One Person, Three Levers

Here’s a question I can’t shake. In 2026, how much of the world can one person actually command? Not influence, not lobby, not nudge. Command.

Start with a small, weird fact. Early in 2026, a private company changed a verification setting and switched off Starlink terminals that Russian forces had been using on the front in Ukraine. Within weeks Kyiv had taken back around 400 square kilometres of ground, its first real territorial gain since 2023, and the Pentagon’s own people were the ones connecting the two events.1 Think about what that means for a second. Not a government, not a treaty, not a general. A setting. Flipped by a company whose CEO posts memes at 3am and whose opinions on the war change with his mood. There is no form you can file to appeal that decision, because there is no office that made it.

To be honest, when I first started pulling on this thread I expected it to be a story about sports. The thing that set me off was small and a little ridiculous: the head of motorsport’s governing body got himself re-elected with no opponent allowed to run, and a few weeks ago his federation quietly voted away its own term limits so he can stay basically forever.2 And the head of world football handing out a “peace prize” to a sitting US president at the World Cup draw.3 Funny, petty, very legible. But sport turned out to be the small version of the story. The on-ramp. The real thing is much bigger, and once you see the shape of it you can’t unsee it.

Three levers

Here’s the shape. One person ends up commanding an arena (a company, a market, a sport, a country) when they get their hands on three levers at once:

  • The rule-book: they write the rules everyone else has to follow, or they’re big enough to ignore them.
  • The cashflow: serious money moves at their personal say-so.
  • The attention: they own a slice of what the public sees and talks about.

Any one of these is just being rich, or powerful, or famous. We’ve always had those. The interesting (and slightly alarming) cases are the ones where the same person holds all three. That’s the bit that’s new in degree, if not in kind. And once you have the three-lever lens, you can just… go down the list and score people on it. So let’s.

The full house

Elon Musk is the cleanest example, because he holds all three and barely hides it. The cashflow: in November 2025 Tesla’s shareholders approved a pay package worth up to about a trillion dollars over ten years if he hits the targets, the largest executive pay deal anyone has ever recorded.4 The rule-book: see the Starlink story above, a man whose company is infrastructure that states depend on, with no accountability when he decides to use it. And the attention: he owns X outright and posts to it like it’s his nervous system. Rule-book, cashflow, attention. Full house.

Then there’s the version where the arena is a whole country.

In 2018, China’s legislature voted 2,958 to 2 to abolish the two-year term limit on the presidency, clearing the way for Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely.5 Worth sitting with that vote count for a moment. The limit it removed wasn’t some ancient relic; Deng Xiaoping had put it in specifically to stop one man over-concentrating power again, after Mao. So this was a deliberate undo of an anti-concentration fix. Analysts call what followed a return to personalist rule, the Party (and Xi) pulling economic authority back into its own hands.6 Beijing, for what it’s worth, frames all of this as stability and good governance, and I’ll come back to that in a later part because it matters more than it sounds.

And then there’s the case that makes the others look subtle: a head of state running the office partly as a family business. In late 2025 the US president pardoned the founder of the world’s largest crypto exchange, a man whose company had paid a 4.3 billion dollar penalty, around the same time his own family’s crypto venture was taking money linked to that same exchange.7 The opposition’s investigators put the family’s crypto haul in the billions; those are partisan numbers, so treat them as a claim and not a fact, but even the conservative reading is large.8 You don’t need to like or hate the man to see the structure. The structure is the point.

I could keep going, and the catalogue gets long fast. Mohammed bin Salman chairs both Saudi Arabia’s roughly 900-billion-dollar sovereign fund9 and Aramco, one of the most profitable companies on earth, which cleared something like 105 billion dollars in a single year10, as the de facto ruler of the country that owns both. Mark Zuckerberg owns about 13% of Meta’s economics but controls around 61% of its votes, so three billion people’s main communication layer answers, in the end, to one guy.11 Lachlan Murdoch walked away from a 3.3 billion dollar family settlement in 2025 with sole control of Fox and News Corp.12 Larry Fink’s BlackRock crossed 14 trillion dollars under management, enough that a law professor only half-joked it’s “a fourth branch of government.”13 Nvidia became the first 4-trillion-dollar company, the toll booth every AI ambition has to pay.14 None of these people got there by accident, and none of them are going anywhere quietly.

