Humanity Will Sign a New Social Contract With Musk’s AI Companies Instead of Nations: The End of the Social Contract

Part 13 of 27 in Homo Conspirans: The Humans Who Come After Us

Homo Conspirans · Musk’s dream: “X, the everything app” → a humanity that signs with companies instead of states

People will move their contracts with the state, one by one, to AI companies. The party they trust with their money, their identity, their disputes and their retirement shifts from government to corporation. The social contract that has bound humanity for 250 years gets rewritten with a single “Agree” button.

In June 1762, the council of Geneva ordered two books torn up and burned in front of the town hall: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and The Social Contract. The council issued a warrant for the author’s arrest, and Rousseau fled to neighboring Neuchâtel.[1] The Social Contract opens with this line: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The book, which argued that legitimate power comes only from the agreement of the people, became a textbook of the French Revolution 27 years later, and it lies under nearly every constitution today.

The state is a recent invention

Humans have lived inside states for only a short time. For most of Homo sapiens’ 300,000 years, people lived in bands of dozens or hundreds who knew each other’s faces. The first states appeared about 5,000 years ago. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes laid out the deal in Leviathan. Without a state, human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” So people hand part of their freedom to a vast power and get safety in return.[2]

Over time the state added items to the deal. It prints money, issues IDs, builds roads, judges disputes and pays a pension in old age. The taxes we pay are the price of the whole bundle. But the bundle never had to come as one package.

Also read: Humans With Musk's AI Brain Chips Will Evolve to See Infrared: Neuralink Blindsight

An app that takes the Leviathan’s jobs one by one

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he called it a shortcut to building X, “the everything app,” and held up China’s WeChat as the model. In January 2025, X announced X Money, a partnership with Visa for sending and receiving money inside the app.[3] Chat, news and money go into one app, and on top of it sits Grok, an AI that answers anything. Musk’s Starlink brings internet to places governments never wired, and SpaceX’s company town in Texas has become an official city. Musk’s AI is on course to deliver what Marx dreamed of, a universal high income.

Trust is already moving. In the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, which surveys 28 countries, business was the only one of four institutions, among government, media, NGOs and business, to clear the line into “trusted.”[4] People trust the company they pay every month more than the government they voted for.

Apply for residency, subscribe to a country

States themselves are unbundling. In December 2014, Estonia let anyone, anywhere in the world, apply online to become an “e-resident.” Without ever setting foot in the country, e-residents can start companies, open bank accounts and sign documents electronically. By July 2026 more than 142,000 people had become these digital residents, and they had founded more than 43,000 companies.[5]

In his 2022 book The Network State, the Silicon Valley investor Balaji Srinivasan went a step further. A community that first comes together online pools money, buys land and eventually becomes a new country recognized by existing states.[6] In an age when people choose their country, the contract with the state turns into terms of service. Even a single share of an AI company that Musk hands to every child will work as a lifelong contract.

April 2048: empty polling stations, crowded cafés

April 2048, the morning of South Korea’s National Assembly election. At a polling station in an elementary school gym in Mapo, Seoul, the staff sip coffee with nothing to do. By 11 a.m., turnout is 14 percent. The café across the street is packed. Ji-won, a 34-year-old freelancer, is voting on his phone. Not in the parliamentary election, but on an amendment to the “member charter” of the AI platform he belongs to.

The charter governs his income settlements, health insurance, retirement savings and dispute mediation. Most of his pension sits not with the National Pension Service but in the platform’s savings plan, and when a dispute with a client comes up, he goes to the platform’s AI mediation before any court. After voting on the charter, Ji-won hesitates for a moment, then crosses the street to the gym. That evening’s count shows twice as many people voted on the platform charter as in the parliamentary election.

One app in 2029, members without a nation by 2060

This is the order in which people sign with AI companies instead of states.

• 2029: X launches a “membership” that bundles messaging, payments, an AI assistant and satellite internet into one subscription. Its U.S. subscribers outnumber the customers of America’s largest bank.
• 2034: A small country of under a million people signs the first contract handing its national identity checks and tax settlement wholesale to an AI company.
• 2040: More people vote on one AI platform’s charter amendment than in a U.S. midterm election.
• 2048: South Korea’s parliamentary election turnout falls below 50 percent for the first time. The same year, three in ten South Koreans keep more of their retirement money in platform savings than in public pensions.
• 2060: More than a million people give up their nationality and live on AI company membership alone, and the United Nations debates their legal status for the first time.

Rousseau’s books burned in front of Geneva’s town hall, but 32 years later his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris. In between, a king fell and a nation of citizens was born. The next social contract has no paper to burn. The “Agree” button at the bottom of the screen is pressed hundreds of millions of times a day.

Next in the series · After the Weight-Loss Drug Musk Took, the Next Step Will Be an AI Brain Chip That Replaces Willpower: The Ozempic Effect
Musk credited Ozempic for his weight loss, and a drug of the same kind cut how much people drank by half. Willpower is passing from a human virtue to a function of drugs and AI chips.

Sources

1. Columbia University Libraries, “Core Curriculum: Contemporary Civilization — Revolutions: French Revolution” (exhibition). https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/cc/revolutions/frenchrev
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 13 (Project Gutenberg). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207
3. AP (via News4Jax), “Elon Musk’s X partners with Visa on payment service in an effort to become an ‘everything app’,” January 28, 2025. https://www.news4jax.com/business/2025/01/28/elon-musks-x-partners-with-visa-on-payment-service-in-an-effort-to-become-an-everything-app/
4. Cooley PubCo, “2025 Edelman Trust Barometer: grievance,” February 11, 2025 (2023 Edelman Trust Barometer: business “the only trusted institution” at 62). https://cooleypubco.com/2025/02/11/2025-edelman-trust-barometer-grievance/
5. Republic of Estonia e-Residency, “e-Residency dashboard,” July 2026. https://www.e-resident.gov.ee/dashboard
6. Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State: How to Start a New Country, 2022. https://thenetworkstate.com/