The cult of Elon and more: Beyond the election, we still have these pesky billionaires
Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins the looming presidential election—and sadly, there is a good chance he will—we are still left with these billionaires, most of them extremely conservative, who will continue to back Trump and other politicians of MAGA orientation. They have so much power, and more money than any human should possess, and they will continue to pour money into making sure not only that repressive conservative agendas are enacted as law but also making sure the American populace is less educated, less financially secure, more malleable, and more willing to cede power and decision-making to those at the very top of the financial food chain.
The problem is that those billionaires generally aren’t all that well-versed in making decisions that are good for the economy or the general populace. Not that they want to do good, generally speaking. Most of them just want more and more—money, power, influence, etc.—and their aims are directly counter to the well-being of Americans who aren’t rich and powerful. They aren’t all stupid or ignorant—though a lot of them really are, skating by on inherited wealth that they built even bigger through rampant exploitation of workers and manipulations of the government—but almost every one of them lacks any really useful knowledge or skills to be guiding where the economy goes, or who is protected by law, or anything like that.
And perhaps the most glaring example of this is Elon Musk. He is positively venerated by millions of Americans, who swear he’s a genius and a visionary and not only deserves all that excessive wealth but also somehow deserves to be revered and honored and, yes, worshipped.
Never mind that he has never shown an ounce of genius. For all that his company Tesla has done, Musk didn’t create it. He bought it from the founders who did have knowledge and skill, and maybe genius. And he’s turned it into a bit of a travesty. Say what you will about Tesla’s past track record and SpaceX and anything else Musk controls, but then there’s the Cybertruck. Clearly his brainchild. Not in the sense that he developed it but that he wanted it made, and wanted it made in a way that is tacky, not useful, not reliable, and just—pointless. It’s a status symbol for those who think he’s a genius, and they defend that funky, messed-up, underperforming expensive vehicle because it is their idol and status symbol to connect them to the man they so revere. As Fortune magazine recently noted, his personal profile and his fame is largely why many investors own Tesla stock. It’s like people who throw money at dommes because of a financial domination fetish, but worse—because I’m all for supporting hard-working sex workers but not so much destructive and greedy uber-rich people.
It is unfortunately very common not just for conservatives but also moderates to say that rich people shouldn’t be taxed heavily—even though when the United States was at its peak in terms of growth and economy and the growth of a middle class—rich people were taxed very heavily. And yet because they were so rich, they continued to be rich nonetheless. But their taxes helped pay for U.S. growth and development. That’s not the case anymore, and it shows.
The thing is, people who worship Musk and the other ultra-rich talk like those people earned their wealth, when in fact what they did was exploit workers and consumers to get it, often with the help of government subsidies (as in the case of Musk in particular). No one can earn that kind of money; it can only come from underpaying workers, overcharging consumers, and dealing in financial shenanigans. No one is valuable enough, smart enough or worthy enough to “deserve” that level of obscene wealth.
And take Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now known as X). He ruined it. Not just in terms of quality or credibility but financially. Even his critics give him too much credit when they say that was his goal. Yes, it was his goal to stop Twitter from continuing to be a source of news that wasn’t covered in the mainstream media. Yes, it was his goal to stop it from being a place where activists and progressives could spark movements and organize. But he didn’t do anything smart. He simply elevated and protected Nazis and other right-wing menaces. If he were smart, he’d do something more like Mark Zuekerberg, who has twisted up Facebook’s algorithms to stifle news he doesn’t want people to see and to restrict the flow of posts by progressive people on the site. Or he’d own the most powerful retail operation around, Amazon, like Jeff Bezos, who also bought one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, The Washington Post (which also had to scuttle plans to run an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the opinion section at the orders of Bezos just two weeks before the election).
But Musk is not smart. Yet he is worshipped by a huge number of people in the country because he is so rich and, to them, somehow charismatic. It’s very cult-like, honestly. And recently Musk even bought a huge compound in Texas to have two of the three mothers of his children and their kids. Which sounds great on the surface to have your family all together, but still feels a bit cultish, kind of reminding me of a celebrity version of the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians back in the day.
Musk is so crass and obvious that he is giving away random $1 million dollar prizes to encourage people to support Trump, which seems pretty much against election law to me, Not to mention the more than $75 million in donations from his pro-Trump super PAC, which shows just how much this country no longer cares at the electoral level how much the rich are allowed to sway things away from the control of the voters at large and the average election contributor.
Too many of us put the rich on a pedestal and we’re basically just handing our fates over to an uncaring oligarchy that mostly supports the creation of an authoritarian state. Sounds a lot like Russia, doesn’t it? And that’s because that’s where things are headed.
No, the election is just a part of things. The cult of Elon Musk—the cult of worshipping the rich in general—is going to be our undoing if we don’t watch out. When a man as awkward, lacking in skills or knowledge, and so utterly lacking in any kind of obvious charisma can build such a huge cult following, we have a problem. I’ve said before that even the most progressive among you probably have people you are close to who support Trump and others like him in politics—and you need to try to reason with them. That might go double for people you are close to who think Elon Musk is some genius god. We have a lot of work ahead to deprogram those among us who give so much of their souls to billionaires and politicians like these—assuming we don’t end up in a dystopia ruled by Trump and his kin and cronies before then.