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Opposition to AI Goes Beyond Data Centers, as Poll Shows Massive Distrust of Big Tech CEOs
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on Sunday that Americans distrust Big Tech because they "always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over."
Aug 17, 2026
Opposition to artificial intelligence data centers has exploded across the US in 2026, as a recent Annenberg Public Policy Center poll showed that more than 60% of Americans say they are against building AI facilities in their areas.
However, a new survey highlighted by Futurism on Sunday shows that the AI industry has bigger problems than just the unpopularity of data centers.
As Futurism noted, the poll by CNBC found widespread distrust of artificial intelligence CEOs among Americans between the ages of 18 and 34.
In fact, more than two-thirds of respondents said they did not trust Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, or SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to responsibly expand the use of AI.
"Those are some appalling approval ratings," commented Futurism, "reflecting the massive swing in popularity the tech industry has experienced over the last decade, driven by concerns around data privacy, the purposeful decay of once-useful platforms, and the erosion of democracy."
The survey comes amid signs that the AI industry knows it faces a significant deficit in public opinion.
Anthropic boss Amodei wrote a social media post on Sunday acknowledging that "the public has a negative view of AI," which he said was "fundamentally a crisis of trust."
"I think that ordinary people don't trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over," wrote Amodei. "The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it."
The Anthropic CEO added that he didn't think any positive public relations campaign could turn around people's perception of the industry, and he said that one of the few ways it could gain trust was "actually curing cancer."
The rapid expansion of AI data centers, pushed by President Donald Trump, has provoked grassroots campaigns in communities across the country, with people loudly opposing the facilities that have been linked to high household electricity bills, massive water consumption, and few, if any, long-term job opportunities.
Amodei's musings about AI's unpopularity came days after Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto, in which he pushed back on AI developers who believe the technology will "eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance," while insisting that Meta would develop "personal superintelligence for everyone" that would put "power in people's hands" rather than taking it away.
However, Zuckerberg's promises of a benevolent AI future drew skepticism from TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom, who argued in an essay published last week that the Meta chief's manifesto would fall on deaf ears given his own toxic reputation. Meta was recently ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in fines due to its products' harms to children and teens.
"Suffice it to say, Facebook as a product and Zuckerberg as a person are both unpopular with the US public," wrote Brandom. "A recent survey found that 64% of Americans believe social media has been harmful to democracy and a similar percentage believe it should be more heavily regulated, numbers that cut evenly across partisan lines."
People's own past experience with social media, Brandom continued, is a big reason why they are revolting against Big Tech's ambitions to use AI to remake society.
"The public does not trust tech executives to make sure new technologies like this have a positive impact on society," Brandom explained. "Instead of acknowledging that and trying to win back their trust, this essay demonstrates over and over again how the trust was lost in the first place."
Brandom cited Zuckerberg's discussion of human lawyers eventually being replaced by AI as particularly problematic, given that enabling chatbots to engage in litigation could result in a wave of nuisance lawsuits that would clog up the legal system.
"It’s hard to feel calm about any of this stuff," commented Brandom, "and the fact that Zuckerberg isn’t worried makes me more worried."
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In Leaked Audio, Zuckerberg Tells Meta Workers He's Been Using Them to Train AI Ahead of Mass Layoffs
"AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion," said one engineer, urging his colleagues to sign a petition to stop Meta's use of an AI tracking program. "It’s not too late to pump the brakes."
May 20, 2026
Meta employees reported Wednesday that in the company's offices on the day mass layoffs hit thousands of their colleagues, fliers were taped to walls urging workers to sign a petition in support of stopping the company's new artificial intelligence data tracking program—which CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted late last month as a way for its new AI models to "learn from watching really smart people do things."
A day before about 8,000 Meta employees began receiving emails notifying them that they were being laid off—a process that began in Singapore at 4:00 am local time Wednesday and continued in European and US offices in their respective time zones—the labor-focused media organization More Perfect Union shared a leaked audio file in which Zuckerberg was heard explaining how the AI training program worked.
"The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks," said Zuckerberg. "So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company."
LEAKED AUDIO: In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells employees that he's training AI on them ahead of mass layoffs.
