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elon musk
Trump: An Instrument of the Age
He is the personification of a time when the evolution of capitalism institutionalizes class divisions, universally degrades morality, and threatens global extinction.
Sep 14, 2026
Donald Trump is an instrument of this age, a force propelling capitalism and the global economy into a critical stage of their historical development. Since the beginning of village life some 10,000 years ago, commerce among villages and rural economies intensified as cities emerged and over centuries forged trade networks across regions into a global system of commerce. At the same time, from the beginning of markets, traders, merchants, industries, and governments engaged in the struggle for control of local, regional, and inter-regional markets.
Today this struggle continues, but now with devastating consequences: the concentration of wealth on a global scale; the vast productive power and technological innovation; the multiplying flow of market-related information, and the explosive potential of artificial intelligence. Each of these factors is channeling private and public resources to elites, and spurring worldwide trade wars, technological dependency, and military confrontations that threaten humanity's survival.
No longer is it an intra-regional conflict between Greeks and Trojans over control of the grains produced in the basin of the Black Sea. Now it is a global conflict over control of international markets and supply chains, driven by the competition between transnational corporations and national governments over geopolitical objectives, a competition that is apocalyptically violent. And, at the head of the largest economic and military power is a pathological, impulsive, and phenomenally wealthy businessperson.
The emergence of Donald Trump is not wholly surprising in a global economy teetering on the edge of military annihilation and worldwide environmental collapse. He is the personification of a time when the evolution of capitalism institutionalizes class divisions, universally degrades morality, and threatens global extinction.
If citizens fail to contain the juggernaut of corporate-authoritarian forces unleashed in recent decades, our children will likely live in a wholly dystopian world.
Clearly, the global economy has reached a critical stage in the accumulation of wealth and its social impacts. Today transnational corporations have achieved historic levels of economic power and political influence throughout the world. But governments, with their enormous borrowing capacities and acquisition of capital through taxation, are a chief target for privatization of public wealth. They are the last bastion of enormous resources that concentrated private commercial interests need to overcome, to disarticulate the state in order to access the vast capital reserves that governments represent. Thus the virtually ineluctable privatization of government services from social programs to space exploration and military production proceeds unabated by social controls. Of course corporations and an elite class must retain tax revenues collected by governments while private corporations siphon off these resources through government contracts. As part of this privatization project, regulation of private entities and activities must be undermined. From the Department of Government Efficiency led by the world's richest individual to the edicts expunging from records the words and documents indicating that the direction of national priorities is misdirected and dangerous, the Trump administration is aggressively, relentlessly attacking any obstacle to privatization of public resources.
On one level none of this is new. The British East India Company in the 18th century controlled 80% of the trade from Asia to Europe and governed India with its private court system and army of 250,000. It used a portion of its wealth to buy parliamentarians responsible for its regulation. Today, however, the aggregate wealth and power of tech giants dwarfs that of the East India Company. According to Oxfam America, Elon Musk has more wealth than 46% (3.8 billion) of the world's population. He spent nearly $300 million to help Trump win the 2024 presidential election. Musk and other Big Tech companies—key tech, social media, and AI entities—spent $41.8 million in the second quarter of 2026 lobbying the government. Big Tech receives in excess of $45 billion in government contracts. The combined capitalization of the top five US tech companies is greater than the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 193 countries, trailing only the economic output of the United States and China.
The impact of such outrageous distortions in the global economy is wide-ranging. The convergence of private business interests and money with public policy and governance breeds corruption. Trump reported $2 billion in income in the first year of his second term, tripling the income he reported in the previous year. Much of Trump's new wealth comes from cryptocurrency, a business field in which Trump's family is deeply invested, taking in $1.4 billion through its cryptocurrency ventures in just one year. At the same time, Trump is engaged in the wholesale deregulation of digital assets like cryptocurrency. He disbanded the Biden-era National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, directing the Justice Department to end its enforcement of regulatory violations and to close all ongoing investigations. He directed Attorney General Todd Blanche to refrain from charging violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and to end charging violations of the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Commodity Exchange Act.
According to the American Bar Association, the lack of corporate regulation subverts democracy: “These transactions—ranging from donor-driven federal appointments to dropped investigations, lucrative business deals, and foreign gifts—have enriched Trump and his allies while undermining long-standing ethical norms and public trust in democratic institutions.” Another instance of a proposed initiative that is blatantly unethical, anti-democratic, and politically corrupt is the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to reward Trump's political allies including the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2020.
The development of corporate capitalism has always been anti-democratic to one degree or another. Private boards of elite shareholders decide corporate policy and virtually all decisions are aimed at increasing profits. Corporate elite have historically fought against workers' organized power. The corruption and assumption of executive power at the center of the current American government reflect the intrusion of rank corporate values and ethos central to modern markets. Donald Trump runs the presidential office as a mafia organization with a pay-for-play ethos, the raw corruption expected when corporate elite are untethered from social supervision and management. As corporate policies and investments become existential threats, they cannot afford a citizenry awakened to the catastrophic direction of the American and global economy.
