The Vassal Strategy

I was reading last week that SpaceX, Musk’s private space company, is close to filing for an IPO. 

It immediately made me think of an ex-coworker of mine who put a large share of his savings into Tesla about eight years ago.

He was just a normal guy with a normal job. He was not some great investor or engineer. He wasn’t even really into batteries or electric cars. He just believed in Elon Musk. He thought Musk was a visionary, the real-life Iron Man, and that investing in him would pay off.

It turned out he was right.

I am personally not going to gamble my life savings on the Spacex stock. But I also would not automatically look down on someone who does. I have seen this kind of bet work before.

Most modern industries are illegible to outsiders. If you want to understand the future of aerospace, energy, or AI, you have to sort through regulation, technology, geopolitics, financing, and bottlenecks that are invisible to almost everyone outside the field.

Most people can’t do that. They do not have the time, the access, or the technical knowledge. So instead of trying to understand the whole machine, they judge the person operating inside it.

Besides, there are not many winners in life. A small number of people capture a wildly disproportionate share of the rewards. Many domains are winner-take-all, or close to it. And often the same people keep winning.

@buzzedmedia_

“I’d never bet against Elon”

In finance, you see these cults spring up because coattail investing is a legitimate strategy. If some people really are much better than others at allocating capital, then following them is not insane. It is a shortcut.

But now the internet has generalized that model across the whole economy. Marketing, sales, manufacturing, startups, politics. The pitch is always slightly different, but the underlying offer is the same, attach yourself to me and I will carry you into a world you cannot enter alone.

@ahormozi

The message is directly linked to the messager

It’s Happening All Around You

And that is not just an internet phenomenon. It is not confined to gurus, founders, or billionaire cults. It is playing out all around you.

You may not be participating in it, but someone is.

A senior manager gets promoted, and the people he trusts rise with him too. That is one of the most common forms of this strategy. The manager does not want to walk into a bigger role surrounded by strangers. He wants people who already know how he thinks and what standards he actually enforces. Trust travels upward, and careers travel with it.

You see this constantly in sales. A star producer leaves one firm for another, and a cluster of his employees move with him.

During layoffs, this can matter more than competence. A person inside the right circle often survives not because he is the best, but who he is attached too.

The Political Pathology

That is why politics attracts such awful people.

Attachment rewards people who will deform themselves for proximity. It rewards dishonesty, flattery, and moral self-erasure.

In a normal organization, attachment is one path among others. In politics, it is the main one. No market test can save you. No independent scoreboard can rescue you. Power flows through proximity. So the people who rise fastest are often the ones most willing to suppress their judgment, absorb humiliation, and say or do whatever the patron demands.

And it carries them into jobs they never would have reached on ordinary merit.

Nick Adams is a good example of the type. He made himself into a public Trump loyalist and was nominated to be ambassador to Malaysia.

If you rise through a patron, you also borrow his fragility. Politics is full of people who attached themselves completely to one leader and then collapsed with him. The same strategy that carries them upward also leaves them exposed. But that is not the only danger. Dependence can also narrow your judgment, cap your independence, and slowly turn you into an extension of someone else’s will.

Every shortcut has risks.

A Very Old Strategy

This is one of the oldest strategies in the world. Rome had patronage and clientage. Medieval Europe had retainers and household men. Early modern courts had favorites, ministers, chamberlains, and advisers who rose by making themselves indispensable to princes and kings.

The most extreme version was the eunuch. In Byzantium, the Ottoman court, and imperial China, eunuchs controlled access to rulers, ran bureaucracies, commanded armies, and accumulated enormous power. They were useful because they could not found rival dynasties of their own. The castration was the price of admission, and for many, it was worth it.

The Sopranos shows the same strategy in modern form.

Silvio is the successful version. He rises by being useful, steady, and dependable. He does not try to rival Tony. He does not confuse proximity with independence. He makes himself necessary, which is the real source of subordinate power.

Christopher is the failed version. He gets close to power through favor, but he cannot turn favor into durable standing. He is too impulsive to be trusted and too dependent to stand alone. He cannot bear the humiliation built into the subordinate role, but he has no way out of it.

On Dating the Same Women

At elite levels, this is not controversial. Loyalty is a currency, and proximity to power becomes a credential in its own right. The problem is, the middle class is taught to think in terms of merit, credentials, and formal achievement. Elite life often runs more openly on trust, vetting, and social proof. It’s more Lindy that way.

There’s a reason you often see the same women move through overlapping circles of famous, rich, and powerful men. A woman who has navigated the inner circle of one powerful man signals that she is a low-chaos actor. She has been vetted by the only people whose opinions the powerful actually respect, their peers.

The Selection

For the vassal strategy to work, you need to know who to follow. You can just select the most prominent member in the field. That isn’t irrational.

But most people are not choosing between titans. They are choosing inside the organizations and communities they actually inhabit. The selection problem is local before it is global.

This means you should be looking for trajectory and not status. Status is a snapshot, a lagging indicator of past victories. Trajectory is the rate of change.

Women are great at this. It’s a misconception that women are just drawn to status. They sometimes are. But clever girls are drawn to trajectory.

A lot of female choice is really a bet on momentum.

That’s one reason some men end up in relationships with attractive women that do not seem to match their current status. She is betting on him.

This makes sense historically. Women had more reason to get this judgment right. Picking a man with no future could cost them a lot more. So they got good at reading trajectory.

They also tend to notice decline early. That is why some breakups seem to come out of nowhere for the man. To her, it has been obvious for a while.

Older societies too, took this kind of judgment much more seriously than we do today. There’s a whole courtier literature around these kind of questions. Machiavelli, Castiglione, and de Retz. That is why book The Art of Worldly Wisdom still feels so sharp. It came out of a world where survival depended on reading people correctly

If you are trying to spot trajectory early, there are usually a few signs you can notice. A man who is going nowhere rarely has enemies. Upward motion creates friction. It irritates rivals.

You can also see it in how he takes a hit. For the rising, a setback is often just part of the climb. He gets hit, but the motion remains.

Rising people also tend to look a little unfinished. Their current life has not fully caught up to their direction. If someone seems perfectly settled he may already have reached his ceiling.

What Do You Have to Offer?

Selection is only one part of this equation. After that comes the harder question, what do you have to offer in the relationship? Loyalty isn’t enough. There has to be some trait, some asset you can trade.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.