"The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things... The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is… pic.twitter.com/lt9eeJ3cwh
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 19, 2026
He assured the company's 78,000 employees that "no human is looking at or watching what people are doing on their computers... None of the data is being used for looking at what people are doing or surveillance or performance tracking or anything like that. It's purely just that we are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks."
Zuckerberg explained how the employees have been used to train the model that could potentially replace many of them days after Meta announced it was planning to lay off about 10% of its workforce as the company invests heavily in AI, spending $125 billion to $145 billion on the technology—more than double what it spent last year.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that employees "revolted" when they learned about the AI tracking program, and expressed fears that they had unknowingly been training a model that would ultimately replace them.
An engineering manager asked on the company's internal communication platform how workers can opt out of having their computer activity monitored to train the AI model, only to be told by chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, "There is no option to opt out on your corporate laptop."
Another employee told Bosworth, “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning."
On Monday, The New York Times reported, employees learned that in addition to the layoffs, another 7,000 workers will be reassigned to help develop AI tools.
About 2,000 employees began working this month on a new Applied AI and Engineering team, which is set to use the data gathered by the AI tracking program Zuckerberg described to build AI tools. Those who volunteered to join the group would not be included in this week's layoffs, the Times reported.
"Every company is training AI on their employees," said Chen Avnery, an independent adviser on AI governance and data platforms. "Meta just said it out loud. The question stopped being, 'Will AI replace you?' a year ago. Now it's whether you're building the agents or generating their training data."
More than 1,000 people in the company have signed the petition calling to halt the AI data program, according to the newspaper.
Software engineer Mack Ward urged his colleagues to sign on earlier this month, telling them in an internal post that "AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion."
"It’s not too late to pump the brakes and consider how we, society, want to go about this,” Ward said. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ isn’t what you were hired to do.”
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Rights Groups Warn Against Meta's 'Dystopian' Plan to Add Facial Recognition Tech to AI-Powered Eyeglasses
"Meta’s reported plans to introduce this technology into broadly available consumer products is a red line society must not cross."
Apr 14, 2026
The ACLU and a coalition of 75 other rights organizations on Tuesday issued a warning to tech giant Meta about its plan to install facial recognition technology onto its artificial intelligence-powered eyeglasses.
In a letter organized by the ACLU, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the groups said adding facial recognition technology to Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses would pose a grave threat to Americans' privacy.
"People should be able to move through their daily lives," the letter states, "without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors."
When it comes to specific dangers posed by embedding this technology into the company's products, the letter points to the potential for scammers to use it to "find out, quickly and in complete stealth, not just the name of the person sitting next to them on the subway—but their address, marital status, social media profiles, workplace, income, hobbies, health information, and habits."
Because of this, the letter says that "Meta’s reported plans to introduce this technology into broadly available consumer products is a red line society must not cross."
Blocking facial recognization technology from Meta glasses "is a prerequisite for a free and safe society," reads the letter.
The letter concludes with a series of demands, including that Meta stop any plans to attach facial recognition technology to its products; publicly disclose any past instances of Meta glasses being used for stalking and harassment; and reveal any "past or ongoing" discussions with law enforcement agencies such as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement about deploying the technology.
Cody Venzke, senior staff attorney working on surveillance, privacy, and technology issues for the ACLU, described facial recognition technology as "inherently invasive and unethical," and said adding it to a widely available consumer product "would vastly increase the risk of harm to individuals, families, and our democracy itself."
Kade Crockford, director of technology and justice programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts, argued that "the American people have not consented to this massive invasion of privacy," which is why Meta must abandon plans to deploy it.
"Stalkers and scammers would have a field day with this technology," Crockford said. "Federal agents could use it to harass and intimidate their critics. It’s dangerous and dystopian, and Meta must disavow it."
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Don't Just Tax the Uber Rich, Reform the Corporate Structure That Creates Them
The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while shortchanging other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits
Mar 13, 2026
Targeting billionaires with California’s proposed wealth tax is an eye-catching idea, but perhaps the real problem is how some of these people become billionaires in the first place.