Desperate to continue profiting from a degraded natural and social environment, those with the most resources work to keep the truth about looming disasters from influencing public discourse. Trump is the harbinger of a totalitarian state that is the likely outcome of unregulated corporate investment and planning, one in which the flow of information must be managed. So, he attacks the media and censors reports and even words and phrases that are based in research and backed by skeins of evidence. To ensure authority over information flow, Trump values loyalty as the fundamental qualification of his appointees. Attorney General Todd Blanche exemplifies just how corrupted executive appointments throughout the administrative agencies and cabinet-level departments actually have become. As with other presidential nominees and appointments, Blanche was obviously selected for his fealty to Donald Trump. Just how much he identifies with supporting the president was revealed in a hearing for his confirmation in the Senate. While being questioned by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) about his relationship to Trump, Blanche stated, "I'm his lawyer—was his lawyer," before correcting himself, saying that he was now the deputy attorney general.
The ongoing general attack on American democracy stems directly from the presidential office and his friends in business. The impunity with which Trump aggrandizes himself through specious, if not illegal, projects is clearly a wide-ranging assault on citizens' rights to democratic decision-making theoretically safeguarded by the US Constitution. The decision to destroy the East Wing of the White House and construct a ballroom is one example. Numerous other projects dismissive of congressional approval also exist. To list just a few: planning an 'Arc of Trump'; adding his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with only the approval of his hand-picked board; negotiating no-bid contracts such as the one repainting the Reflecting Pool; receiving a luxuriously outfitted plane from a foreign government. These are examples of his many mundane acts of corruption. More far-reaching and pernicious anti-democratic actions also abound: expending American lives and resources in wars with Iran and supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza; instituting universally costly tariffs; restricting and censoring public reports on various issues affecting the health and livelihood of Americans everywhere; abducting—even killing—immigrants to achieve quotas of deportation without legal recourse; and on and on.
One of the most egregious assaults on democracy is the proposed proliferation of data centers. It reveals how insidious the march toward corporate elite dominance actually is. Polls indicate that 80% of Americans oppose the construction of data centers yet Trump supports Big Tech's drive to establish data centers across the country. Data centers are environmental and human health disasters. Not only do they tax the electrical grid and use unsustainable amounts of water, through massive data collection and deep analysis they also have the very real potential to construct a totalitarian state through government contracts in which algorithms of artificial intelligence are applied in projects ranging from facial recognition to autonomous military and police personnel. Without democratic control of industry and governance, the power of Big Tech to control our lives into the future presents a rapidly escalating existential threat.
At this stage in the historical evolution of capitalism it is the people who must resist being alienated from their own governance, from the power to construct a sustainable economy and to restore their responsibility to each other and the environment. If citizens fail to contain the juggernaut of corporate-authoritarian forces unleashed in recent decades, our children will likely live in a wholly dystopian world. But it doesn't have to be that way. Organized and sustained political protests, progressive reform movements, and mass mobilizations have saved the nation and other nations from the worst excesses and transgressions of powerful elites and their destructive capitalist practices and designs.
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Doctors Without Borders Says Trump Aid Cuts Fueling Humanitarian Catastrophe in Sudan
"War is driving Sudan’s needs; funding cuts are shrinking the response."
Sep 08, 2026
The renowned humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday that the Trump administration's destruction of the US Agency for International Development has contributed to the collapse of the war-torn nation's healthcare system, forcing clinics to close and leaving millions of people without access to lifesaving treatment.
The organization, known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said the closure of USAID last year at the behest of President Donald Trump and the world's richest man, Elon Musk, left many healthcare providers in Sudan "unable to find alternative funding to continue providing services," leaving facilities with no option but to shut down in the midst of a worsening humanitarian catastrophe.
"War is driving Sudan’s needs; funding cuts are shrinking the response,” Muhammad Ibrahim, MSF's head of mission in Sudan, said in a statement on Tuesday. “MSF’s work in Sudan is privately funded. But when funding disappears from other health services, clinics close, patients have fewer places to go, and pressure shifts to the facilities that remain, including ours.”
MSF said its hospital in Um Rakuba, a refugee camp in eastern Sudan, is now "the only lifeline left" for locals and refugees.
"The cuts here go well beyond healthcare," emphasized Fabrizio Locuratolo, MSF humanitarian affairs manager. "Food rations are shrinking and protection programs are being dismantled, pulling away the last safety nets and leaving refugees completely exposed.”
The dismantling of USAID by Musk's wrecking crew at the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency has already killed hundreds of thousands of people—most of them children—according to experts tracking the impacts on humanitarian aid around the world. Musk and the Trump administration have continued to deny that the aid cuts have killed any children.
