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elon musk
Trump, Musk, and the Age of the Super Asshole
The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men—and how horrible and cruel they are as people—is evidence of how far we’ve fallen.
Jun 15, 2026
Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.
To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.
Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.
Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books, and civilly liable for sexual abuse.
Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.
Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes "makes me smart." Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.
Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a "consoler-in-chief" in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)
Musk has stated that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength.
Both regard themselves as omnipotent and invincible. Both lash out verbally or physically at anyone who crosses them, often getting into raging disputes and fights.
To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.”
Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people.
In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years.
Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially-charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists;” his 2017 “Muslim ban;” his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever.
Both have fomented white nationalism abroad. Trump was an enthusiastic ally of Viktor Orbán, who saw Western civilization threatened by Muslim immigration into Europe. Many people in Trump’s circle continue to support and encourage leaders of the European far-right.
Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom—particularly in Belfast and London—Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous.”) In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.”
Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.”
Both Trump and Musk also have long histories of misogyny.
Throughout his business and political careers, Trump has frequently disparaged women, describing female opponents and journalists as “disgusting,” “slobs,” and “piggy.” He has a well-documented history of sexual aggression. A federal jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll, awarding her millions in damages. And he has appointed conservative judges instrumental in rulings that overturned long-standing reproductive rights.
Musk, too, has faced frequent claims of misogyny and sexism. Eight former SpaceX engineers filed a lawsuit detailing a pervasive “’Animal House’” culture — accusing Musk of creating a hostile environment, treating female employees as sexual objects, and retaliating when employees challenged his sexism. Separate reports have also emerged alleging that Musk engaged in inappropriate relationships and persistent advances toward employees, including asking them to bear his children.
Musk has 14 kids with different mothers, and talks about them as a “legion,” as in a Roman military unit. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he told one of his partners, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has frequently drawn ire for promoting a “bro culture” and mocking femininity. He sparked a major online debate by stating that “Instagram is for girls” and has repeatedly shared or amplified sexist theories and extremist content regarding traditional gender roles.
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The question, then, is why have two such loathsome men come to dominate America and much of the rest of the world at this point in history? Is there something about American capitalism or culture in the 21st century that has given both such extraordinary power?
Part of the answer, it seems to me, is a loss of our sense of common good — a decline of the role of public honor and public shame, and a disintegration of public morality — which has allowed, even encouraged, these two dangerous men to acquire such untrammeled wealth and power.
The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”— not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”
To be sure, the Gilded Age, which ran from the late 1880s to the 1910s, was dominated by a few extraordinarily wealthy men who violated social norms and monopolized the economy. “The public be damned,” said William Henry Vanderbilt, head of the New York Central Railroad.
But the reign of these “robber barons” ended when the American public — outraged by their abuses of wealth and power — rose up to demand reform and a return to the common good.
Subsequently, during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required that we work together for the common good. Many of us — both white and black Americans — were motivated to fight for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. And a sense of common good moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.
Yet the common good is no longer a fashionable idea. The phrase is rarely uttered today. It feels slightly corny and antiquated if not irrelevant. There is no longer any restraint on aggressive men (almost all of them men) using whatever means possible to accumulate vast wealth and power on a scale that exceeds even the Gilded Age.
This moral breakdown is not one of personal, private, religious morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality — in a broad understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. Trump and Musk exemplify that breakdown. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it.
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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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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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