California has long eyed taxing the ultra rich. In 2024, Assembly Bill 259, backed by progressive Democrats and unions like the California Federation of Teachers, sought annual wealth taxes but was blocked by centrist Democrats, business groups, and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Now, advocates are going for a one-time 5% levy on roughly 200 billionaires, covering everything they own—stocks, businesses, art, private islands, personal spacecraft, even intellectual property—basically the whole enchilada if they were state residents on January 1, 2026. Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West estimates the tax could raise $100 billion for health and social services.
Backers call it a fair share. Critics cite economic, legal, and retroactive risks.
A one-time California wealth tax might dent the personal fortunes of the Zuckerbergs and Cooks, but it does nothing to slow the corporate machinery that grinds on to produce still more of them.
To many, the logic seems straightforward: Billionaires have absurd, even toxic amounts of money. The richest 1% now own more than the bottom 90% combined. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman note that middle- and working-class Americans often pay higher effective tax rates than the super rich, whose California fortunes grew over $2 trillion in just a few years.
Why not tax them?
But Here’s the Twist
Economist William Lazonick, a long-time critic of the way many US corporations are run, argues that targeting individual fortunes treats the symptom, not the disease. The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while shortchanging other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits—and too often creating little of real value to society.
Most billionaires don’t “earn” their fortunes through work. They build wealth by owning stock in corporations. Executives and boards pump up dividends and stock prices, often using stock buybacks, which rocket their own pay into the stratosphere. Managers and professionals with stock options or stock awards can cash in too—but only if they keep their jobs. Everyone else—most workers and the wider public that depends on taxing corporate profits to fund schools, roads, and healthcare—gets left behind.
This shareholder-first model (famously called “the dumbest idea in the world” by former GE CEO Jack Welch), encourages executives and investors to treat companies like giant ATMs, pulling money out rather than reinvesting profits to create lasting value.
Stock buybacks and ownership stakes that line the pockets of executives at the expense of employees, communities, or innovation are a modern form of illth.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg. Nearly all of his mind-boggling fortune—the kind that just bought him a record-smashing $170 million mansion in Miami-Dade County near Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and is funding a bombproof bunker-complex in Kauai that disturbs local wildlife—comes straight from owning stock in Meta Platforms. Meta has spent nearly $200 billion on stock buybacks in the past five years. Those buybacks have fattened the wallets of shareholders, including Meta’s top executives and professionals, while leaving the rest of society out of the gains (Meta is famous for its tax-dodging schemes). With Meta, there aren’t any hedge-fund activists forcing Zuckerberg to do buybacks—they’re happening by choice.
Lazonick points out that “with all the profits that they have, they could be creating stable, high-paid jobs for the workers whom they employ—and thereby put in place powerful social conditions for collective and cumulative learning.” He adds, “Instead they are using stock-based pay, which is always volatile and which results in unstable and inequitable employment, to compete for talent.”
Now, even some of Meta’s highest-paid employees are feeling the squeeze. With stock-based pay being cut back and the AI revolution changing work, some of the people who once seemed untouchable are discovering that their jobs aren’t as secure as they thought.
Then there’s Tim Cook. Much of his wealth comes from stock-based compensation tied to the stock-market performance of Apple Inc. Under his leadership as CEO, Apple’s so-called “Capital Return Program” has spent hundreds of billions on stock buybacks—north of half a trillion dollars when counting programs from the early 2010s on—which have helped push up the share price and richly rewarded executives and shareholders. Lazonick has criticized this trend, arguing that Apple’s huge buybacks reward shareholders who have never provided finance to the company, instead of investing in value-creating workers who are the source of innovation. This is the activity that has Cook extremely rich—though he still buys his underwear on sale at Nordstrom, so it’s not entirely clear why he needs all this money.
His workers could sure use a bigger cut. It is a fact that many of the workers who build, sell, or support Apple products have faced stingy pay and labor issues: Some retail employees have pushed for higher minimum wages and better benefits as recently as 2022, and labor-rights groups have documented low wages and complaints about conditions among Apple’s supply-chain workers.
A one-time California wealth tax might dent the personal fortunes of the Zuckerbergs and Cooks, but it does nothing to slow the corporate machinery that grinds on to produce still more of them.
