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department of government efficiency
The World's First Trillionaire Is a Flashing Red Light for Democracy
Billionaires—and soon trillionaires as well—are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence our elections while working Americans struggle to afford food, housing, and healthcare; it’s clearer than ever that those two facts are connected.
Jun 28, 2026
The red emergency light is flashing on America’s democracy dashboard, like a damaged aircraft teetering toward a mountain. Elon Musk becoming the planet’s first trillionaire should make us tremble for the future of self-governing republics. It’s as if we’re bringing back modern pharaohs to dominate our societies.
Musk’s SpaceX company recently went public with a (probably inflated) market capitalization of $2 trillion. SpaceX’s IPO increased Musk’s net worth by an estimated $188 billion, and the stock’s first-day surge subsequently pushed his fortune to roughly $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.
The concern here isn’t with wealth per se. It’s the tremendous power of concentrated wealth to distort markets, politics, and society. When you have Musk’s level of wealth, you’re no longer just buying another mansion or private jet (of which he already has several). You’re buying a media outlet, a senator, and maybe, in the case of Musk, elevating a president.
Musk has no inhibitions about deploying the power of his considerable wealth. He bought Twitter, one of the public squares of our time, and transformed it into X, a partisan and disinformation platform rife with hate speech and extremism.
We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.
In the 2024 election cycle, he donated $291 million to President Donald Trump and Republican candidates, according to Open Secrets. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Mother Jones, “Musk expended 0.1% of his wealth in the process and got far more in return.” Mechanic notes “The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies.”
Musk was rewarded with a rogue government agency—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), named for a crypto meme coin Musk invested in—to advance a self-interested data grab and chainsawing away at government capacity. Public Citizen found that 70% of the agencies that were targeted by DOGE had conflicts of interest for Musk’s businesses. For example, Musk directed DOGE to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would have overseen X’s move to become a payment processor.
More dire still, DOGE cuts to USAID and other humanitarian aid programs have contributed to an estimated 750,000 lost lives. The projected deaths from these cuts run into the millions.
Musk was further rewarded with lucrative government contracts for SpaceX, Starlink, and other Musk-companies. In early 2025, The New York Times reported on a boost in multi-billion-dollar contracts for Musk’s companies as the Trump administration took power.
That was Musk as a “mere” centi-billionaire. What other power might Musk be able to wield as the world’s first trillionaire?
But it’s not just Musk. America’s 16 centi-billionaires (including Musk) have a combined wealth of $4 trillion. And the 977 billionaires on the Forbes US wealth list now own a combined $9.24 trillion, according to analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.
This isn’t a partisan concern. Whether it’s liberals like George Soros and Tom Steyer or right-wingers like Musk and Peter Thiel, this concentration of power and influence should trigger the flashing red light. It’s never a good thing for anyone to have the power of modern-day pharaohs. Musk was the top political donor in 2024, but five other billionaire households gave over $100 million to candidates.
Billionaires—and soon trillionaires as well—are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence our elections while working Americans struggle to afford food, housing, and healthcare. It’s clearer than ever that those two facts are connected. We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.
Oxfam observes Musk could give $100 to every person on Earth and remain one of the 10 richest people on the planet. A 10% wealth tax on Musk’s fortune alone, they estimate, could end global extreme poverty and lift 800 million people above the extreme poverty line. Imagine the revenue and investment possibilities of a global wealth tax on all billionaires.
The planet’s first trillionaire is not a sign of economic health. It’s an indicator of extreme inequality and the dangers of concentrated power.
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Trump Is the Vandal He's Been Looking For
President Donald Trump accuses vandals of sabotaging his efforts to refurbish the Reflecting Pool, but he and his administration are the ones sacking US democracy and its symbols.
Jun 23, 2026
“The pump don’t work ‘Cause the vandals took the handles.”—Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
Sometimes President Donald Trump’s diatribes reveal his own guilty behavior. Take his disastrous promotion of the makeover of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Not only did he hire an incompetent contractor whose prior work for Trump at Mar-a-Lago gave him the shady inside track, but also Trump’s insistence on an environmentally disastrous “royal blue” caused an increase in the amount of algae now polluting the pool. Perhaps it might be time to break out a new MAGA hat, all in green, with the words, “Make Algae Grow Again.”
Of course, neither Trump nor his buddy contractor would admit their malfeasance and responsibility for what has happened. Given Trump’s other corrupt vandalism of national sites in DC, why should we fleeced taxpayers and residents of the city expect accountability from such grifters? Instead, the predictable accusation by the Orange Menace is that vandals were the cause of the algae bloom. The real vandals, Trump and his enablers, were operating in plain sight and with presidential impunity.
Indeed, Trump’s vandalism has engulfed the White House and environs. From the destruction of the “Rose Garden” (heaven forbid that he would want to wake up and smell the roses) to leveling the East Wing for his ballroom and bunker (again, at the taxpayers’ expense), the wrecking of the grounds continues unabated. Added to this devastation was the garish Claw, erected for the UFC blood sport on the White House lawn. Oh, yeah, the lawn is gone. Perhaps to be replaced by what—a Circus Maximus!
