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The definition of this Age of Stupid: Musk as the world's first trillionaire

24 0
16.06.2026

Even if Elon Musk wasn’t Elon Musk, even if Elon Musk was a good and noble man, even if Elon Musk was a planetary exemplar of decency and morality, even if Elon Musk was a living saint, his status as the world’s first trillionaire would still remain a symbol of humanity’s corruption and degradation in the 21st century.

But he isn’t a good or noble man, he isn’t an exemplar of decency and morality. He’s about as far removed from being a living saint as it’s possible to be. He’s a dangerous man. A pitiless man. A man who believes empathy is a “weakness”. What passes for his heart, who knows, but it doesn’t beat to the rhythm of anyone I know.

Yesterday, the British Government had to announce laws to protect the young from Elon Musk’s X social media platform – a site which shared computer-generated child sexual abuse images. That’s how a trillionaire makes a trillion.

Nobody needs to be a trillionaire. Nobody should be a trillionaire. The average Brit earns about a million in their lifetime. It would take a million lifetimes to spend a trillion.

Picture a dollar on the ground. Now picture one trillion dollars beside it, rising 68,000 miles high, a quarter of the way to the moon. Around 8,200 children under five die daily from hunger. It costs 50 cents for the food needed to keep one child alive. How’s your arithmetic? Do the maths. Musk could all but wipe out world hunger personally.

Instead, some of his decisions are killing children. Musk was responsible for, as he put it, “feeding USAID into the wood-chipper”. USAID provided humanitarian aid globally. The Lancet – Britain’s leading medical journal –........

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