A study published in The Lancet earlier this year estimated that the gutting of USAID—whose surviving programs were mostly transferred to the US State Department—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by the end of the decade. The US Department of Agriculture took over USAID's Food for Peace program—and subsequently omitted Sudan from the list of countries that would receive shipments of US grain.
MSF said Tuesday that "just as health providers faced the impending removal of US support, many European governments also reduced their assistance to people in Sudan."
The results have been horrific. MSF said that "malaria and malnutrition cases are already rising despite limited rainfall, ahead of the peak of the rainy season—and we expect numbers to increase as the rain intensifies."
"In August, our teams admitted 191 children under five with severe malnutrition to our inpatient feeding center, and nearly 22% also tested positive for malaria," the group said Tuesday. "The UN reports that 825,000 children under five are expected to suffer severe acute malnutrition and 19.5 million people faced crisis-level hunger earlier this year. Yet the UN’s $2.87 billion response plan is barely 41 per cent funded, and 37 per cent of Sudan’s health facilities are estimated to be completely out of service."
"As world leaders gather at the UN General Assembly, governments and institutional donors must protect funding for essential health services in Sudan and provide flexible transitional financing where facilities are at risk of closure," the organization pleaded.
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Far-Right Alternative for Germany Thanks Elon Musk After Regional Election Win
"The far-right rampage is not slowing down, but accelerating instead."
Sep 07, 2026
The far-right Alternative for Germany party thanked the world's richest man, Elon Musk, after decisively winning a key regional election on Sunday, sparking alarm across Europe and around the globe.
Ulrich Siegmund, AfD's lead candidate in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, praised Musk—who has openly advocated for the far-right, xenophobic party—for his support and "clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time—including here in Germany." Siegmund wrote that if AfD ends up leading the state government, the party "would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation," adding that "Germany would once again be a place worth investing in."
Siegmund's post on the social media platform X, which Musk owns, came after AfD won just over 44% of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt election, trouncing the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz. CDU finished a distant second with 17.1% of the vote.
"Well done!" Musk wrote, in German, following AfD's election win. The mega-billionaire has called AfD "the only hope for Germany."
US President Donald Trump, a political ally of Musk, posted to Truth Social a screenshot of exit polls showing AfD leading the regional election on Sunday afternoon.
"Leave it to Trump to celebrate the victory of a far-right German party that shows sympathy for the Nazis, downplays the Holocaust, and flirts with Putin," Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote on social media in response to the US president.
The Associated Press noted that "to win an absolute majority, AfD needed to clinch 42 of the 83 seats in the state parliament, but the party appeared on track to win 39. Depending on the ultimate make-up of parliament, it could still end up leading the state government." Siegmund would be the first far-right leader to govern a German state since 1945.
But other German parties have refused to work with AfD, raising doubts about its ability to form a government in Saxony-Anhalt, which has a population of around 2.1 million people.
David Adler, co-general coordinator of the Progressive International, wrote that the election "sent a clear message, to Germany as to all of Europe, that the far-right rampage is not slowing down, but accelerating instead."
AfD focuses heavily on immigration, vowing "deportation from minute one" and calling for abolition of "the fundamental right to asylum."
"In addition to deporting immigrants, the party has proposed cutting funding for public broadcasters, banning gay pride flags in schools, and teaching more Russian, as well as tax breaks for large families and free childcare," The New York Times reported. The newspaper noted that Siegmund declined to condemn supporters who "chanted his surname... in the style of the Nazi salute, 'Sieg Heil.'"
European officials voiced deep concern about AfD's surge in the regional election, with France's Europe minister calling the results "a serious moment."
"Nationalism and xenophobia will never be a solution," said Benjamin Haddad. "We must listen with humility to the anger, the concerns, the fears, and respond to them. We cannot forget our history. That is the meaning behind the choices made by France and Germany.”
Spanish Julen Bollain wrote on social media that "the far-right is managing to turn discontent, economic insecurity, and disaffection into votes."
"AfD is doing something that should especially worry the left: transforming precarity, frustration, and disaffection into political identity and votes," Bollain added. "And if we don't manage to give a collective response to the existing social discontent, someone always shows up ready to turn it into fear, hate, and scapegoats. And there they beat us, because they move like fish in water."
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'We Don't Have to Let It Happen': Casar Says Progressives Must Fight AI Oligarchs' 'Dystopic' Vision
"We know that they are trying to get rid of a huge number of people's jobs."
Sep 06, 2026
The chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Sunday urged Americans to push back on the vision of the future being presented by the oligarchs who run the artificial intelligence industry.
In an interview with MeidasTouch, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) addressed the backlash against Big Tech, which has included a nationwide movement to oppose the construction of AI data centers.