How do you even lock that in?

Here’s a thing that bugged me, as someone who works around markets. If you control 13% of a company, how do you hold 61% of the votes? How does a family run all of Samsung on a 1.6% slice?

Turns out there are only a handful of ways to engineer one-person control, and almost everyone on the list above is using one of them:

  • Dual-class shares (Zuckerberg): one class of stock gets ten votes, the public gets one.11
  • Promoter holdings (India’s Ambanis and Adanis): the founding family just keeps a fat majority stake and the board.
  • An irrevocable trust (the Murdochs): you fence the voting control off so heirs can’t break it.12
  • Circular shareholding (the Lee family at Samsung): company A owns B owns C owns A, and you sit on a tiny direct stake while controlling the whole loop.15
  • A foundation (Novo Nordisk, the company that’s now something like 40% of Denmark’s exports): a controlling foundation holds the votes, the public holds the upside.16

And the most 2026 version of all: Palantir’s founders set up a special share class that hands their voting trust 49.99% of the company’s votes on a minority economic stake. A shareholder suit literally accused them of making themselves “emperor for life.”17 Same company just landed a US Army deal worth up to 10 billion dollars that rolls 75 separate contracts into one.18 Rule-book (the state buys from you and basically only you), cashflow, and a founder lock on control. The levers again.

Five mechanisms. That’s roughly the whole toolkit. Once you know them, the magic trick stops looking like magic and starts looking like plumbing.

If you’re reading this from India

You don’t actually need the foreign examples. We’re living a concentrated version of the whole thing.

There’s even a name for it: the “Billionaire Raj,” from James Crabtree’s book, which openly reaches for the American Gilded Age and its robber barons as the comparison.19 Two men, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, sit across a startling share of the real economy. Ambani’s media arm, JioStar, runs over a hundred TV channels and one of the largest streaming services on the planet, and its crown jewel is cricket: it holds the rights to a sport that is somewhere north of 90% of what Indians watch when they watch sport.20 Now, cricket isn’t the whole of anyone’s attention, obviously. People watch films, news, regional soaps, a thousand things, and no single company corners all of that. But owning the most-watched event in the country, sitting on top of the channels and the streamer, is about the closest thing to a hand on the national attention dial that anyone’s got. Adani runs roughly a quarter to a third of India’s port traffic on a single integrated ports-and-logistics machine.21 One commands an outsized slice of what the country watches, the other a chunk of how its goods physically move.

And the sport detail that ties the bow: the chairman of world cricket’s governing body, the ICC, took the top job in late 2024 unopposed, as the only nominee. He happens to be the son of India’s Home Minister, the second most powerful politician in the country.22 The motorsport guy I opened with got himself in with no opponent. So did this one. Different continents, same move.

To be honest, the Indian case is the one I find hardest to write about cleanly, because it’s home, and because every sharp claim about it has a political charge I’d rather not pretend isn’t there. So I’ll be careful through this series to separate what’s verified (the stakes, the shares, the unopposed votes) from what’s alleged (the favours, the motives), and I’ll flag which is which. The pattern is real either way. You don’t have to believe anyone is a villain to notice the shape.

So, are we doomed?

Here’s where I have to stop myself, because the easy move from here is doom, and I don’t actually think doom is earned yet.

Every name above is real, every number is sourced, and laid end to end it does look like the world is being quietly carved into private kingdoms. But I keep bumping into an awkward fact: a lot of these empires are also visibly wobbling even as I write this. The Saudi money isn’t bottomless. The cricket conglomerate just walked away from a media deal it couldn’t afford. There’s a federal judge in New York right now refusing to let one of those Indian tycoons off the hook on the government’s say-so. The story is genuinely two-sided, and I’d be lying if I pretended I knew which side wins.

So before I decide whether any of this is a crisis or just the usual churn dressed in new clothes, I want to ask the boring, important question first: is this actually new? Because my hunch, and it’s only a hunch right now, is that we have seen almost exactly this before. More than once. And the interesting part isn’t that the empires rose. It’s how they came down… and whether they came down at all.

That’s the next part.

