SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
social safety net
Elon Musk Is the World's First Trillionaire—Let's Make Sure He's the Last
Musk’s trillion does not materialize from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidized, and that the public is now invited to applaud.
Jun 13, 2026
Elon Musk was set to become the world’s first trillionaire Friday after the public debut of his rocket and AI company, SpaceX.
Sit with that number for a moment. A trillion dollars. If you spent a million dollars every single day, it would take you 2,700 years to spend down a trillion. It is more than the entire GDP of Argentina or Nigeria. It is a figure so large that our brains are not really equipped to process it as a real thing.
According to Oxfam, 60% of billionaire wealth globally is not “earned” in any sense of the word that you or I would recognize, but derived from inheritance, monopoly power, or crony connections.
By UBS’s own count, the great wealth transfer is accelerating, with a record $297.8 billion passing to just 91 heirs in 2025. Musk’s own wealth did not surge through some new invention, but through a private-market revaluation of SpaceX and his AI company xAI, a paper merger that pushed his net worth from $500 billion to $800 billion in just four months.
The 1% have the money and, for now, control of the politics. The 99% have the majority, the moral case, and a growing refusal to be distracted from who is actually picking their pockets.
Tesla, the engine of much of his wealth, runs on public subsidy, tax incentives, and regulatory frameworks his own companies have spent years bending into shape. Musk’s trillion does not materialize from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidized, and that the public is now invited to applaud.
Earlier this year—while his companies held billions in government contracts—Musk played a role inside the US government running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE fired the regulators, hollowed out the agencies, and dismantled the oversight structures that might otherwise have asked awkward questions of his own companies.
A Yale model estimated Musk’s political activities cost Tesla between one million and 1.26 million US vehicle sales as furious Americans boycotted the electric car manufacturer. He took that hit and kept going, which tells you what the access was worth to him. This is regulatory capture as a business model, dressed up as a public service.
But this is not about one man and his excessive wealth. It is systemic, and the same pattern recurs across every region.
In South Africa, the Gupta brothers spent years so deeply embedded in former President Jacob Zuma’s government that a judicial commission concluded the state itself had been captured, with cabinet appointments and contracts steered to serve private interests.
In India, Gautam Adani built one of the world’s great fortunes in lockstep with his proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, winning state contracts and infrastructure concessions as his net worth soared, while those who called it crony capitalism were brushed aside.
In Mexico, Carlos Slim became one of the richest men on Earth almost overnight when the Salinas government privatized the state telephone monopoly and sold it to him, handing a public asset to a private fortune that has dominated the country’s telecoms ever since.
Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and where they do not hold office outright, they buy the people who do. When wealth concentrates at this velocity, democracy is revealed as a sham.
Meanwhile, the world that produced this wealth continues as it is. The World Inequality Report, drawing on the work of 200 researchers, found that the poorest half of humanity holds barely 2% of global wealth while fewer than 60,000 people at the very top control three times as much as that entire bottom half combined.
This context cannot be separated from the Musk wealth story. The systems that funnel money upward at unbelievable speed are the same systems that underfund public health, load poor countries with debt they cannot escape, and leave communities without the basics that governments once treated as obligations.
You will be told, as you always are, that taxing extreme wealth is complicated, that capital flees, that redistribution is a blunt and dangerous tool. These arguments are made by people who would be taxed more.
A wealth tax sufficient to fund universal healthcare and education across the Global South has been modeled, costed, and proposed repeatedly. The obstacle has never been the arithmetic. It has always been the politics, and the politics is owned by the people the tax would affect.
But here is what the first trillionaire does not want you to notice. Across the same world that produced Musk’s fortune, the 99% are organizing. Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker recorded more than 110 major anti-government protests across 70 countries in the last year. Most of them were powered by the same anger at the same rigged system.
Young people forced a tax climbdown in Kenya, brought down governments in Nepal and Madagascar, and took to the streets from Morocco to Indonesia demanding the rules be rewritten. They did it without trillion-dollar war chests. They did it themselves, alongside people like you and me, in solidarity, with an insistence that wealth concentration is not inevitable.
