Air Date: 6–27-2026

Today we trace how one man went from receiving a $278 million government grant to becoming the world's first trillionaire who spent .025% of his wealth to get Trump elected, then used his position to slash programs that help people while stoking race riots overseas.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. Today we trace how one man went from receiving a $278 million government grant to becoming the world's first trillionaire who spent .025% of his wealth to get Trump elected, then used his position to slash programs that help people while stoking race riots overseas.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today include

MS NOW

More Perfect Union

The Last Word

Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie

I Doubt It

and Garys Economics

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 5 sections;

Section A, The Trillionaire and What He Reveals

Section B, The Human Cost of Concentrated Power

Section C, The SpaceX IPO Heist

Section D, Belfast, How Musk Fuels Racial Violence Abroad

And Section E, The Reckoning, Billionaire Rhetoric and the Case for Taxing Wealth

And now, on to the show.

The numbers, which I like to dwell on, are almost impossible to comprehend. The top 1% of households in Teton County now earn 221 times more than everyone else who lives there. Not twice as much, not 10 times as much, 221 times as much. The median home price, which means half of all homes sell for more and half sell for less, has surpassed $3 million.

What does that look like on the ground in the actual lived human reality of that valley? It looks like this. The people who make that place work, the dishwashers, the landscapers, the lift operators, the hotel housekeepers, many of them cannot afford to live anywhere near the town where they spend their days.

Some of them are sleeping in their cars. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the richest country on earth, it was named for a working man by working men, where working men can no longer afford to live. So here's the question I want us- you to sit with this morning. What if Jackson Hole isn't the exception? What if Jackson Hole is a bellwether for what's coming?

Because the same forces that turned one of America's most breathtaking mountain towns into a place where working people cannot survive, those forces are no longer contained to one zip code in Wyoming. They are reshaping this country, all of it, top to bottom, and those forces have a friend in the White House.

Nearly half of Americans today don't have enough savings to cover a single $1,000 emergency. In the richest country on earth, millions of families are essentially one car repair away from financial ruin. That's not a talking point. That's current data from Bankrate. Even those who do have an emergency account, the average balance is now about $5,000, roughly half of what it was last year.

More than 40% of Americans say they've got no emergency fund at all. None. A third of Americans say they couldn't cover even one month of living expenses if they lost their income. A majority, 59%, say their savings would last no more than three months. Forget about being a billionaire. Forget about even being a millionaire.

In Trump's America, millions of people are lucky, genuinely lucky, if they can count themselves thousandaires. A report just this week found that more Americans than ever are raiding their 401retirement savings, the money they set aside for retirement, for their retirement, for their dignity in old age, just to cover mortgages and everyday bills.

Not a lavish vacation, not any kind of splurge. Their mortgage, their groceries, their gas. Here's what makes all of this so striking. It isn't happening in a vacuum. It isn't happening because of bad luck or some unavoidable force of nature. It's happening at the exact same moment that the people at the very top of this economy are accumulating we- wealth at a pace that would make the robber barons blush Between 2017, the year of Trump's tax cuts, and 2025, the wealth of America's richest households didn't grow, it exploded.

According to a recent New York Times report, the net worth of the top 1% grew by an astonishing 120%. The number of American billionaires jumped by roughly 50%. That's the real divide in Trump's America. It's not red and blue, it's not urban and rural. It's the people sleeping in their cars in Jackson Hole, and the people who own the lodges that they can see from the parking lot that they're sleeping in.

That gap, that chasm, that's the story of this moment, and this morning we're going to follow it from one working man's valley in Wyoming all the way to the halls of the United States government. Trump ran as a populist. He stood at rallies across this country. He promised to fight for forgotten Americans, the workers, the veterans, the people who felt left behind.

But his signature economic policy, the 2017 tax cuts, delivered its biggest rewards not to those forgotten Americans, but to corporations and the wealthiest households in the country. Those tax cuts helped fuel a stock market surge that minted hundreds of new billionaires. A huge share of those gains flowed upward as corporate taxes were slashed and companies spent billions buying back their own shares.