Historically, reformers recognized this issue. For example, Thorstein Veblen critiqued the ways elites could extract wealth while contributing less to society than might be expected. And early 20th-century progressives championed higher corporate taxes and antitrust laws because they understood that inequality was more structural than individual.
This is what 19th-century critic John Ruskin had in mind when he coined the term “illth.” For Ruskin, true wealth, or “weal,” promotes everyone’s health and prosperity. Illth, by contrast, amasses when money is extracted or hoarded without focusing on social value. Stock buybacks and ownership stakes that line the pockets of executives at the expense of employees, communities, or innovation are a modern form of illth.
We don’t want illth.
Taylor Swift Isn’t the Problem
Now let’s bring in someone we can all relate to—Taylor Swift. Her fortune comes from her creativity, work, and audience engagement. She writes songs, records albums, tours, sells merchandise, and negotiates brand deals. Yes, corporate structures like Ticketmaster’s oligopoly complicate matters—but Swift herself isn’t the CEO of a company extracting illth through financial engineering. Taxing her personal wealth dramatizes the issue without addressing its source.
Policies aimed at corporate engines of inequality, rather than individual fortunes, could reshape the system itself. Lazonick and others have recommended a variety of approaches:
- Ban stock buybacks and suppress predatory value extraction. This curbs wealth concentration at the top.
- Encourage employee ownership or provide employee representation on corporate boards. Gains should benefit a broader group of stakeholders—not just shareholders.
- Reimagine corporate governance. Move towards stakeholder models balancing shareholder yields with social and environmental responsibility.
And last, but not least:
- Strengthen progressive corporate taxation. Close loopholes that allow extreme wealth accumulation.
As Lazonick sees it, whether it happens at the federal, state, or local level, government policy should focus on curbing predatory value extraction and promoting what he calls “progressive value creation”—which means passing laws to stop corporations from being looted, a key source of the exploding wealth of the mega rich. “From this position of regulatory power,” he advises, “we should then decide how the top 0.1% should be taxed.”
The real work, from this perspective, is reforming the structures that concentrate wealth. If we want an economy that fosters health, innovation, and opportunity instead of illth, chasing Taylor Swift won’t cut it. We need to start regulating the corporate engines behind her peers’ billions
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Will Democrats Finally Get Real About AI?
If Democrats want to regain trust ahead of the 2026 elections, they need to show they are willing to take on Big Tech with the urgency that everyday Americans are demanding.
Jan 30, 2026
One year ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos got front-row seats at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The images of CEOs enjoying better seats than congressional leaders foreshadowed exactly how much access and influence Big Tech would wield in the Trump White House.
Since entering office, Trump has repeatedly signaled deference to a small group of powerful technology executives, aided by advisors like AI czar David Sacks who have spent their careers profiting from the industry. With Trump’s blessing, companies like NVIDIA are now poised to profit from sales of advanced chips to China, America’s foremost strategic competitor. That choice exposes a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the administration’s AI policy: prioritizing short-term corporate gains over long-term public interests.
In December, Trump signed an executive order threatening states for enacting AI safety laws without offering a credible federal framework to replace them. It was yet another misuse of executive power—and an industry giveaway disguised as a competitiveness strategy. By threatening states for acting while offering no federal safeguards in return, the order attempts to clear the field for companies that have spent years lobbying against meaningful accountability.
While Republicans move to shield companies from accountability and block reasonable state action without offering meaningful protections, Democrats can articulate a smarter approach.
Supporters argue that preemption is necessary to help the United States compete with China. But if that’s true, why is the president offering the Chinese Communist Party access to superior American technology and a clear path to win the AI race?
That contradiction hasn’t gone unnoticed, even inside Trump’s own coalition. Indeed, most Americans continue to express deep concern about Trump’s growing alignment with Silicon Valley.
Still, Trump has only doubled down, pushing a vision of global “tech dominance” with little regard for the real-world consequences of unprecedented AI investment. Even Republicans who were once vocal critics of Big Tech are now taking money from Meta and other companies to accelerate AI on industry-friendly terms.