That movement is the counterweight to everything this moment represents. Billionaires are feeling the pressure. In May, Jeff Bezos went on CNBC to insist the tax system is crony capitalism, defend his peers against "vilification," and deny that the ultra rich avoid tax at all, the sound of a class that suddenly feels the need to argue its case in public.
Every wealth tax now argued seriously in a parliament, every billionaire levy being debated at the United Nations, every debt cancellation demand making it onto a government agenda arrived there because people organized and refused to accept the terms being set for them from above. The 1% have the money and, for now, control of the politics. The 99% have the majority, the moral case, and a growing refusal to be distracted from who is actually picking their pockets.
The 12 of June, 2026 may be the day the first trillionaire was officially minted, but it can also be the moment millions more people decide they have had enough.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Finally, Someone in Congress Is Listening to Our Pleas for Military Budget Cuts
While congressional efforts to reign in military spending face steep odds of passing, growing pushback shows us that a different path is possible.
Jun 11, 2026
Last week, Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, that would have cut $150 billion from the president’s proposed military budget. While it didn’t pass, 12 members of the House Armed Services Committee voted against advancing the bill, signaling a shift from decades of bipartisan support for unchecked spending on weapons and war.
Now the NDAA goes to the Senate, where resistance to unchecked military spending is also on the rise. The Senate Appropriations Committee has repeatedly delayed action on the budget because of disagreements between the parties over top-line numbers. This pushback is even more critical as the war in Iran again escalates. Congress must say no to more war and war funding.
The majority of people in the US don’t want endless wars that line the pockets of military contractors while making life harder for everyone else. If more lawmakers start following the will of their constituents, it could point the way to a brighter and safer future for all.
This year, the military budget soared past $1 trillion dollars, paid for by cuts made to Medicaid, food assistance programs, infrastructure funds, and more. Overall, nearly 72% of all discretionary spending went to pay for the military, homeland security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other related programs. The National Priorities Project estimated that on Tax Day this year, the average taxpayer paid over $4,000 for weapons and war.
A $1 trillion military will not save us from climate change, overdose deaths, or industrial accidents. It won’t even save us from another military.
If President Donald Trump has his way, those numbers will be even higher next year. The presidential budget released this April seeks $1.5 trillion for military spending.
The $500 billion increase exceeds the total combined amounts the US spent in 2025 on public health, education, job training, transportation, agriculture, and vital safety net programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and childcare. And even these massive cuts to lifesaving social programs are not enough to cover the massive proposed military expenditure. Trump’s budget would drive the country further into debt.
The president, the weapons company lobbyists, and most of Congress want us to believe that this money is a generational investment in our security. They want us to believe that there is no price too high for safety. But a $1 trillion investment in weapons won’t keep us safe in the same way that a $1 trillion investment in umbrellas won’t keep us dry in the ocean. The problems we face—in our communities, in the United States, and globally—require solutions that reduce violence rather than compounding it.
Over the past quarter century the US has spent trillions of dollars on wars and militarism, but global and national risks have only increased. The post-9/11 "War on Terror" resulted in up to 5 million direct and indirect deaths, yet the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan, the destabilization of Iraq directly contributed to the creation of ISIS, and in 2025 there were more violent conflicts between states than any time since WWII.
The Trump administration’s unprovoked war against Iran is just the latest example of the spectacular failures of military force. While the US was able to quickly destroy key Iranian infrastructure, months later they are now in a weaker negotiating position than at the outset. The cost of continued war—both in dollars and lives—is unconscionable.
The US military is the most expensive, lethal, and technologically advanced the world has ever seen, and US military spending is more than 60 times that of Iran. The idea that we can, and should, resource an enormous military prepared to fight both Russia and China simultaneously is preposterous. Continuing to throw trillions of dollars away on weapons that we hope to never use in wars that we can never win makes no sense. Peace, not war, requires generational investments in security. Getting there will require courageous action from our elected officials.
A $1 trillion military will not save us from climate change, overdose deaths, or industrial accidents. It won’t even save us from another military. It is time for a new paradigm. Real generational security comes when people are housed, fed, healthy, and have hope for a better future.