As the decrepit old man occupying the White House tries to surround himself with imperial glitter and glory, his power is actually diminishing even as the damage, unfortunately, expands.
And speaking of Rome, the actual sacking of the city by the Vandals in 455 only lasted some two weeks. Trump’s pillaging of the federal government has lasted more than a year. While the most obvious physical vandalizing is very evident, buried in much of the legislation and executive orders is a massive amount of damage to people’s lives and the future of the country and the world.
Only now are we reckoning with the harm caused by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Hundreds of thousands thrown off Medicaid, children and families denied basic foodstuffs. Trump and his Republican allies apparently aren’t even interested in offering “bread” along with the circuses that Trump revels in.
Meanwhile, Trump’s insane pal at Health and Human Services, brain-worm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is sacking those doctors who believe in science in order to hire charlatans whose medicinal palliatives are hardly better than reading entrails. Eliminating tried and true medical practices, such as vaccines, has led to outbreaks of measles and will, undoubtedly, cause additional health problems.
And it should not be surprising that his toxic masculinist buddy, Pete Hegseth, the white Christian nationalist who occupies the office of the “Secretary of War,” now is overseeing a flu outbreak among the troops in the aftermath of making a vaccine “voluntary.” On the other hand, the 200-plus boaters murdered by Hegseth’s Pentagon pals in Latin America did not have the “luxury” of a choice about their well-being!
And speaking of well-being, the predictable worldwide deaths of people who relied on medical assistance from the United States was caused by DOGE’s slashing of international aide. Trump’s fellow vandal, the neo-Nazi Elon Musk, haughtily embraced such pillaging, seeing it as a way to extirpate empathy from any and all governmental policies.
Another fellow vandal on the world stage is Bibi Netanyahu. With the assistance of the US, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. (As the historian Tacitus reflected on the depredations of the Roman military campaigns: “They made a desert and called it peace.”) The devastation wrought by these two bullies has spread to Lebanon and Iran. However, these vandals may have overplayed their hand in Iran.
Finally, one of the most egregious examples of Trump’s vandalism is sending out legions of armed thugs to cause murder and mayhem on the streets of major cities around the country. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents harass, intimidate, and kidnap thousands of innocent people, sending many to prison hellholes built by the private corporate buddies of Trump.
As the decrepit old man occupying the White House tries to surround himself with imperial glitter and glory, his power is actually diminishing even as the damage, unfortunately, expands. Trump’s vandalism, and that of his enablers, will only be terminated when they are unceremoniously expelled to those islands of incarceration where others now languish.
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Trillionaire Elon Musk's Destruction of USAID Takes Food Aid From Millions Facing Deadly Hunger
"Now in its third consecutive year of famine, Sudan received nothing."
Jun 14, 2026
Elon Musk's vault to trillionaire status following the public debut of his rocket company SpaceX came on the heels of an analysis showing the devastating impact of his destruction of the US Agency for International Development on millions of people in countries facing or on the brink of famine.
The analysis, authored by Council on Foreign Relations expert and longtime aid worker Sam Vigersky, noted that Musk's targeting of USAID during his tenure as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) resulted in the transfer of the Food for Peace program to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), an agency "without international humanitarian or disaster-response expertise."
Vigersky found that the USDA this year chose just seven countries to receive American grain under the Food for Peace program: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, El Salvador, and Rwanda. The latter two countries, Vigersky noted, "do not meet an emergency threshold" for assistance.
"Meanwhile, the country facing the largest hunger crisis in the world—Sudan—did not make the list. Now in its third consecutive year of famine, Sudan received nothing. In fact, more than 40% of Sudan’s community kitchens, a lifeline for the displaced, have closed in the past six months as funding dried up, according to Islamic Relief," Vigersky reported. "Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Yemen were also passed over. Millions of people in those countries live one step from famine, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the UN-backed monitoring system that uses a standardized five-point scale (five being famine) to measure the severity of food insecurity."
Experts assessing the global impact of USAID's decimation at the hands of billionaire US President Donald Trump and the world's first trillionaire, who bragged publicly about "feeding USAID into the wood chipper," estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have already died as a result of the large-scale loss of humanitarian assistance—and millions more will die in the coming years if swift action is not taken to restore aid.
"The impacts of the cuts were immediate and tragic," Nicholas Enrich, a former USAID employee who became a whistleblower, wrote in The Boston Globe on Friday. "Health clinics and emergency ambulance services shuttered overnight. Clinical trials were deserted. Thousands of healthcare workers lost their jobs. Lifesaving food and medicine was left to expire in warehouses. According to conservative estimates, in the year since USAID was dismantled, 750,000 people have died as a result of the cuts. For the first time in a generation, more children died in one year — 2025—than in the previous year."
Oxfam has estimated that a 10% tax on Musk's $1 trillion fortune would generate enough revenue to end extreme poverty worldwide for a year.
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