He probably owns some root certs. Likely if he were to start exercising such authority without being an active developer, there would be a fork soon enough.
It happened with GCC. Today's GCC is actually a fork of the original, which became the "blessed" version once the forkers and RMS worked out resolved some issues that led to the fork.
The unforked (for lack of a better term) GCC was set aside, and the fork became the official version.
Isn't that what happened to emacs?