This is not a call to turn inward, but to invest in international cooperation rather than international destruction. Addressing global problems through international investment isn’t a utopian vision. Spending even a fraction of the military budget to address the root causes of poverty and conflict would have a massive domestic and global impact. If the US reduced military spending, other countries would be likely to follow, freeing up global resources to meet human needs.
Internationally, the World Food Program estimates that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger by 2030. Ending extreme global poverty would cost approximately $300 billion per year—a fraction of the US military budget. At home, the child tax credit gave $2,000 per child to all US families with children. That program could be continued with less than half of the increase sought for the military.
There are some signs of hope. Recent war powers votes have received far more support, across party lines, than previous ones. While congressional efforts to reign in military spending face steep odds of passing, growing pushback shows us that a different path is possible. Refusing to rubber stamp a deadly status quo takes courage and resolve. Congress must vote against military spending increases; continue to advocate for spending cuts; and invest in diplomacy, development, human rights, and human needs. That is where real security can be found.
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Citizens Must Stop the Madness Their Empire Imposes on Them and the World
Today, the United States has the opportunity to prove to itself and to the world that the mistakes committed by its government do not reflect the desires of the US people.
Jun 11, 2026
Since January 2026, when the intensification of US policies aimed at suffocating the Cuban people began, I have had the opportunity to travel to the island three times. Each time I return with my heart a little more broken, but also with a stronger conviction that we need to defend Cuba.
As a Mexican, I have received, on behalf of my compatriots, thousands of expressions of gratitude and hugs that the Cuban people send to the Mexican people. Every time I am there, I speak about the empathy and understanding we have toward Cuba, about the great efforts ordinary Mexicans make to bring a few kilos of rice to collection centers. And when I listen to Cubans, I learn a little more about the deep history that unites us.
But as a Mexican American and a binational activist, I also carry the weight of understanding the average US citizen. After many years of living in the United States, I continue to be surprised by how deeply the dream of democracy lives within people there, despite the fact that the country has been experiencing a deepening democratic crisis for years.
The deprivation imposed by Washington on the Cuban people for decades is now being reflected within the very core of the empire itself. It is suffered not only by migrants, Native Americans, Black communities, and the historically oppressed. Today, that same yoke has reached a white middle class that is beginning to feel the collapse of freedoms originally created for them.
Only the people of the United States—and no one else—can carry out the transformations their own country needs.
Fortunately, people in the United States can learn much here from Latin America—and Cuba in particular. They can learn from the region’s long history of struggle against Washington’s domination—and from the long construction of democratic processes from below that go far beyond just elections.
The resilience and social fabric the Cuban people have built are unique, just as unique as the oppression caused by the blockade the US government has maintained for all these decades. The United States needs public healthcare, free access to university education, and affordable housing. It needs to stop investing the billions it spends on war and instead invest that money in its own people. Cuba has done that.
The dream of democracy in any country is built beyond the ballot box alone, through projects that people themselves embrace and carry out. Today, the United States has the opportunity to prove to itself and to the world that the mistakes committed by its government do not reflect the desires of the US people. Today, as C. Wright Mills said 60 years ago, “Cuba’s voice must be heard in the United States, because the United States is too powerful and its responsibilities to the world and to itself are too great for its people not to hear the voices coming from the hungry world.”
The United States is preparing for another electoral cycle while its policies of war and interventionism throughout the Global South get reaffirmed.
At the same time, the island of 10 million inhabitants is preparing to continue resisting in the face of the possibility of an attack. In Cuba’s “Family Guide for Protection in Case of Military Aggression,” one can read recommendations for what to pack in a backpack: identification, a radio, candles, food, medicine, and toys to help distract children.
A recently published poll by the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank based in Washington, DC, reveals that more than 60% of US citizens oppose a war with Cuba. At the same time, solidarity networks with Cuba in the United States—which have existed since the beginning of the blockade—are reactivating with renewed strength.
But can US citizens truly stop the madness their own empire imposes on them and on the rest of the world? Let us hope so, because only the people of the United States—and no one else—can carry out the transformations their own country needs. Only then will Cuba, the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world be free.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular