CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Trillion-Dollar Alarm Bell

Elon Musk. Photo: Brazil Department of Communications.

Last week’s SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, despite the fact that the company has lost tens of billions of dollars since it was founded almost 25 years ago. Shares of the company climbed steadily after markets closed on Friday, pushing its market cap to $2.2 trillion. The public conversation about Musk’s vast wealth often obscures the fact that he is actually a very fancy welfare recipient, having taken billions of dollars from the public coffers by even the most conservative measures.

In reaction to the news, Oxfam America’s Nabil Ahmed said, “Elon Musk’s rise to trillionaire status marks a new pinnacle of oligarchy and a dark day for democracy. But this moment of dramatically concentrated wealth was not inevitable. Musk will be a government-backed trillionaire whose fortune was fueled by an era of regressive public policy choices — decisions rigged by a tiny few to fuel their fortunes, and overwhelmingly supported by political leaders.” Ahmed says that this development is a “trillion-dollar alarm bell” and he calls on governments to “address the inequality emergency.”

In a tweet last year, Jeff Bezos said something true that very few of the ultra-rich have been willing to acknowledge: “We do NOT have free markets today and have not had them for a very long time. In general, corporate subsidies and special interest tax breaks are great examples of where government interferes with free markets.” If one of the richest people in the world is ready to admit this, then maybe we should be too.

CNN’s Abby Phillip gave an entire segment of her show to this question, and not a single guest knew enough about our oligarchical political-economic system to raise the most obvious objection, to recognize that those opposed to the forced........

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