For Democrats, this should be a moment of clarity—and a moment to lead. While many lawmakers have raised legitimate concerns about AI’s risks, the party’s response has too often leaned on commissions, task forces, and studies when the public is asking for clear rules and accountability.
Democrats must ask themselves: if Big Tech is already working overtime to block meaningful safeguards, why not meet the moment by standing clearly on the side of consumers, parents, and workers? Voters are asking for real leadership, but all they are seeing is a familiar pattern: billion-dollar companies consolidating power, writing the rules, and dodging accountability, leaving children, workers, and democratic institutions to deal with the consequences.
The 2024 election underscored a deeper challenge for Democrats than economic uncertainty or flawed candidates. Many voters struggled to see a coherent vision for the future under Democratic leadership. That vacuum has allowed Republicans to posture as pro-consumer and pro-family while quietly shielding powerful companies from accountability.
The debate over AI offers Democrats a chance to do better. While Republicans move to shield companies from accountability and block reasonable state action without offering meaningful protections, Democrats can articulate a smarter approach: clear expectations for safety; real liability when technology causes harm; serious preparation for economic disruption; and responsible planning for AI’s massive energy demands.
AI is no longer an abstract idea; its impacts are already being felt. But without clear rules, it risks reshaping our economy, labor markets, and democratic institutions in ways that undermine security, opportunity, and trust. When elected leaders prioritize the agendas of their corporate executives over the long-term public interest, trust erodes—not just in institutions, but in innovation itself.
That erosion of trust is already visible. Workers worry about job displacement, recent graduates struggle to enter a rapidly-changing workforce, and parents fear how algorithmic manipulation and AI-generated deepfakes will shape their children’s reality. These concerns aren’t partisan. This shared national anxiety goes to the heart of the American experiment.
If Democrats want to regain trust ahead of the 2026 elections, they need to show they are willing to take on Big Tech with the urgency that everyday Americans are demanding. That means recognizing that AI isn’t just another talking point, and pursuing strong, enforceable standards now—so its extraordinary potential strengthens the middle class, improves our children’s future, and reinforces democratic institutions rather than undermining them.
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Bernie Sanders on What Corporate Media Does Not Want Discussed: The Oligarchy
"Let’s talk," says the Vermont senator, "about the reality which the corporately-controlled media and the corporately-controlled political system don’t talk about very much."
Sep 24, 2025
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont penned a new op-ed published Wednesday in which he attempts to redirect the American electorate away from what most media outlets seem fixated upon to a subject he argues they would rather not acknowledge, discuss, or promote—let alone challenge: the existence and power of the nation's oligarchy, which day by day continues to hollow out democracy while keeping the working class mired in relative poverty with families scraping to meet basic material needs.
"Let’s take a deep breath and, for one moment, forget about Donald Trump, Jimmy Kimmel, the UN, Charlie Kirk, Gaza, a government shutdown, and the other crises that we face," writes Sanders, an Independent, in The Guardian.
Instead, he says, "Let’s talk instead about the reality which the corporately-controlled media and the corporately-controlled political system don’t talk about very much," which is a two-tiered nation in which extremely wealthy billionaires—including mega-billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg—live in "a world completely removed from ordinary Americans" that struggle to have affordable healthcare, housing, and education while earning wages that are lower, on average, than they were half a century ago despite huge increases in worker productivity.
Sanders writes:
What we are witnessing right now is the rise of two Americas. One for the billionaire class. And one for everybody else.
In one America, the richest people are becoming obscenely richer and have never, ever, had it so good. That America is overflowing with unimaginable wealth, greed and opulence that makes the Gilded Age seem very modest.
And then there is a second America–an America where a majority of people live paycheck to paycheck, struggling to secure the very basic necessities of life–food, healthcare, housing and education.
The sad conclusion, Sanders argues, is that the political system in the United States "is badly broken," crushed by the same oligarchs who have amassed large enough private fortunes that they can control "our government, our economy, and our future."
Noting that Musk, Bezos, Ellison, and Zuckerberg—just four individuals—are now have an estimated $1.3 trillion in combined wealth, Sanders says it's not just them. "The top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%," he writes.