"Everyday folks right now, they're pissed," said Casar, who last week joined with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to introduce legislation to ban AI models capable of surpassing human cognition. "They know [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman is not actually out there to help you... We know that they are trying to get rid of a huge number of people's jobs."
Casar: And then in Silicon Valley, basically their policy proposal is that they will give out a little bit of UBI to make that high unemployment rate more tolerable. I see that as a bad idea. Going towards 10 or 20% unemployment, just so these guys could be super rich, is… pic.twitter.com/AUIezlGZK3
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 6, 2026
Casar then mocked the remedy to mass joblessness being pitched by tech titans like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has proposed a universal basic income (UBI) program.
"In Silicon Valley, basically their policy proposal... is that they will give out a little bit of UBI to make that high unemployment rate more tolerable," he said. "I see that as a bad idea. Of course, everybody getting a little bit of money could be a good thing. Yeah, people being able to work fewer hours is, of course, a good thing. But going toward 10%, 20% unemployment just so these guys can be super rich is completely dystopic."
Casar emphasized that, despite tech industry claims, there is nothing inevitable about their plans to profit by putting millions of people out of work.
"We don't have to let it happen," he said. "Just look at our history from over 100 years ago: You had the Gilded Age, you had a few of these robber barons who tried to get all the money, capture the government, buy the presidency... And then people woke up, fought back."
"We have to be headed on a path," Casar continued, "where we reclaim our power, as a democracy, as people."
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The Blessings of Wendell Berry in a World Cursed by Men Like Elon Musk
Musk indulges in the kind of fantasy that drove Berry to distraction (and to work)—all about control and domination, all done by the few to the many, utterly ignorant of context. Immodest in every way.
Sep 01, 2026
Wendell Berry, who died Monday at the age of 92, was such a great man that I hardly know where to start. He was on the very short list of the best writers of our time: His essays on rural America were the words that launched 10,000 farmers markets; his poems, the staple of many happy weddings (and I’ve peed in a dozen different bathrooms where the Manifesto of the Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front was framed above the toilet). If you’ve never read his short stories of the Port William Membership, or his finest novel, Jayber Crow, you can count yourself lucky that you’ll get to encounter them for the first time.
Berry was also, of course, politically engaged. I remember standing with him 20 years ago, at a protest against the Capitol Hill power plant that I’d asked him to attend. It was a bitterly cold day, and at one point he turned to me and smiled and said, "Do you think maybe they’ll arrest us soon?" He didn’t particularly like movements, but he understood the power of moral witness; he occupied the Kentucky governor’s office, in a protest against mountaintop removal coal mining, with a toothbrush and volume of Shakespeare in his pocket.
And, perhaps above all, his life was a work of both art and politics—his decision to give up a New York lit’ry career and to return instead to the Kentucky of his boyhood, settling along the Ohio River where he and his wife Tanya farmed and he wrote, embodying the commitment to place and community that animated his writing. (His family is asking that in lieu of flowers people might send a donation to the Berry Center that is carrying on his agrarian work).
I was very lucky that my wife handed me a copy of his essay collection Home Economics about 40 years ago, when we were still courting. If I hadn’t fallen under his spell I’m not sure I would have spent my life in rural America, red state and blue; I know that he taught me how to see my town and my county, and my country and my species, in new-old ways that have undergirded all my work. And I’m very glad that we became friends, visiting and writing back and forth. His droll good humor rarely faltered, in my experience. I did not agree with him at all times, nor he with me—though he had solar panels behind his house, for instance, he didn’t think they belonged on farmland, while I think they’re a boon to both farmer and planet. But we agreed on most things of real dimension, and I was always delighted to see in the mailbox a letter with the return address of Port Royal Kentucky. He was one of the last people with whom I had a true written, as opposed to electronic, correspondence. Sometimes he’d tap things out on a manual typewriter, but more often it would be in pencil, on lined yellow paper.
The most recent arrived in July, and after news about grandsons and granddaughters it contained his newest discovery, a 1940 volume titled Stops, A Handbook for Those Who Know Their Punctuation and Those Who Aren’t Quite Sure. He was recommending it to me on the grounds that it is the “only book of my acquaintance that makes grammar delightful,” but also because he’d noted that it was published by the press (now defunct) at Middlebury College, where I teach. So while the rest of us were figuring out how to enlist Claude to help with our composition, one of the best writers of our age was still enjoying sharpening his prose, just as he enjoyed sharpening the tools of his work in field and forest. “I’m writing this on the porch of the ‘camp house,’ still unwired, built, I think, in 1964, in the woods between the river and the road.” He died on that farm on Monday, surrounded by family.
