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democracy
Elon Musk Is the World's First Trillionaire—Let's Make Sure He's the Last
Musk’s trillion does not materialize from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidized, and that the public is now invited to applaud.
Jun 13, 2026
Elon Musk was set to become the world’s first trillionaire Friday after the public debut of his rocket and AI company, SpaceX.
Sit with that number for a moment. A trillion dollars. If you spent a million dollars every single day, it would take you 2,700 years to spend down a trillion. It is more than the entire GDP of Argentina or Nigeria. It is a figure so large that our brains are not really equipped to process it as a real thing.
According to Oxfam, 60% of billionaire wealth globally is not “earned” in any sense of the word that you or I would recognize, but derived from inheritance, monopoly power, or crony connections.
By UBS’s own count, the great wealth transfer is accelerating, with a record $297.8 billion passing to just 91 heirs in 2025. Musk’s own wealth did not surge through some new invention, but through a private-market revaluation of SpaceX and his AI company xAI, a paper merger that pushed his net worth from $500 billion to $800 billion in just four months.
The 1% have the money and, for now, control of the politics. The 99% have the majority, the moral case, and a growing refusal to be distracted from who is actually picking their pockets.
Tesla, the engine of much of his wealth, runs on public subsidy, tax incentives, and regulatory frameworks his own companies have spent years bending into shape. Musk’s trillion does not materialize from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidized, and that the public is now invited to applaud.
Earlier this year—while his companies held billions in government contracts—Musk played a role inside the US government running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE fired the regulators, hollowed out the agencies, and dismantled the oversight structures that might otherwise have asked awkward questions of his own companies.
A Yale model estimated Musk’s political activities cost Tesla between one million and 1.26 million US vehicle sales as furious Americans boycotted the electric car manufacturer. He took that hit and kept going, which tells you what the access was worth to him. This is regulatory capture as a business model, dressed up as a public service.
But this is not about one man and his excessive wealth. It is systemic, and the same pattern recurs across every region.
In South Africa, the Gupta brothers spent years so deeply embedded in former President Jacob Zuma’s government that a judicial commission concluded the state itself had been captured, with cabinet appointments and contracts steered to serve private interests.
In India, Gautam Adani built one of the world’s great fortunes in lockstep with his proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, winning state contracts and infrastructure concessions as his net worth soared, while those who called it crony capitalism were brushed aside.
In Mexico, Carlos Slim became one of the richest men on Earth almost overnight when the Salinas government privatized the state telephone monopoly and sold it to him, handing a public asset to a private fortune that has dominated the country’s telecoms ever since.
Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and where they do not hold office outright, they buy the people who do. When wealth concentrates at this velocity, democracy is revealed as a sham.
Meanwhile, the world that produced this wealth continues as it is. The World Inequality Report, drawing on the work of 200 researchers, found that the poorest half of humanity holds barely 2% of global wealth while fewer than 60,000 people at the very top control three times as much as that entire bottom half combined.
This context cannot be separated from the Musk wealth story. The systems that funnel money upward at unbelievable speed are the same systems that underfund public health, load poor countries with debt they cannot escape, and leave communities without the basics that governments once treated as obligations.
You will be told, as you always are, that taxing extreme wealth is complicated, that capital flees, that redistribution is a blunt and dangerous tool. These arguments are made by people who would be taxed more.
A wealth tax sufficient to fund universal healthcare and education across the Global South has been modeled, costed, and proposed repeatedly. The obstacle has never been the arithmetic. It has always been the politics, and the politics is owned by the people the tax would affect.
But here is what the first trillionaire does not want you to notice. Across the same world that produced Musk’s fortune, the 99% are organizing. Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker recorded more than 110 major anti-government protests across 70 countries in the last year. Most of them were powered by the same anger at the same rigged system.
Young people forced a tax climbdown in Kenya, brought down governments in Nepal and Madagascar, and took to the streets from Morocco to Indonesia demanding the rules be rewritten. They did it without trillion-dollar war chests. They did it themselves, alongside people like you and me, in solidarity, with an insistence that wealth concentration is not inevitable.
That movement is the counterweight to everything this moment represents. Billionaires are feeling the pressure. In May, Jeff Bezos went on CNBC to insist the tax system is crony capitalism, defend his peers against "vilification," and deny that the ultra rich avoid tax at all, the sound of a class that suddenly feels the need to argue its case in public.
Every wealth tax now argued seriously in a parliament, every billionaire levy being debated at the United Nations, every debt cancellation demand making it onto a government agenda arrived there because people organized and refused to accept the terms being set for them from above. The 1% have the money and, for now, control of the politics. The 99% have the majority, the moral case, and a growing refusal to be distracted from who is actually picking their pockets.
The 12 of June, 2026 may be the day the first trillionaire was officially minted, but it can also be the moment millions more people decide they have had enough.
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Democratic Lawmakers Condemn Trump Effort to 'Tip the Scales' in Colombia Election
"The future of Colombia must be decided by the Colombian people—not American politicians with their own agenda."
Jun 13, 2026
A group of Democratic members of the US Congress on Friday condemned President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers' attempts to influence the results of Colombia's upcoming presidential runoff, calling it an "insult" to the Colombian people's sovereignty.
"We see actions by US President Donald Trump and other members of Congress to endorse, advocate for, or otherwise tip the scales to a particular candidate as detrimental to the democratic rights of the Colombian people," said the lawmakers, led by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). "The future of Colombia must be decided by the Colombian people—not American politicians with their own agenda."