[The 1%] don’t ride overcrowded subways to get to work or sit in traffic jams to get home. They fly on private jets and helicopters they own. They live in mansions all over the world, send their kids to the most elite private schools and vacation on their own islands. And, for fun, some spend millions to fly off into space on their own rocket ships.
And then there is the other America, where the vast majority of our people live. For them, the economy is not just broken, it is collapsing. In this America, despite a massive increase in worker productivity, real weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were more than 52 years ago.
Since Trump returned to office, Sanders has been traveling the nation as part of his "Fight Oligarchy" tour that has attracted tens of thousands of attendees in red, blue, and purple states. While the message appears to be resonating—and more lawmakers and candidate running for office echoing Sanders' message—the Vermont senator says the fight against massive inequality—both on the economic and political front—is far from over, but must be kept front and center.
After listing the litany of economic injustices faced by the nation's working class, Sanders says, "Enough is enough. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said in 1933: 'We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.' That warning is even more relevant today."
Despite President Donald Trump being in office and the headwins seemingly in favor of the billionaire class, which has been able to buy elections and increase its stranglehold on major media outlets and platforms, Sanders suggests that the people still have the upper hand when it comes to the long-term battle for the nation's future.
"I know day-to-day life can take a toll, but we must not allow ourselves to fall into despair," he writes. "If we do not allow ourselves to be divided up by Trump and is oligarch allies, we can change the path we are on."
"The choice is clear," Sanders concludes. "Let’s stand together for democracy and justice."
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'This Is OIigarchy': While Job Market Sinks, Musk Aims to Become First Trillionaire
A report released this week revealed that the top 100 billionaires in the US have a net worth totaling $3.86 trillion.
Sep 05, 2025
The US job market has ground to a near halt, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday estimating that the economy produced an average of fewer than 30,000 jobs over the last three months.
However, not every American is feeling economic strain, as The New York Times reported on Friday that the board of electric car maker Tesla has unveiled a proposed compensation package for CEO Elon Musk that could make him the world's first trillionaire.
As the Times wrote, Musk could become worth $1 trillion so long as he boosts Tesla's share value "eightfold over the next decade" and as long as he stays at the company for at least that period.
Musk, who is already the world's richest man with a net worth of over $400 billion, would be left owning 29% of Tesla as part of the package, which the Times noted would be "an extraordinary level of control for a chief executive."
The report did add, however, that it will be very hard for Musk to achieve the full value of the compensation package given the intense competition that has emerged in the electric vehicle market and the damage Musk has inflicted on the Tesla brand with his embrace of far-right politics that have resulted in plunging car sales around the world.
Warren Gunnels, a top adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), observed on Musk's platform X that the billionaire's massive increase in wealth in the middle of a stalling job market was not a fluke, as several other tech billionaires have also seen their fortunes grow over the last three months.
"In the same 3 months [as the economy averaged under 30,000 jobs created per month]: Musk became $21 billion richer. He’s worth $435 billion," wrote Gunnels.
Gunnels also noted that:
- Oracle founder Larry Ellison became $69 billion richer. He's worth $277 billion.
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg became $19 billion richer. He's worth $257 billion.
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos became $22 billion richer. He’s worth $245 billion.
"This is oligarchy," Gunnels concluded.
On Wednesday this week, global wealth intelligence firm Altrata released a new report estimating that the total number of billionaires in the US had increased from 927 in 2020 to 1,135 last year, with a collective net worth totaling $5.7 trillion. The top 100 billionaires in the US had a net worth totaling $3.86 trillion, Altrata estimated, with just three of these billionaires—Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg—accounting for nearly $1 trillion in net worth.
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How a Professional Bully Is Winning Control of the Media
Major media outlets from CBS to The Washington Post have “bent the knee” to President Trump’s specious demands.
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is following the authoritarian’s handbook that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used to consolidate power in Hungary. He is attacking the independent institutions that comprise the infrastructure supporting democracy—universities, law firms, culture, and the media.
And he is winning.
Major media outlets have “bent the knee” his press secretary’s preferred phrase for capitulation to Trump’s specious demands. His latest conquest is CBS.
