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Executive Summary

Twenty-first century corporate sovereignty is no longer about asset ownership—it's about permission-free operation. When ExxonMobil's Baytown refinery lost API access to GE Predix and AWS IoT, 95% energy self-sufficiency became worthless. The refinery could light itself, but it couldn't see.

I developed the ERC Index (Energetic-Robotic-Computational) to quantify sovereignty across four dimensions: Energy (30%), Robotics (30%), Algorithm (25%), Maintenance (15%).

Key findings:

• Tesla (69.5): Algorithm fortress (95) but energy eroding as AI loads explode from 50 MW to projected 500 MW while solar crawls from 20 to 30 MW
• BYD (74.75): Balanced redundancy with no catastrophic weakness
• Exxon (53.0): That 20 in algorithms collapses the 95 in energy

The weakest dimension dominates failure. Four hidden traps compound the challenge: pseudo-sovereignty (physical independence creating digital dependency), class blindspot (P90 workers burn 4.8× more energy than P10 workers yet P10 tasks get automated first), time trap (linear construction can't catch exponential AI demand), and carbon arbitrage ($87M/year saving by emitting 350K tons while reporting zero).

Corporate sovereignty redistributes power—but when firms gain it, workers whose tasks are "definable" lose definitional sovereignty.

The Morning Everything Stopped

Sarah Chen arrived at ExxonMobil's Baytown refinery at 6:47 AM on March 15, 2026. The sun was just breaking over the Gulf Coast, throwing a flat orange light across the maze of towers and pipes. Another routine shift at one of the world's largest petrochemical complexes—or so she thought.

She unlocked her workstation and opened GE Predix, the predictive maintenance platform that monitored 500 inspection robots patrolling the facility's 3,400-acre sprawl. The screen flashed red: API Access Denied – Account Suspended. Refresh. Same message. She checked the local network. Fine. VPN connection. Fine.

After twenty minutes on hold with GE's support line, a tired voice finally came on: "New export control regulations. Certain geographic zones have been reclassified. Legal needs to review your deployment. We're working through the queue."

No timeline. No escalation path. No exception.