to thrown his own staff and allies under the bus in order to preserve his reputation.

What will Trump do, then?

He’s probably going to throw his dear attorney general Pam Bondi under the bus, but he’s going to make it look like that’s the last thing he wants. Next, he’s probably going to find “the real” Epstein files. He’s going to put something in their that satisfies his base while keeping himself clean. Finally, he’s going to come up with a convincing explanation for the delay.

One possibility:

“Unfortunately, Biden destroyed the Epstein files and every trace of them. He planted a decoy file, but we found the real one!”

“Blame Biden!”

There’s a lot of ways this can play out. One of them includes MAGA ditching Trump for good. But what happens after that?

According to Dragon King theory, MAGA is far from just some outlier that’s going to go away when we finally oust Trump from power and/or influence. As some have already commented, he’s simply the current manifestation of their collective will. They’ll find someone else to carry their hatred.

Who’s going to inherit MAGA?

If we keep with our theory, then it’s probably someone who’s being overlooked, just like Trump was written off as an outlier (twice) who didn’t stand a chance at winning a presidential election. It’s probably going to be someone who can manage the global crime network that put Trump in power in the first place.

Maybe it’s Vance, but I don’t think so.

He’s not presidential enough.

Vance is presidential in the old sense of the word. He follows the old paradigm. Political figures like him are necessary because we’re still in a phase transition. It’s not over yet. He’s not presidential according to the new rules. Yes, those new rules are horrifying, but that’s the reality.

Among all the dragon king personalities out there who have the grifter charisma and the resources to supplant Trump, only one name really comes to mind, and it’s Elon Musk. He’s the definition of a political outlier.

Here’s one big thing about dragon kings, based on my own interpretation of Sornette’s theories. They’re not just outliers. They’re the ones staring you right in the face the whole time, something that looks a little too obvious and a little too weird to be true. Then in hindsight, you slap your forehead.

Elon Musk fits that pretty well.

On the one hand, it sounds ridiculous that Elon Musk would just form a new political party and sweep the next presidential election, or even the midterm elections. Of course, that only sounds ridiculous if you’re analyzing everything through the lens of the old rules, rules from 20 years ago, rules from the Obama era, rules from the Hamilton paradigm of society, where things kind of made sense. But imagine analyzing today’s politics with a 2008/2015 political lens.

That would be ridiculous right…?

Right…?

Think about all the things that sounded ridiculous ten years ago, including the idea of Elon Musk buying one of the world’s biggest social media platforms and turning it into a rightwing troll den. It happened, despite scores of experts laughing it off and telling us it would never happen.

Now let’s be very honest with each other. Does anyone think Elon Musk is going to launch a political party and run someone else for president? Or do you think he’s going to consider himself most qualified?

I’m going with Option B.

At the moment, Musk might look like one of the least likely candidates. But he ticks all the boxes. He has that particular MAGA charm, the ability to say incredibly offensive things with swagger. He has the knack for stunts and spectacles. He has tendency toward weird outbursts and tantrums. He has the malignant narcissism. He has the thinly veiled white supremacy. He can infuriate “the libs.” He has the capacity for cruelty and vengeance.

He has the money, and the connections.

With DOGE, Elon now has the “political experience.” He also probably has all the dirt and data you could ever ask for. Vance? His main problem is that he’s just not sloppy enough for MAGA. He’s too polished.

Musk looks appropriately disheveled.

People will say Musk can’t run because he’s not a natural-born citizen. But MAGA managed to elect a felon. Let’s also remember that the 22nd Amendment limits a president to two terms, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from pushing on that rule with “suggestions” and “jokes” about a third term. Guys like Peter Thiel have already started referring to Trump’s current term as his first “real” term. So if you concede that it’s possible, even likely, for Republicans to run Trump once again in 2028, casually disregarding what the Constitution says about that, I don’t think anyone can point to any other clause in the Constitution for a definitive say on what the richest man in the world is or isn’t allowed to do.

The Constitution also forbids the president from declaring war, but everyone in the media conveniently forgot that when Trump ordered nuclear strikes on Iran and threatened to assassinate their leader.

So you see, the Constitution only means something in the old paradigm. In the new paradigm, it means whatever people want it to mean. The Supreme Court has essentially said that the law doesn’t apply to the president, so that sounds more like a hurdle than a disqualification.

If you want to see how our branches of government could wiggle around that problem, read this essay on the origins of the qualifications. I’m not trying to do MAGA’s homework for them, but there it is, practically gift wrapped, the idea that a cornerstone of the constitution was actually “far from settled” and actually had more to do with fears that the current government no longer seems to take very seriously, especially the notion of foreign interference.

Wouldn’t it be easier for Elon to run a puppet?

Well, he already tried that.

It didn’t work.

True, politicians can’t stand Elon Musk. But they also couldn’t stand Trump, and they still can’t. Trump’s current vice president once called Trump an idiot and compared him to Hitler. Boy, that changed.

More than anything, Elon Musk has a brand. He’s a household name. Find one person in this country who doesn’t know him now. As we’ve learned so hard so many times, name recognition beats everything these days. He’s presidential in the new sense of the word. All he needs now is a line of merch.

Elon Musk running for president now has all the vibes of Trump running for president after a humiliating correspondents’ dinner.

Get ready for black baseball caps.

It all sounds outlandish, but that’s the point. As old paradigms give way to new ones that follow different rules, things that sounded impossible become possible.

On Reddit, they say Trump is a poor person’s idea of what a rich person is, and Elon Musk is a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person is. Elon Musk can easily unite both, and that’s his superpower. In the old regime, Elon Musk would make for a terrible presidential candidate. But the rules have changed.

Now he’s a dragon king.

You can’t fight a dragon king with a traditional candidate who ticks all the boxes from an outdated paradigm, and that’s why Democrats have struggled so much for so long. They need their own dragon king. They need the antithesis of everything Musk represents, and that’s not an establishment figure.

Five years ago, it sounded ridiculous to think we’d be living in a world where the president gives the global economy whiplash with constant tariff threats. It sounded ridiculous to think a president would send Marines to a city to stomp down protests. It sounded ridiculous to talk about annexing or even invading Canada and Greenland. It sounded ridiculous that a president would even think about stripping citizenship from Americans, much less openly entertaining the idea on social media. It sounded ridiculous that a Fox News host would take over the military. It sounded ridiculous that Dr. Oz would take over Medicare and Medicaid. It sounded ridiculous that RFK Jr. would take over public health.

A vast majority of the public has been so certain that this or that ridiculous thing would never happen, and that’s pretty much what happened. It didn’t always happen the way some of us predicted, but a version of it happened, and that version was often even more nuts than what we predicted.

How many times have we been told what the Supreme Court would do, only for them to hit everyone with a big surprise?

We have other scenarios.

Maybe none of this happens. Maybe Trump finds the right version of his lie to tell his base. Maybe none of it even matters because Trump and his administration have already laid the groundwork to rig elections going forward. Maybe Establishment Democrats will sweep the next two elections, without offering any real alternative vision, simply because Trump drops the bar even lower than we thought possible. Whatever does happen, I suspect it’s going to look equally as nuts, as outlandish, and as impossible as anything else we can dream up.

So, that’s my prediction. Maybe I’m wrong. But I think it’s a stark possibility that Elon Musk will (try to) run for president in 2028.

He might even win.