America, Inc.

If you build America, you should own America.

Why the Future Belongs to Nations That Unleash Their Builders

America’s last great weapon isn’t our military or our factories. It’s our builders. The men and women who wake up every morning to pull the future into the present.

But today, the very people who create our future are forced to fight their own government just to move forward. SpaceX had to sue the federal government to launch rockets. Palantir had to sue the Army to win contracts. Our best founders don't just outcompete the market, they outlitigate their own country. It’s a national disgrace, and if we don’t fix this, we lose the only edge we have left.

We can’t just get government out of the way. We have to rewire it to run at the speed of American ambition. Imagine if we treated America not like a bureaucratic monolith, but like a high-performance company. KPIs reviewed quarterly, outcomes rewarded, failure removed without ceremony.

Whenever America aligns incentives from the top down around building, it wins. Whenever it worships process, it decays.

The Builder’s Economy Is America’s Ultimate Edge

If you want to see what still works in America, don't look at Washington. Look at our companies.

Sixty of the world's 100 most valuable companies are American (and 9 of the top 10 are.) The "Magnificent Seven" American tech giants are worth more than China’s entire stock market. Enabling this is the fact that the U.S. is home to 50% of the world’s top universities, producing more startups than any other country, and 90% of global venture capital.

Only in America could SpaceX rise from near-bankruptcy to the world’s most valuable private tech firm, making space reusable not through early government contracts, but private capital and relentless ambition. Only here could a kid like Mark Zuckerberg drop out of college and build a company used by nearly half the planet. Jeff Bezos once explained that the USA is the global innovation leader because it has “the best risk capital system in the world by far…where founders can raise $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working." He’s right, but it’s more than just capital. It’s a system of network effects: risk-tolerant investors, world-class talent, and a culture that celebrates bold ambition. This results in an unstoppable flywheel where execution wins, risk is rewarded, and incentives align.

Bureaucracy Is Smothering America’s Builder Power

If we don't protect and expand this frontier, it will close. If we don’t bring the operating model that built our companies into how we govern, the future will be built elsewhere.

For most of modern history, representative democracy & process was the winning meta. In a world with limited connectivity, fragile logistics, and simpler power structures, the checks and balances of American democracy were a feature, not a bug. But technology changes the meta. In a hyperconnected world, it is speed, execution, and alignment that win.

Today, America is slow, misaligned, and self-sabotaging. While we bicker over culture wars and pass window-dressing legislation, China runs the industrial playbook we invented:

• 55% of global shipbuilding now happens in China. The U.S.? Less than 0.2%.

• In WWII, we built a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes. Today, Boeing hasn’t released a new airframe in 20 years. This means that much of our military logistics fleet now relies on retired commercial planes, yet Boeing just secured a $20B ‘Next Gen Air Dominance’ contract. The irony is painful.

We celebrate bureaucratic “victories” like they’re triumphs. An infrastructure bill passes, but projects still crawl through years of environmental review. An aerospace grant is issued, but the recipients spend more time on compliance paperwork than in the air. The builders are still here. We just force them to crawl through broken glass to build.

America, Inc.: Aligning the State to Serve Builders and Empower Citizens

We need government that treats building and incentive alignment at a national level as its core mission, not as an afterthought.

Imagine if America.gov was instead America, Inc., a high-performance company where:

• The President is the CEO.

• Congress is the Board.

• Builders are the national Skunkworks, turning moonshots into reality.

• Citizens are the shareholders.

Performance reviews aren't controlled by media cycles every four years. They’re metrics-driven, continuous, and brutal. Budgets are set quarterly and objectives are public. Failure results in immediate removal, not pensions, not golden parachutes.

It sounds radical. But versions of it already exist, and they work.

Singapore rose from a malarial swamp to a sovereign powerhouse in a single generation by doing what few governments dared: it paid civil servants like private-sector executives, fired underperformers without hesitation, and aligned the entire machinery of government around outcomes rather than optics. Ministers in Singapore today earn over $1 million annually, pegged deliberately to top private-sector salaries, ensuring they attract talent and prevent corruption. Singapore structured society with precision: it embraced Western meritocracy, rewarding hustle and personal ambition, while preserving Eastern values of duty, discipline, and collective national purpose. The result? A country that has no natural resources, yet became one of the world’s richest, with a GDP per capita higher than the U.S., top global rankings in education and healthcare, and the world’s busiest transshipment port. Individual success wasn’t separate from national success, they were engineered to serve the same goals.

When governance runs like an operating system and incentives are aligned, success ensues. America doesn’t need to tear itself down. It needs an OS upgrade. The blueprint is simple: treat governance like a product, align incentives from the top down to the citizen level, and unleash the builders who can rebuild it. I have several ideas on how to achieve this:

• Align leadership incentives by tying compensation to real outcomes: GDP growth, infrastructure built, energy deployed.

• Recruit operators, not politicians. Hire Cabinet Secretaries the way companies hire CEOs, for competence, not handed out like favors.

• Launch privatized experimental cities where performance rules over legacy processes. Consider Starbase, Texas, a company town built around SpaceX’s rocket program and governed by SpaceX leadership, designed to operate at startup speed. Similarly, look at California Forever, a $900 million plan to build a new city on 60,000 acres in Solano County. Backed by A16Z, Michael Moritz, John Doerr, and others, it’s a full-stack civic prototype for 400,000 innovation-driven residents rallying behind the slogan: “Let’s make Solano a place that builds.”