CBS
Days before the 2024 election, Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit accusing the network of bias in broadcasting a “60 Minutes” interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Seeking $10 billion in damages, the complaint claimed that the edited interview and associated programming were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” in Harris’ favor.
Prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said that “the First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation.” Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet called it “ridiculous junk and should be mocked.” Attorney Charles Tobin warned, “This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”
A few days later, Trump won the election. And now CBS’ parent company, Paramount, wants to settle the case.
Whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion.
Through her family’s holding company, Shari Redstone who is “friendly with Trump” is Paramount’s controlling shareholder. If the Federal Communications Commission approves its pending merger with Skydance Media, Redstone will reap millions.
On February 6, Redstone told the Paramount board that she wanted to settle Trump’s lawsuit. The next day, Trump doubled his damages claim to $20 billion. As the media reported Redstone’s desire to resolve the case, Trump pounced. On April 13, he asserted on social media that the FCC should impose “the maximum fine and punishment” on CBS and the network “should lose its license.”
The parties have agreed on a mediator, but whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion. The more profound cost is the loss of CBS’ journalistic independence, which became apparent on April 22 when the producer of “60 Minutes” resigned.
In the program’s 57-year history, Bill Owens—who became the “60 Minutes” executive producer in 2019 after 30 years at CBS—was only the third person to run it. Owens’s memo to his staff should be a warning to all of us:
“[O]ver the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
CBS wasn’t Trump’s first media victim.
The Washington Post
In early November 2024, The Washington Post editorial board had signed off on an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But it never ran. Owner Jeff Bezos personally killed it and, for the first time in decades, the paper did not endorse a U.S. presidential candidate.
A few hours after Bezos’s “no endorsement” decision became public, officials from his Blue Origin aerospace company, which has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA, met with Trump.
After Trump won the election, Bezos flew to Mar-a-Lago where he and his fiancée dined with the president-elect. Shortly thereafter, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And another Bezos company—Amazon—paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, who personally will receive $28 million.
On February 26, Bezos announced a new rightward shift for the Post: It would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.
The paper’s opinion section editor, David Shipley, resigned in response to the change. Prominent columnists followed him out the door, and more than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times had an established record of presidential endorsements too—until 2024. Its 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden blasted Trump. But in 2024, billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong quashed an editorial that would have endorsed Vice President Harris. As at the Post, columnists and editorial board members resigned in protest, and the paper lost thousands of subscribers.
After the election, Soon-Shiong killed another editorial set to run with this headline: “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.”
Self-censorship is the most effective, enduring, and dangerous method of abridging free speech.
More than one-half of Americans “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media. One-third of all adults in the U.S. get their news from Facebook (operated by Meta). Meta’s president Mark Zuckerberg was among the billionaires who traveled to Mar-a-Lago after the election, met with Trump, and donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. (With the help of corporate and billionaire megadonors like Zuckerberg and Bezos, Trump raised a record $239 million for the fund.)
Then Zuckerberg gave Trump a bigger gift: Meta abandoned third-party fact-checking of Facebook posts. As his rationale, Zuckerberg repeated Trump’s false talking points that fact-checking was “censorship” and reflected an “anti-Trump bias.”
Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats” that Trump had made to him in the past, Trump answered: “Probably.”
Meanwhile, Meta invited Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter, to join its board of directors.
PBS and NPR
On April 26, Trump will send Congress his request to halt all funding for public media—including NPR and PBS.
Viktor Orbán’s Playbook—The Trump Sequel
Since his return to power, Hungary’s prime minister has used “muscular state policy to achieve conservative ends,” according to conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Orbán is “attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media.”
Orbán began “working with friendly oligarchs to purchase and transform media companies into conservative stalwarts; directing government advertising budgets to politically-aligned outlets;… and pressuring the holdover state media… to provide more favorable coverage.”
Rufo insists that Hungary “has a media environment at least as competitive as that of many Western nations.” Experienced observers disagree:
Human Rights Watch found that the government is using its near media monopoly to strengthen its hold on democratic institutions… The government’s increased control over the media market is linked to its broader assault on rule of law in Hungary, including undermining judicial independence and state capture of public institutions…
Trump’s attacks on universities, law firms, culture, and the media are all of a piece. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary provides a roadmap of his battle plan and a preview of his end game.
