Elon Musk becomes world’s richest person as pandemic death toll breaks records
Last week, Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to become the richest human on the planet, with a net worth of $189 billion.
Bezos and Musk have become the standard bearers for the massive enrichment of the world’s billionaires over the course of the pandemic. Since the beginning of last year, the world’s 500 richest individuals have increased their wealth by $1.8 trillion, and the world’s billionaires now control more than $10 trillion dollars in wealth for the first time in history.
Bezos and Musk alone account for a significant portion of this increase. Since March 2020, Jeff Bezos has increased his wealth by approximately $72 billion, according to Forbes. However, Musk’s wealth increased by $165 billion over the course of a year which has been marked by extraordinary levels of mass suffering and death in the US and all around the world.
The same day that Musk became the world’s richest person, 4,245 people died from COVID-19 in the US, according to Worldometer. By the end of the year, according to the US Department of Labor, 10.7 million American workers remained officially unemployed, and according to analysis of Census data by the Economic Policy Institute, 50 million Americans, including 17 million children, had gone hungry due to the effects of the pandemic on the economy.
It is worth noting, before going further, that the response of the newly crowned world’s richest man to last week’s historically unprecedented coup attempt by President Donald Trump was to fire off a series of idiotic non-sequitur memes on Twitter. Musk treated the event, which involved high-level state involvement and reportedly aimed at kidnapping and even murdering high-ranking Democrats, as the occasion for snide jokes.
The best possible interpretation one can put on this is that Musk, who now controls wealth greater than the annual GDP of Iraq, is an uncultured ignoramus. This is certainly true. But given Musk’s close relationship to the Trump administration—he sat on the president’s business advisory council in 2017 and praised Trump’s support for his business ventures in the 2020 elections—it may well indicate his support for the attempt to violently overthrow the US Constitution, or at least a “wait and see” attitude.
Moreover, Musks’ tweet earlier last year clumsily attacking Karl Marx is an indication of the intense nervousness, both of Musk and the corporate financial oligarchy as a whole, that the unprecedented levels of inequality in American and world society will inevitably produce a revolutionary response by the working class. Trump himself has presented himself for years as the only bulwark standing between the United States and socialism.
But regardless of Musk’s immediate calculations, the drive towards fascism is the inevitable outcome of the staggering levels of inequality which exist in the United States and around the world, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The response of both parties to the pandemic, which has been to funnel trillions into Wall Street while forcing workers back into unsafe workplaces, can be summed up as sacrificing hundreds of thousands of human lives to the profits of Wall Street.
Musk is not merely a beneficiary of these policies but played a leading role in implementing them. Last May, Musk violated local lockdown orders and kept Tesla’s assembly plant in Fremont, California, running full speed ahead.
At the time, Musk owned “only” $40.1 billion and was the 22nd-richest person in the world. Despite this brazen violation of the law, California Democrats did nothing. Trump tweeted in support, “California should let Tesla & @elonmusk open the plant, NOW. It can be done Fast & Safely!” This was a major milestone in the reopening of the US auto industry, after it had been closed for months after a wildcat strike wave in mid-March.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Musk personifies the parasitic character of the corporate-financial oligarchy which dominates society.
Musk’s wealth is almost purely a product of the stock market bubble. Musk’s actual business ventures are comparatively insignificant. The main source of his wealth is his stock in Tesla, an electric vehicle company which controls less than one percent of the global auto market. Tesla delivered 499,550 cars in 2020, short of its annual target of 500,000 vehicles, according to the Motley Fool website.
In contrast, Toyota produced 8.8 million vehicles globally in the 2019 to 2020 fiscal year, Ford vehicle wholesales reached 1.18 million individual units as of the third quarter of the last year and General Motors sold 2.5 million total vehicles worldwide in 2020.