I got the news about his passing even as I was trying to grapple with the latest from a man who will attract more notice when he dies, but less affection. Elon Musk is always advancing his own vision of the world, of course—in fact, he’s just pledged to spend $100 million helping Republicans this fall. Or maybe $200 million—neither would be a noticeable sum to a trillionaire, of course. Whatever good he did with his early advocacy for electric vehicles has now been undone 100 times over with his advocacy for the people who hate EVs and all the other things we need. (He’s, as of last week, building gas turbines to make more electricity for his right-wing Grok AI project, already polluting the air of Black neighborhoods in Memphis).
He offers the Nazi salute; we are at his behest settling thousands of refugees from white South Africa (and no others) in our country; his rancid racism has destroyed Twitter. It would be a pleasure never to think of him again, but because he’s the richest man in the world, one has to monitor what he says. And here’s Monday’s installment, from of course his own social media site:
Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them.
Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.
The disingenuousness of this is remarkable. Extremely severe extinction events have indeed happened just five times in the last half-billion years, which means it would be extremely unlikely we’d spontaneously come across one any time soon: Human civilization is, after all, just 10,000 years old. And yet of course we face one, not because of anything nature has done, but because we’ve filled the air with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, which his allies wish to continue indefinitely. “Just switching to sustainable energy” is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that, but since he’s a part of the political movement against this idea, he is now backing an alternative: “space satellites to control temperature,” which he further explains will be accomplished by a “super-intelligent swarm” of “sentient satellites, launched into Earth-Sun Lagrange points by mass drivers on the Moon.”
This is the kind of fantasy that drove Berry to distraction (and to work)—all about control and domination, all done by the few to the many, utterly ignorant of context. Immodest in every way.
But in Musk’s case it was accompanied by another revelation that began to emerge over the weekend. It turns out that the human toll of the horrific rampaging floods on the Nepal-Tibet border may well have been exacerbated by Musk’s decision to destroy the US Agency for International Development early in the DOGE assault on our government. USAID, in collaboration with NASA, helped maintain a network of monitors high in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Musk, in February 2025, “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” One casualty was apparently this network. As Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw America’s response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake, wrote this weekend on (ironically) X:
DOGE famously used keyword searches for terms like "climate" to terminate federal grants. Among the victims: a collab between USAID and NASA for flood prediction, early warning, disaster readiness, glacier inventories, and mapping dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal.
As Konyndyk added:
Could these programs have helped foresee or mitigate this week's glacial flooding catastrophe? Hard to say with an outlier event like this. But that was their purpose.
Sadly, it's hard to anticipate or mitigate climate hazards which your ideology has decreed do not exist.
Musk’s victims already number in the millions—a Lancet study predicts 14 million by 2030 as the indirect results of shutting down America’s humanitarian work, which puts him up there in the Stalin-Mao category, and almost certainly the most deadly human of this millennium. So maybe a few thousand more people hardly matter.
But contrast what Musk did with the actions of a principal at a school along the river. When a friend upstream phoned one of his teachers a blurted warning, he immediately evacuated the entire student body, saving at least 900 lives. Given a warning, he acted (precisely what the world has not done with climate change). “I thought that even if the warning turned out to be wrong, the worst it would cost us was one day of study,” Rajendra Dawadi said. “But taking it lightly could mean the loss of hundreds of lives.”
Principal Dawadi will spend the rest of his life going to the weddings of the students whose lives he saved, and I imagine there will be no small number of babies named in his honor. Elon Musk’s name will be cursed—the richest man in human history, who used his wealth and power to kill the most vulnerable people on the planet.
Here is a recent poem of Wendell Berry’s, published in The New Yorker less than a year ago and titled "The Loved Ones":
The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.
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Busting CEO Pay Curve in 2025, Musk Made Annual Salary of Average Tesla Worker Every 4.2 Seconds
The AFL-CIO report also points out that "a majority of S&P 500 CEOs made more in one day than the median US worker made in one year."
Aug 13, 2026
"Failed trillionaire" Elon Musk's $158 billion pay package at Tesla was so high that it "broke the CEO pay curve," as the nation's largest federation of labor unions underscored on Thursday in its annual report about chief executive pay.
"Including Musk, S&P 500 CEOs received $340.1 million on average in 2025, about a 1,700% increase over the previous year," explains the AFL-CIO's latest "Executive Paywatch" report. "Excluding Musk's Tesla pay package, the average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased 21%, from $18.9 million in 2024 to $22.8 million in 2025."
"The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio across S&P 500 Index companies was 5,387-to-1 in 2025. Musk's total compensation at Tesla was 2,522,203 times the median Tesla employee's pay in 2025," the publication continues. "Excluding Musk, the average pay ratio of S&P 500 companies increased from 285-to-1 in 2024 to 312-to-1 in 2025."
Musk became the world's first trillionaire in June, after another company for which he serves as CEO, SpaceX, went public—but as of Thursday afternoon, his net worth was estimated at around $880 billion, according to the Bloomberg and Forbes billionaire lists.