References

Footnotes

  1. Ukraine retook territory after hobbling Starlink, Pentagon says (Bloomberg, May 2026), citing a US DIA/Pentagon assessment; the February 2026 terminal cutoff is covered in Starlink terminals cut off in Russia-occupied Ukraine (CNN, Feb 2026). ↩

  2. Mohammed Ben Sulayem re-elected unopposed in contentious FIA election (France 24 / AFP, Dec 2025); the FIA abolished presidential term limits at its Extraordinary General Assemblies in Macau on 26 June 2026 by supermajority, leaving the over-70 age bar in place: FIA removes limits on presidential terms and tightens eligibility criteria (RACER, June 2026). ↩

  3. FIFA projected a record ~US$13bn for the 2026 World Cup cycle: Breaking down the business of the US$13bn 2026 FIFA World Cup (SportsPro, 2026); the “FIFA Peace Prize” to Donald Trump at the Dec 2025 draw is reported in Infantino’s peace prize to Trump raises questions about FIFA’s neutrality (Al Jazeera, Dec 2025). ↩

  4. Tesla shareholders approve Musk’s pay plan, with over 75% voting in favor (CNBC, Nov 2025). The package is worth up to ~US$1tn over ten years and is performance-contingent, not paid out. ↩

  5. China removes presidential term limits, enabling Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely (NPR, Mar 2018); the vote was 2,958 to 2 with 3 abstentions. ↩

  6. China in Xi’s “New Era”: The Return to Personalistic Rule (Susan L. Shirk, Journal of Democracy, 2018). ↩

  7. Trump pardons Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (Fortune, Oct 2025). ↩

  8. The multi-billion-dollar figures for the Trump family’s crypto ventures come from a House Judiciary Committee Democrats report (Nov 2025), a partisan source; figures cited there run to at least US$2.3bn added to the family fortune and up to ~US$11.6bn in holdings. ↩

  9. Saudi wealth fund PIF’s assets under management up 19% in 2024 to $913bn (The National, Aug 2025). ↩

  10. Aramco fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results (Saudi Aramco, 2026); net income ~US$104.7bn. ↩

  11. Shareholder Democracy and the Challenge of Dual-Class Share Structures (Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, Feb 2025); Zuckerberg holds ~13% of Meta’s economics and ~61% of the voting power. ↩ ↩2

  12. Lachlan Murdoch wins control of Fox and News Corp in $3.3bn family settlement (NPR, Sept 2025). ↩ ↩2

  13. BlackRock Q4 2025: AUM hits $14 trillion (Investing.com, Jan 2026); the “fourth branch of government” line is law professor William Birdthistle’s, not BlackRock’s. ↩

  14. Nvidia becomes first US company to reach $4 trillion market cap (Al Jazeera, July 2025). ↩

  15. How Samsung became 23% of South Korea’s GDP (Braumiller Law, 2025) for the scale; Lee Jae-yong controls the group via circular shareholding on a ~1.6% direct stake, per Who owns Samsung (LegalClarity, 2025). State the GDP basket carefully: the Samsung group is closer to ~13%, the wider affiliated-companies measure ~23%. ↩

  16. Novo Nordisk helps drive Denmark’s fastest growth in years (CNBC, Nov 2025); the company is controlled by the Novo Nordisk Foundation via Novo Holdings (~28% economic / ~77% voting). ↩

  17. Palantir founders made themselves “emperor for life,” suit says (Bloomberg Law, 2025); the Class F structure gives the founders’ voting trust 49.99% of voting power. ↩

  18. Palantir lands $10 billion Army software and data contract (CNBC, Aug 2025), consolidating 75 separate contracts. ↩

  19. The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age (James Crabtree, 2018). ↩

  20. The Reliance-Disney venture JioStar closed in Nov 2024 and runs 100+ TV channels: Disney-Reliance merger complete (Variety, 2024); its streaming arm JioHotstar is among the world’s largest, reported at ~280m paying subscribers, JioHotstar second to Netflix with 280 million subscribers (Business Standard, 2025); cricket’s ~90% share of Indian sports viewership is from India sports audience share by sport (Statista / BARC). ↩

  21. Adani Ports (APSEZ) handles roughly 27–30% of India’s port volumes; see Adani Ports FY25/FY26 disclosures and coverage in Adani Ports surging cargo volumes (AInvest, 2025). ↩

  22. Jay Shah elected unopposed as independent chair of the ICC (ICC, 2024); he took office 1 Dec 2024 and is the son of India’s Home Minister, Amit Shah (Jay Shah, Wikipedia). ↩