• Launch federally backed Manhattan Zones. Instead of handing $20B to legacy primes like Boeing, create five government-funded “builder cities” with $4B budgets each, full regulatory suspension, zero bureaucracy, and world-class talent focused on solving existential problems. A fusion energy city. A quantum computing city. A cure-cancer city. Stack the best minds and remove the red tape.

• Reward citizens like shareholders. Rather than taxing America’s top contributors to fund waste, create a system of citizen payouts tied to national productivity and economic goals so Americans can share in the upside they help create.

If you build America, you should share in America's returns. Alignment creates pride. Pride fuels greatness.

Rethinking Social Security: Taxpayers as Equityholders

Of the aforementioned concepts, I believe one of the most actionable for America, Inc. is simple: treat citizens like shareholders. Because when citizens share in the upside, builders are empowered to create it, and together, the nation rises. Citizenship itself needs to be rethought, not as a tax burden, but as ownership in the American project.

Right now, Social Security is a slow-motion collapse. It’s a glorified transfer scheme whereby today’s workers fund today’s retirees, and tomorrow’s shrinking workforce is somehow expected to fund today’s millennials. The math is breaking, birth rates are falling, debt is exploding, and trust in the system is evaporating. The fundamental flaw? Social Security treats citizens as renters, not owners. You pay in, but you don't build equity. You have no stake in national growth, you’re just waiting for a check that may or may not arrive.

But imagine a different model, one based in ownership. Imagine if every dollar you paid into Social Security bought you equity, a slice of America's real productive assets:

• GDP growth

• Federal land, mineral rights, and royalties

• The U.S. equity markets

• National energy exports, LNG, rare earths, uranium, and more

Each year, your contributions purchase more shares, and those shares compound as America grows. When you retire, you're not left waiting on political promises. You're accruing the value you helped create. Other countries already glimpse this idea. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has turned oil reserves into national wealth. Even Alaska’s “Permanent Fund” pays residents ~$2,000 per year from oil revenues. But America’s full potential is orders of magnitude larger.

Let’s run some back of the napkin math on how Citizen Shareholding could work for a sense of scale:

• Social Security collects ~$1.2 trillion a year today.

• If, for simplicity, it was invested into a simple S&P 500 index, compounding at the historical 9.8% return, over 35 years:

That fund would grow to over $304.9 trillion

Now assume a conservative 4% annual dividend payout (like a university endowment):

• 4% of $304.9 trillion = $12.2 trillion in dividends.

• With 175 million eligible recipients (unlike Social Security, I am assuming eligibility for all Americans who have contributed for over 10 years.)

• That’s ~$70,000 on average per recipient annually in passive income.

✅ No new taxes.
✅ No demographic Ponzi scheme.
✅ True national wealth.

Over time, returns in a system like this would likely converge somewhere between historical S&P returns and GDP growth, settling around 5 to 6 percent annually. But even then, it’s a structure that creates mathematical sustainability so long as America, Inc.’s growth is on average higher than the 4% dividend. And while transitioning from our current system would require time and careful planning, strategic seeding of national assets could jumpstart this vision and accelerate our path to a more prosperous, ownership-based America in far less than 35 years. It’s fair, aligned, and sustainable. It’s America’s national cap table, where every citizen is a shareholder, and every builder is a catalyst for national growth. This sort of national cap table structure would allow for various related concepts such as:

Transparent Equity Accounts: Each citizen holds a real account on America’s cap table. Citizens can see, in real time, their share of the country's growth, updated quarterly, just like stockholders.

Real Access and Flexibility: Citizens can access their vested account value when needed for major life expenses, with proportional adjustments to future dividends, an option completely unavailable with Social Security.

Generational Wealth Accrual: While Social Security creates no accumulated wealth, Citizen Shareholding creates value that continues growing. Untapped equity in America, Inc. accounts can be inherited to create generational wealth.

Performance-Tied Dividends: Mechanisms such as “Citizen IPOs” would be possible. One-time issuances where every American receives a direct equity grant pegged to hitting national GDP targets, energy independence, etc. This aligns national goals.

Bonus Shares for Builders: Founders, service members, and high-contribution citizens can earn bonus equity for advancing the national interest. In a startup, it’s a powerful signal when top talent takes equity over salary. Why can’t key performers in society be allowed to index on national equity over comp?

At the end of the day, incentives compound just like capital does. Today’s Americans are asked to pay into a system they have no stake in. No ownership if America thrives, no consequence if it fails. America, Inc. would be different.

• If the country wins, you win.

• If the economy grows, your balance grows.

• If you build America, you own America.

Yes, this is a simplified thought experiment, but it’s grounded in real-world logic and entirely testable. The principle is simple: if you build the house, you should own the house. The current model treats Americans like renters. The future demands that we treat them like founders.

Fixing Social Security is just the beginning. If we want a nation where incentives align between citizens, builders, and government, we need to unleash that energy across the economy. And the builders? They’re already moving. From reusable rockets to frontier AI, the next Manhattan Projects are underway, and they’re led by founders, not government. The only question: will America align its citizens, builders, and government to win together, or keep pulling in different directions?

America: In the Hands of Founders Since 1776

America began as the boldest startup ever launched. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was just 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was 21 when he began laying the groundwork for America’s financial system. James Madison helped design the Constitution before he turned 40. These weren’t gray-haired bureaucrats. They were young, mission-driven founders, building a new operating system for human ability from scratch.

Our founding fathers didn’t iterate on monarchy. They threw it out and built something entirely new: a system where power was checked, incentives were aligned, and individual agency was the atomic unit of national strength.

It’s time to reboot the greatest startup the world has ever known. It’s time to treat citizens like shareholders. It’s time to treat builders like national treasures. It’s time to move fast again.

Let’s unleash America’s full potential.