The AFL-CIO report spotlights the wealth of the world's richest man, noting that last year "Elon Musk received the median Tesla worker's pay every 4.23 seconds—less time than it takes to read this sentence," but it also stresses that he's far from alone in making exorbitant amounts of money compared with the wages of workers at the companies he leads.
"As shown in our latest Paywatch report, executive compensation has reached a new, shameful high," said AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Fred Redmond in a statement. The report points out that "a majority of S&P 500 CEOs made more in one day than the median US worker made in one year."
"Excessive CEO compensation contributes to growing economic inequality," the document says. "It creates the risk that CEOs will make short-term decisions to maximize their pay, even if it hurts the company's long-term health. And it's simply unfair to the workers whose labor generates the profit these CEOs capitalize on."
Our new Executive Paywatch report is here, and - spoiler alert - greedy CEOs are making even MORE.Top CEOs made 312x what workers make and took home an average of $22.8 MILLION per YEAR in total compensation.Read our full Paywatch report here: Aflcio.org/paywatch
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— AFL-CIO (@aflcio.org) August 13, 2026 at 12:35 PM
AFL-CIO found that the biggest ratio for executive v. worker pay was in manufacturing: Average executive compensation—which often includes not only a salary but also a bonus, stock, a retirement plan, and more—topped $696 million a year, while the typical worker made just over $93,000.
By sector, the second-highest was in arts, entertainment, and recreation, where executives were paid over $24 million while the median worker got just $24,850 annually. In educational services, average executive pay was around $50 million while workers were paid under $58,000.
The report emphasizes that like the CEOs, "2025 also was a very good year" for President Donald Trump, who returned to office in January and, according to recent federal disclosure forms, pocketed at least $2.2 billion last year—which, as the AFL-CIO found, was "a nearly 254% increase from what he received in 2024."
"Trump's 2025 receipts included $1.4 billion from the sale of $TRUMP memecoins and World Liberty Financial, his family's cryptocurrency business," the report says. "The median US worker would need to work 43,154 years to earn what Trump received in 2025."
16% of adults can’t pay all their bills in full.26% skipped medical care due to cost.23% of renters fell behind on rent in the last year.Meanwhile, CEO pay is exploding. Let’s call this what it is: greed.Learn more in our Executive Paywatch report: Aflcio.org/paywatch
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— AFL-CIO (@aflcio.org) August 13, 2026 at 2:15 PM
While gutting the federal government with help from Musk, Trump last year signed the GOP's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cutting programs for working people to give billionaires more tax breaks—and Wednesday's release of the latest inflation figures highlighted how Americans continue to struggle with the cost of gasoline, groceries, healthcare, housing, and more.
Redmond said that "Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire. Donald Trump raked in over $2 billion since the 2024 election. Meanwhile, working Americans are struggling to feed their kids and pay their electric bills. But there's a better economy we can build for working people."
"That's why the labor movement will continue to fight for every worker to have a union contract that begins to level the playing field and ensures they take home the share of the profit they create," he added. "And it's why we are spending every day until November organizing and mobilizing 16 million union voters to elect pro-worker politicians who will work for us, not wealthy CEOs."
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Trump Admin Permanently Guts Law 'Designed to Stop Criminals from Laundering Money' After Push From Elon Musk
“Trump is making it easier for cartels, criminals, and US adversaries to abuse our financial system," said Sen. Andy Kim. "Because he’s in the pocket of billionaires like Elon Musk, who’d potentially benefit."
Aug 13, 2026
Critics are warning that the Trump administration just made financial crimes a lot easier to commit by permanently gutting a law that prevented criminals from using shell companies to obscure their activities. Elon Musk may benefit.
On Tuesday, the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a final rule permanently exempting US individuals and companies from a section of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) requiring them to identify the true owners of opaque companies.
The law, which passed in 2020, was ironically introduced and championed by then-US Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is now President Donald Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser.
At the time, Rubio called the law—which he introduced with Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)—"the most significant anti-corruption and money laundering law in decades."
But Republicans have since pushed to repeal the legislation, which Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) referred to as "big government overreach."
With Republicans in Congress unable to muster the votes to reverse it legislatively, the Trump administration has effectively killed the law by weakening Treasury Department policy. In March 2025, Treasury adopted an interim rule exempting US companies from its requirements.
Plans for a rule change were announced by Treasury less than 24 hours after the SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Musk—who was then leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—commented on his social media platform X that he would “look into” the statute in response to a right-wing comedian who'd complained about it.
According to a May report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, more than 99% of entities previously required to report under the law were now exempt. That exemption was made permanent this week.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it was "a victory for common sense and American small businesses" and called the reporting requirements "burdensome... for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security.”
Nelson Bunn, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said the exact opposite was true.
"By exempting domestic entities and owners from reporting, FinCEN has significantly hindered prosecutors’ ability to identify the bad actors from legitimate businesses when investigating US shell companies used by transnational cartels, human traffickers, and cyberscammers,” Bunn said. "Taking away this indispensable tool for law enforcement endangers American families and communities.”