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'They Are Laughing at Us All': Trump Tariff Whiplash Boosts Wealth of Mega-Rich by $304 Billion
"Is there any doubt in anyone's mind they were tipped off?" asked one progressive news outlet.
Apr 10, 2025
As retirees, small business owners, and consumers reeled from the chaos sparked by U.S. President Donald Trump's erratic tariff policies, the richest people on the planet saw their wealth surge Wednesday as the White House partially froze the duties it imposed on most countries.
Trump's announcement of the 90-day pause sparked a historic market rally that added $304 billion to the collective wealth of the world's top billionaires, according to a Bloomberg estimate. The outlet called the jump "the largest one-day gain in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index," which was launched in 2012.
"The largest individual gainer Wednesday was Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, who added $36 billion to his fortune as the EV manufacturer's stock jumped 23%, followed by Meta Platforms Inc.'s Mark Zuckerberg, who gained almost $26 billion," Bloomberg reported. "Nvidia Corp.'s Jensen Huang saw his wealth rise $15.5 billion as the chipmaker's shares rebounded 19%, nearly offsetting its 13% decline in the week to Tuesday's close."
Though the stock market gave up some of the massive gains on Thursday amid continued uncertainty about Trump's tariffs, the rapid billionaire wealth surge amplified concerns about possible market manipulation and insider trading ahead of the president's announcement of a 90-day pause. Trump publicly encouraged people to buy stock just hours before announcing the pause.
"Is there any doubt in anyone's mind they were tipped off?" The Tennessee Holler, a progressive news outlet, wrote on social media. "They are laughing at us all."
In the days leading up to the president's partial tariff pause, some of his billionaire supporters publicly criticized his approach as their wealth took a hit amid the trade war-induced market sell-off.
According to Bloomberg, the 500 richest people in the world saw their collective wealth fall by $208 billion the day after Trump announced the sweeping tariffs last week. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was "flooded with worried calls from Wall Street over the weekend and felt strongly he had to persuade Trump that a pause was needed."
The partial tariff pause came a day before the Republican-controlled House passed a budget blueprint that paves the way for another round of tax cuts that would primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans.
"These tariffs are not designed to solve an actual trade or economic challenge," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said Thursday. "They're designed to soak typical workers with higher taxes in order to help pay for handouts to the top."
"They're focused on yet more handouts to billionaires and corporations," Wyden added, "and everybody else is going to be on the hook to pay for them."
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This Is What Oligarchy Looks Like
There are 15 billionaires in the United Sates with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.
Apr 05, 2025
The ranks of global billionaires has grown by 247 in the past year, bringing up the total worldwide to 3,028, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the wealthy published April 1.
The combined wealth of the nine-figure club is now $16.1 trillion, up $2 trillion from a year ago.
There are 902 billionaires in the United States as of the newest survey, up from 813 in 2024. However, the Forbes data release is dated March 7, 2025, and there has been significant market volatility since then.
There are now three billionaires in America with more than $200 billion in estimated wealth: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.
And there are 15 billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.
The oligarchy continues to rig the rules of the economy to get more wealth and power, meaning we should anticipate the first trillionaire within a decade.
As Forbes observes about Donald Trump: “He’s giving the billionaire class more control over the government than ever before. His right-hand man is the planet’s richest person. His administration includes at least ten billionaires and billionaire spouses.”
Trump — who Forbes fawningly calls “America’s billionaire-in-chief” — saw his personal fortune more than double over the last year, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion. Forbes reports that “before moving back into the White House, [Trump] padded his cash piled with a very lucrative move into crypto. Between that and his Trump Media & Technology Group going public just after Forbes locked in its 2024 rankings, the president’s net worth has more than doubled.”
The top four billionaires are U.S. nationals, and their individual wealth are:
- Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $342 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024, but down from $428 billion on January 1, 2025). It’s worth noting that prior to the 2020 pandemic, Musk’s wealth was valued just under $25 billion.
- Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $216 billion, up from $113 billion from the 2020 survey.
- Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $215. billion.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $192 billion.
This is what oligarchy looks like!
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