The point about competition to control the central sub-empire is an interesting one. If I am assigning the terms correctly, in the Musk empire Musk himself serves that role. Is that correct? If so, then I wonder if that helps to explain the prevalence of a single dominant player in wildly successful empires—you can’t effectively compete for control over one person, so this acts as a constraint on the amount of resources wasted in that way.
The point about competition to control the central sub-empire is an interesting one. If I am assigning the terms correctly, in the Musk empire Musk himself serves that role. Is that correct? If so, then I wonder if that helps to explain the prevalence of a single dominant player in wildly successful empires—you can’t effectively compete for control over one person, so this acts as a constraint on the amount of resources wasted in that way.