The change is drawing outrage from Democrats and some Republicans. In a statement on Thursday, Whitehouse and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said the rule change "undermines the clear intent of the law."
"The act gave the federal government needed tools to address criminal activity like human trafficking, terrorist financing, drug distribution, sanctions evasion, and more without unduly burdening legitimate commercial entities," they said. "This decision is an unfortunate one that fails to use all available tools to protect Americans and crack down on illicit financial schemes.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, highlighted that the committee's previous oversight found the rollback would likely hamper efforts to stop a host of bad actors.
These included Chinese money-laundering networks that have been used to funnel proceeds to drug cartels, fraudsters using opaque ownership to rip off federal grants and benefits, and a Venezuelan national who allegedly used shell companies to hide over $1 billion in cryptocurrency transactions.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said the law was “designed to stop criminals from laundering money, and Trump and Secretary Bessent are violating the Constitution to gut it,” and in doing so, “intentionally facilitating corruption and crime.”
In a letter sent to Bessent in March 2026, Warren and other Democratic lawmakers noted that Musk himself would be a direct beneficiary of the rule change, since he "uses a network of dozens of secretive companies—potentially the type of entities that, under the CTA, are required to report ownership information to the Treasury Department."
The New York Times found that in Texas alone, there are over 90 different companies and other legal entities tied to Musk, with others in California, Delaware, and Nevada, which he has used to buy property, structure business deals, hold assets, and pay for political activity—including more than $80 million in super political action committee spending to support Trump in 2024—without putting his own name on the transactions.
"Trump is making it easier for cartels, criminals, and US adversaries to abuse our financial system and harm Americans," said Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ). "Why? Because he’s in the pocket of billionaires like Elon Musk, who’d potentially benefit from his shady and corrupt actions."
Warren said: "Secretary Bessent should reverse this decision. And he needs to testify in front of this Committee to explain why he’s putting American national security at risk.”
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Troy Jackson Slams 'Failed Trillionaire Elon Musk' as Billionaires Dump Millions Into Maine US Senate Race
"They're scared of a movement that demands Medicare for All, prescription drug coverage, and a government that everyday people can be proud of and know works for them."
Aug 13, 2026
Troy Jackson, the Maine Democrat running to unseat Republican US Sen. Susan Collins in November, took aim at Elon Musk and other billionaires Wednesday evening for supporting his GOP opponent directly or through a key super political action committee.
"Look, the billionaires in the country know whose side they're on, and it's not ours," Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, said in a brief video shared on social media, including Musk's platform X.
Jackson—chosen as the Democratic nominee via a convention process last month, after primary winner Graham Platner left the race following a rape allegation that he denied—pointed to a $42 million investment in the contest from the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), whose backers include Musk and various other right-wing megadonors.
"They're here to prop up Susan Collins because they want her to continue to be a rubber stamp and get their income tax cuts," Jackson said. "They're already out with an ad attacking me and my family, to try and make sure that they totally don't talk about the issues."
SLF's 30-second ad, which launched Wednesday, notes his son's lobbying work and smears Jackson as "another dirty politician."
According to Jackson: "They're scared of a movement that goes against the things that they want. They're scared of a movement that demands Medicare for All, prescription drug coverage, and a government that everyday people can be proud of and know works for them."
Wednesday isn't the first time Jackson—who previously ran for governor—has called out billionaires, specifically Musk. After The New York Times reported last month that through his America PAC, Musk intends to spend up to $120 million on a program to help elect Republicans in at least eight states, including Maine, Jackson released a video stressing that the billionaire "doesn't care about us. Really doesn't care about Susan. He cares about him."
"So I would say to you Elon: Maine and really the whole United States doesn't want your dirty money in our politics," Jackson continued. "You don't get to buy the government that you want. This is about all of us coming together and fighting for the government that we deserve, and you're not in it."
Musk became the world's first trillionaire in June, when his company SpaceX made its public market debut, but his current net worth is estimated at over $860 billion, according to the regularly updated Bloomberg and Forbes lists. His trillionaire status came after the early months of the second Trump administration, when Musk was the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Reuters reported Thursday that new data from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations shows how Musk's controversial compensation plans for SpaceX and Tesla are benefiting other chief executives. Fred Redmond, the AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer, said that his pay "changes the dynamic when other CEO compensation plans come up, boards use it as a reference."
The average ratio of CEO to worker pay at S&P 500 companies rose from 285:1 in 2024 to 312:1 last year, excluding Musk's Tesla compensation. When that is included, the ratio becomes 5,387:1. Redmond told Reuters that "as we talk to our members, they're pissed off over what's happening to them, and they feel as though they should be more vocal in terms of calling attention to inequality."