The statement came days after Trump publicly injected himself into Colombia's presidential contest by endorsing far-right candidate Abelardo De La Espriella, a 47-year-old defense lawyer who has pledged to "disembowel the left."
“The results of this Election are very important to the future of Colombia and its relationship to the United States,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post earlier this month. “Because of his tremendous accomplishments in life, and his political support for me, personally, it is my Honor to give Abelardo my Complete and Total Endorsement.”
The US president said that if De la Espriella wins, he "will have the total support and strength of the United States behind him."
The Center for Economic and Policy Research noted that "the implicit threat in Trump’s endorsement of De la Espriella is that Colombians will be punished—through reduced aid, tariffs, sanctions, etc.—if they vote for a political leader not backed by the United States."
Two Republican lawmakers, Rep. María Salazar of Florida and Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, have also endorsed De la Espriella. The New York Times reported that "before Mr. Trump posted his full-throated endorsement of Mr. De La Espriella, Mr. Moreno held a call with reporters in which he said US officials had 'vetted' Mr. De La Espriella and found him to be 'impeccable.'"
De la Espriella will face leftist Sen. Iván Cepeda, an ally of incumbent President Gustavo Petro, in the June 21 presidential runoff.
Petro has criticized his US counterpart for meddling in Colombia's presidential race, urging Trump in a recent social media post to "not intervene in the campaign and allow the people of Colombia to decide freely."
"Whoever wins will maintain the friendship of more than two centuries between Colombia and the US," Petro added.
Earlier this week, Petro planned to meet with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani during the Colombian leader's trip to the US, but "the Trump administration effectively nixed it in a behind-the-scenes effort," The Washington Post reported.
"The Colombian government quietly called off the event following a meeting between US and Colombian officials in Bogotá in which State Department officials made clear that this week’s engagement was unacceptable, a move Colombian officials interpreted as a threat to arrest Petro on site if he proceeded," the newspaper revealed. "A State Department official told The Washington Post that the visit would violate visa restrictions the US imposed against Petro following his comments last year criticizing US support of Israel’s war in Gaza and imploring US soldiers to disobey presidential orders to kill."
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US Citizens Must Stop the Madness Their Empire Imposes on Them and the World
Today, the United States has the opportunity to prove to itself and to the world that the mistakes committed by its government do not reflect the desires of the US people.
Jun 11, 2026
Since January 2026, when the intensification of US policies aimed at suffocating the Cuban people began, I have had the opportunity to travel to the island three times. Each time I return with my heart a little more broken, but also with a stronger conviction that we need to defend Cuba.
As a Mexican, I have received, on behalf of my compatriots, thousands of expressions of gratitude and hugs that the Cuban people send to the Mexican people. Every time I am there, I speak about the empathy and understanding we have toward Cuba, about the great efforts ordinary Mexicans make to bring a few kilos of rice to collection centers. And when I listen to Cubans, I learn a little more about the deep history that unites us.
But as a Mexican American and a binational activist, I also carry the weight of understanding the average US citizen. After many years of living in the United States, I continue to be surprised by how deeply the dream of democracy lives within people there, despite the fact that the country has been experiencing a deepening democratic crisis for years.
The deprivation imposed by Washington on the Cuban people for decades is now being reflected within the very core of the empire itself. It is suffered not only by migrants, Native Americans, Black communities, and the historically oppressed. Today, that same yoke has reached a white middle class that is beginning to feel the collapse of freedoms originally created for them.
Only the people of the United States—and no one else—can carry out the transformations their own country needs.
Fortunately, people in the United States can learn much here from Latin America—and Cuba in particular. They can learn from the region’s long history of struggle against Washington’s domination—and from the long construction of democratic processes from below that go far beyond just elections.
The resilience and social fabric the Cuban people have built are unique, just as unique as the oppression caused by the blockade the US government has maintained for all these decades. The United States needs public healthcare, free access to university education, and affordable housing. It needs to stop investing the billions it spends on war and instead invest that money in its own people. Cuba has done that.
The dream of democracy in any country is built beyond the ballot box alone, through projects that people themselves embrace and carry out. Today, the United States has the opportunity to prove to itself and to the world that the mistakes committed by its government do not reflect the desires of the US people. Today, as C. Wright Mills said 60 years ago, “Cuba’s voice must be heard in the United States, because the United States is too powerful and its responsibilities to the world and to itself are too great for its people not to hear the voices coming from the hungry world.”
The United States is preparing for another electoral cycle while its policies of war and interventionism throughout the Global South get reaffirmed.
At the same time, the island of 10 million inhabitants is preparing to continue resisting in the face of the possibility of an attack. In Cuba’s “Family Guide for Protection in Case of Military Aggression,” one can read recommendations for what to pack in a backpack: identification, a radio, candles, food, medicine, and toys to help distract children.
A recently published poll by the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank based in Washington, DC, reveals that more than 60% of US citizens oppose a war with Cuba. At the same time, solidarity networks with Cuba in the United States—which have existed since the beginning of the blockade—are reactivating with renewed strength.
But can US citizens truly stop the madness their own empire imposes on them and on the rest of the world? Let us hope so, because only the people of the United States—and no one else—can carry out the transformations their own country needs. Only then will Cuba, the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world be free.
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