As a billionaire philanthropist you will still have to align to your home country’s foreign policy, because your billions only have value so far as the State enforces your property rights.
So very concretely, if China says "hey US of A, please don’t bring uncensored Internet to my citizens: it would be a shame if all this manufacturing and trade suddenly stopped", and the US gov agrees, then Elon Musk will not provide uncensored Internet access to Chinese citizens. Else, Elon Musk will cease to be a billionaire and the Internet access will stop working anyway.
Billionaires still need the protection of a nation state. Their wealth would go away quickly if they had to finance an army. Maybe trillionaires can pull that off.
Maybe some kind of cryptocurrency, but it's unlike to be Bitcoin. When people get paid, they want the value of their payment to not massively go up/down each week.
You can be paid usd amount at the fx at the time of transfer in bitcoin and you can convert it right away if you want. Or use stablecoin for transfers. It's actually relatively trivial to have dozens of options of payment options depending on employee preference (I mean once you have cryptocurrency payroll setup it's not difficult to have all available options... available and customizable by receiver).
How far are we really from private armies really? Sometimes I feel like the US is descending back to feudalism. The billionaire tycoons of today are just lacking homage of some PMCs to be modern day barons of their own domain.
You think China could make the US government make a private citizen censor the Internet in a different country?
1. Stopping trade with America would completely destroy China. They could bluff, but they have very little actual leverage. Their economy is hugely dependent on the US.
2. The US government is not really a fan the Great Firewall or of the Chinese government. It's unlikely it'd just be cowed into submission, especially with Trump in office.
3. Even if the government wanted to not upset China, I don't see how it could stop Starlink legally. You think a law would pass that would make it criminal to distribute uncensored information in China? There would be so much public outrage at that. I can't imagine either party supporting it at all. Plus, I can easily imagine that being struck down as unconstitutional. It would spend forever in the courts at the least.
4. Even if it did pass, Starlink would just move to Canada or South Africa or somewhere before it services China. In no scenario can Musk lose his billions. The US loses half its space economy, but there's no mechanism to take his money or to actually stop Starlink.
> 1. Stopping trade with America would completely destroy China. They could bluff, but they have very little actual leverage. Their economy is hugely dependent on the US.
No, US is really only 10-15% of China's export if you consider that a lot of USA trade on paper is not actually going to USA
China has the technology to shoot down satellites. If SpaceX tries to circumvent China's laws they'll just take out their constellation, so SpaceX has no leverage there.
Smaller, third-world countries, maybe there are more chances there. Citizens would likely need to import and manufacture their own antennas illegally that connect to the constellation.
A large part of the advantage of Starlink is that (thanks to SpaceX launch costs) it might genuinely cost more money to destroy than it did to launch. This makes it far harder to deny its use to the US military in times of conflict.
(SpaceX has claimed the cost to build and launch a single Starlink satellite is already under $500,000)
So very concretely, if China says "hey US of A, please don’t bring uncensored Internet to my citizens: it would be a shame if all this manufacturing and trade suddenly stopped", and the US gov agrees, then Elon Musk will not provide uncensored Internet access to Chinese citizens. Else, Elon Musk will cease to be a billionaire and the Internet access will stop working anyway.