This chapter reflects on the future of governance in an era where corporate-driven, private arrangements increasingly dominate key sectors, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and beyond. While public power still contributes through research funding and normative frameworks, the sheer scale and speed of private actors often surpass traditional regulatory capacities. Governance today rests to a considerable extent with the internal factions of corporations—engineers, compliance teams, and public relations—who shape techno-normative frameworks with little public accountability. The chapter argues that governance by emulation offers a pragmatic, albeit imperfect, path forward. Emulating public law principles—such as accountability, self-governance, and due process—into private contexts can inject public-minded values into profit-driven structures. However, traditional private law mechanisms, such as contracts and fiduciary duties, need repurposing to address the scale and public significance of corporate governance. Similarly, the role of infrastructure, code, and technical frameworks in shaping governance must be acknowledged alongside conventional normative tools. While these developments hold both promise and peril, they also mirror the incremental evolution of liberal public institutions. By embedding public law ideals into emerging governance constellations, we may foster accountability structures capable of addressing the complexities of modern global power dynamics—marking a critical step toward a more balanced and responsive future governance framework.

Musk announced Tesla’s decision to go direct to consumers after looking at the history of the legacy car companies with their increasingly onerous dealer networks and the failure of recent EV startups such as Fisker that had tried to sell through dealers. Chapter 2 examines Tesla’s direct sales decision both in Tesla’s own words and with supporting evidence on why selling EVs through franchised dealers is an unworkable business strategy, as demonstrated by the fact that almost every other EV startup has chosen a direct sales approach as well.

Chapter 3 launches into the Tesla wars with an inside account of the first big battle in New Jersey in 2014. It shows how the dealers tried to pivot from the original dealer protection motivation of the state laws to a consumer protection justification and the tactics the dealers used to advance their position. Drawing on public choice theory, the chapter also answers the question of why the dealers have managed to cling onto their protected position for so long, despite business, technological, and political changes that have entirely undermined the original purposes of the franchise dealer laws.

Chapter 9 calls the direct sales wars in Tesla’s favor. It has sold over 2 million cars without using a dealer, established a national footprint, and obtained a loyal customer following that vouches for its direct sales approach. This chapter pulls together the fifty-state story of the direct sales wars, showing where each state stands on the issue and how Tesla used creative tactics like locating on Native American lands to circumvent remaining restrictions in holdout states.

This chapter provides a summary of the main findings reported in this book and discusses numerous questions for future research. It also addresses the political aspects of communicative efficiency and contemplates the potential impact of new technologies on costs of language communication.

I originally penned this essay in the summer of 2018, stimulated by a Twitter exchange I had with Elon Musk, itself triggered by the SpaceX CEO’s previously announced decision to colonize Mars. This led me to wonder if this visionary had given any thought to what sort of government he would set up on the Red Planet and if he already had a team of social scientists working on the problem or whether he was just going to wing it when they got there. Surely not, but what source for research would a team of social engineers (let’s call them) working at SpaceX (or NASA, since it too plans to send people to Mars in the coming decades) access? There are no working models. Or are there? There are. Since it is Earthlings going to Mars, experiments in governance on the Blue Planet are a useful resource for lessons on how to govern the Red Planet. This essay, originally published in Quillette, is my modest contribution to future Martians on what they should take with them when they slip the surly bonds of earth.