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Who is Alexander Muse
Personal Background
I was born at Portsmouth Naval Hospital during the Vietnam War, the son of a Navy officer who very nearly did not make it home. My father was a commander aboard the USS Biddle when, on July 19, 1972, five MiGs attacked the ship in two raids. Without authorization, he ordered his crew to fight back. At least two MiGs were shot down and the ship and carrier group survived. Had he waited for permission, there is a good chance I would have grown up without a father.
Because he lived, our family lived a life in motion. He later became a technology executive and his work took us all over the country, giving me a front row seat to different cultures, accents, ambitions, and ways of thinking. I attended three elementary schools, two middle schools, and three high schools from New England to the Deep South, an education that happened as much outside the classroom as inside it.
I studied history at the University of Texas at Austin and spent a short but formative stretch in the Marine Corps, an experience that taught me discipline, responsibility, and how to stay calm when things get loud. Afterward, I worked in telecom sales and by my late 20s, during the dot-com boom, I founded my first venture-backed company.
I have two children, who are the center of my life and the thing I am most proud of, one who finished his undergrad at the University of Michigan and is now living in New York City pursuing a PhD and the other a high school senior about to head off to Yale College in the fall.
Today, at 54, I am single, curious, and still shaped by the fact that everything I have exists because one man chose to act when it mattered most.
Act One
Technology Entrepreneur
My career began by spotting broken systems and refusing to accept them as normal. In the late 1990s, I worked at three companies that all depended on one another yet operated as if they were strangers: ICG, IXC, and BBN. ICG was a local phone company that needed access to IXC's long-distance network and BBN's internet backbone. IXC needed ICG's local fiber to reach business customers. BBN, the nation's first ISP, needed ICG to reach offices and IXC to move traffic between cities. Everyone needed everyone else, yet their networks were typically forced to interconnect inside the incumbent carrier's central office, often a competitor. The internet promised efficiency and openness, but at the physical layer it was anything but.
The solution was obvious. I built neutral data centers where carriers, ISPs, and network operators could interconnect directly on equal footing, paired with a simple buyer-pays model. I called the company LayerOne, a nod to the physical layer where the real friction lived. We raised millions in venture capital, scaled rapidly, and ultimately sold the company. LayerOne lives on today as part of Equinix.
It was my first company, but more importantly, it established the pattern that would define my work: find leverage points where infrastructure, incentives, and power intersect, then redesign them.
Act Two
Independent Publisher &
Public Affairs Strategist
That same instinct eventually pulled me out of technology and into public affairs. By the mid-2000s, it became clear that politics and media had their own version of the same problem I had seen in telecom: bottlenecks, gatekeepers, and misaligned incentives shaping outcomes behind the scenes.
Since 2007, I have built a reader-supported media operation publishing as amuse on π, focused on conservative ideas, sharp headlines, and original analysis at the intersection of politics, media, and power. The work often starts in short form, but its purpose is longer-term. Through daily longform essays, original reporting, and strategic analysis, I develop arguments meant to be used, not just consumed.
I distribute across π, email, and SMS, reaching more than 10 million Americans each month, with cumulative reach measured in billions of page views and hundreds of millions of video views.
The objective is not attention for its own sake, but impact: moving narratives, surfacing undercovered stories, and putting clear, actionable arguments in front of the people positioned to turn ideas into policy.