Nevertheless, shares of Tesla, the California-based electric carmaker, closed at $816.04 on Thursday, an increase of 8 percent from the day before and 20 percent overall in the first week of 2021. In the last year, its stock price has skyrocketed over 720 percent. The company itself has reached over $760 billion in market value, according to BBC News— “more than the total market value of carmakers Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, [General Motors] and Ford combined.”
Tucker Carlson’s frightening summation of what’s happening in America
On his Monday Fox News program, Tucker Carlson spelled out what America’s corporate overlords are doing in America. Essentially, they are “de-personing” anyone who dares to question what happened in America on November 3-8 or who even supports Trump. In a world run on computers, they are unplugging everyone who does not toe their party line.
I will not link to the video on YouTube because that site is one of the major tech monopolists silencing all who dissent from their political beliefs. I also can’t embed Fox videos here. However, you can see Tucker’s entire monologue here.
The usually ebullient Tucker is manifestly upset, even angry at what’s happening in America. As we all must now, to protect ourselves, he opens by stating that his show immediately and repeatedly denounced the violence at the Capitol (true) because his show is completely opposed to political violence and supports law and order.
He then castigated the new selective enforcement of laws, which means they’re not laws or justice at all. They are merely tyrannical whims. What’s happening now is collective punishment, attacking Americans who had nothing to do with events at the Capitol.
One after another, Tucker details the corporate attacks on people who dared attend or listen to the Trump rally – people who had nothing to do with what happened at the Capitol. (We here at American Thinker also condemn strongly the small number of people who engaged in violent and manifestly illegal activity. We believe absolutely in the Constitution and the rule of law. That doesn’t mean, though, that we don’t believe that there were Antifa and other provocateurs in D.C. intentionally inflaming people and inducing them to act illegally.)
Back to Tucker….
PayPal suspended the account of a group that paid for Trump supporters to travel to Washington. Rocker Ariel Pink’s record label dropped him for attending the rally. A flight attendant’s union has demanded that all “insurrectionists” may no longer travel commercially anywhere in the United States.
And what’s an “insurrectionist?” According to a letter from congressional Democrats, “it is anyone who sympathizes with what happened on Wednesday.”
Everyone should be afraid of this definition and its consequences. People should push back but corporate America is piling on, instead. People who control our money, health, and ability to travel are nailing anyone who questions the election.
Democrats are now trying to eject all congresspeople who asked to have an audit of the election. Tucker points out that, beginning in 2000, Democrats routinely objected to Electoral College certifications, except that it wasn’t “insurrection” then. These same corporate oligarchs (yes, oligarchs, just as in Russia) are also making it impossible to donate money to the Republican politicians who did what their Democrat peers did in past years. It’s a new standard that only cuts one way.
The new ruling class also wants to destroy people’s livelihoods. A Forbes editor announced that any company that hires someone from the Trump administration will preemptively be assumed to be corrupt. Joe McCarthy could only have dreamed of this level of guilt by association.
Tucker notes the irony of a Biden administration is that Americans were encouraged to vote for him because they’d get normalcy. Theoretically, that would include normalcy from the unending hysteria and violence leftists brought to the Trump administration. Democrats were daily encouraging Americans to attack Trump and his supporters – and one man took that invitation up and tried to assassinate a huge group of Republican congresspeople, almost killing Steve Scalise.
Back then, corporations said nothing and did nothing about violence. Instead, they fell over themselves funding Black Lives Matter organizations – and cheerfully funded bailing out violent BLM protesters. (Kamala Harris approved, as she approves of censoring opposing political ideas.) Something big and bad is happening in America, as overwhelmingly powerful corporations, who aren’t answerable to anybody and who have the government in their pockets, go on a rampage against half of America.
Biden added fuel by comparing Sens. Cruz and Hawley to Goebbels. Pelosi is also urging dis-unity, explicitly race-baiting. And here’s the important point: They have to do this because they built their party on a foundation by dividing Americans into inherently oppositional special interest groups. The only way to keep those groups together is to make sure they still hate you.
There’s more but I’m out of space – and you really need to watch the whole thing here.
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