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Rep. John Larson Is an Irreplaceable Social Security Advocate
Larson understands how essential it is to protect and expand Social Security’s modest benefits, and he has the road map needed to get there.
Aug 10, 2026
Democratic Connecticut Congressman John Larson is a bulldog on behalf of the over 70 million Americans who rely on Social Security’s earned benefits, and the millions more Americans who will rely on those benefits in the future. As advocates for Social Security, who represent seniors, working families, and people with disabilities, we have had the opportunity to work alongside Rep. Larson. We can testify to the depth of his commitment: When it comes to fighting for Social Security, no one has worked harder than Rep. Larson.
A determined and relentless champion of Social Security beneficiaries, Larson has consistently pounded the pavement in his outreach to members across the entire ideological reach of the Democratic Party from the progressive Squad to moderate New Democrats to Democratic leadership and virtually everyone in between. In the last Congress, Larson’s Social Security 2100 Act earned in the last Congress support from over 90% of House Democrats, representing all corners of the Democratic coalition. His legislation would keep Social Security strong for decades to come, and increase benefits for everyone.
Rep. Larson refuses to give up. When faced with a political consensus that assumed it was necessary to cut Social Security’s hard-earned benefits, Larson worked to change the entire conversation about Social Security. Thanks to his hard work, Democrats are now united around strengthening Social Security by making the wealthy pay their fair share, and even some Republicans are beginning to come on board. Larson is working closely with Democratic Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY) on plans to bring a Social Security expansion bill up for a vote once Democrats regain control of the US House.
Importantly, Larson has gone face to face with Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” and has stood up to them, fighting for every inch when it comes to protecting Social Security from vicious DOGE attacks.
Larson understands that Social Security’s future is a question of values, not affordability.
Rep. John Larson’s enviable ability to propel a positive, far-reaching vision in the public debate, while working pragmatically with his colleagues to ensure consensus, is a rare combination of attributes. Larson understands how essential it is to protect and expand Social Security’s modest benefits, and he has the road map needed to get there.
One thing is certain: Congress must act on Social Security during the next few years. Without action, Social Security faces an automatic benefit cut of roughly 20% around the year 2032. Larson has a crucial role to play in ensuring that Congress addresses this the right way—by making the wealthy pay in at the same rate as the rest of us.
He will lead the charge. When the Democrats win back the gavel in the House of Representatives, Larson will chair the Social Security Subcommittee of the all-powerful Ways and Means Committee. That comes from his seniority. Whether Social Security is expanded or cut will be decided by the leaders in Congress. His voice, together with his knowledge, his tireless work effort, and his personal connections to colleagues achieved over his years of service, will make the difference whether benefits are increased or cut.
Larson understands that Social Security’s future is a question of values, not affordability. He possesses the moral vision to fight for the type of society that treasures everyone, especially people living through their most difficult and vulnerable moments. By pairing this sense of direction and purpose with a canny ability to understand and persuade his colleagues, Larson is indispensable to make sure legislation to protect and expand Social Security goes the distance.
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'Mostly Made Up'? GAO Exposes Billions in Bullshit Elon Musk Claims About DOGE
DOGE was a "slapdash and deceptive effort" that only succeeded in "putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies," said US Sen. Gary Peters.
Aug 06, 2026
A report from the Government Accountability Office released Thursday details how Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency wildly exaggerated the savings it was able to deliver for the US federal government.
The report, requested by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), finds that DOGE used a number of tricks to inflate the value of its purported savings, including taking credit for ending leases that were already in the process of being terminated and falsely claiming to have canceled contracts that were left intact.
The report also finds that DOGE "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96%" of savings purportedly achieved through grant cancellations.
And in cases where DOGE actually was responsible for terminating a contract or cancelling a lease, the report notes that it "did not consistently use its stated methodology for calculating savings or disclose limitations in a sufficient manner."
Even in instances where the department followed its stated methodology, the report adds, "it did not account for many complexities and nuances of federal contracting," such as obligations or settlement costs that may have come from ending a contract.
In touting the GAO report, Peters said it exposed DOGE as a "slapdash and deceptive effort" at streamlining government spending that only succeeded in "putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies."
Blumenthal accused the Trump administration of using DOGE as cover to "recklessly slash government programs, ransacking critical services and resources and proudly displaying supposed 'savings.'"
Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at the George Washington University Law School, highlighted a number of DOGE flubs in a social media post breaking down the GAO report, including a "favorite example" of DOGE claiming $28 million in savings related to an Air Force contract that in reality only saved around $600,000.
Eric Boehm, writer for libertarian magazine Reason, said that the GAO report revealed that the savings Musk and his minions claimed from their work was "mostly just made up."
In his assessment, Blumenthal said the report only "underscores the need for increased transparency and accountability from the Trump administration so the American public can better understand DOGE’s activities as the organization guts vital government programs."
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