The people who already owned most of those assets, the people who already possessed great wealth, became vastly richer. The people who were already struggling, they're still struggling. In many cases, they're struggling more. Which brings us to the part of the story that goes beyond economics. Because when wealth concentrates this dramatically, when the distance between the top and everyone else becomes this vast, it doesn't just reshape the economy, it begins to reshape power itself.

In the last election cycle, for every dollar donated by billionaires to Democrats, $5 went to Republicans. Much of that money came from ultra-wealthy tech and finance figures who aligned themselves with Donald Trump's tax cuts and deregulation agenda, and boy, did Trump deliver for them. At least a dozen billionaires were given roles inside the Trump administration itself.

Let that sink in for a moment. Not just donors, not just advisors calling in from the outside. People who appear on the Forbes billionaires list are running federal agencies, shaping federal policy, sitting inside the White House. And it's not just at the federal level. Across this country, billionaires are pouring unprecedented sums into races that most Americans barely know are happening.

State attorney general races, county commission seats, increasingly the courts themselves. Take Pennsylvania's recent race for state attorney general. Nearly 90% of the outside money supporting that campaign came from one single billionaire, the richest man in the state, who spent tens of millions of dollars backing his preferred candidate.

In Wisconsin, a state Supreme Court election last year became the most expensive judicial race in American history as billionaires from across the country, including notably Elon Musk, flooded the race with millions of dollars. Elections that used to be decided by voters are increasingly becoming contests measured by the billionaires who are bankrolling them.

Former Montana governor and Republican National Committee chairman, Marc Racicot, told The New York Times he remembers a time when wealthy donors hesitated to give too much money to political campaigns. They worried it might look like they were buying influence. How quaint. Roughly three-quarters of Americans want limits on how much money individuals or organizations can spend on political campaigns.

More than half of Americans, 53%, say billionaires themselves pose a threat to demo- democracy. Nearly 70% say the ultra-wealthy should play a smaller role in American politics. 71% of Americans support some form of a billionaire tax, and almost everyone, 94% of Americans, agree that the wealth gap in this country is getting wider.

That 94% should be 100%, because that's not an opinion, it's a fact. Now, I wanna be clear about something, because this argument gets mischaracterized. Most Americans are not angered by success. This country was built on the idea of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, on the promise that hard work and ingenuity can take you anywhere, but that ideal assumes a level playing field.

What Americans resent, what they're telling us in poll after poll, is a system where the ultra-rich play by one set of rules and everyone else plays by another. A system where wealth doesn't just buy comfort, it buys wholesale impunity. Scott Ellis, a former technology executive and a member of a group called Patriotic Millionaires that advocates for higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy, put it with striking clarity.

Quote, "At some point, there's nothing you can spend money on that actually makes your life materially better, so money simply becomes power. The question for us is not how much wealth we want other people to have, but how much power," end quote. How much power? That question is at the heart of everything Americans are grappling with right now, and for many of them, the Epstein scandal has come to symbolize exactly that kind of system, one where immense wealth and powerful connections appear to place certain people permanently above the rules that govern everyone else.

The scandal pulled back the curtain on what some lawmakers now call the Epstein class, a network of ultra-wealthy elites whose status has time and again appeared to insulate them from any consequences whatsoever. Or as Congressman Ro Khanna, a crusader for justice in the Epstein case, recently put it

Most people don't begrudge, people who have, uh, do well and build wealth, but they begrudge the fact that if they have a different set of rules, and they begrudge the fact that they can't have a secure economic future for their families.

And I bring up the Epstein case for a reason. At last month's hearing on the Epstein case, the Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked a direct and specific question about the case and the investigation, and this is what she said

None of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein.

How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump, the Dow right now is over, the Dow is over 50,000... I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7,000, and the NASDAQ smashing records. Americans' 401ks and retirement savings are booming.

That's what we should be talking about.

That's what we should be talking about. What officials like Pam Bondi appear not to understand, or perhaps understand perfectly and simply don't care about, is that stock market numbers are cold comfort to the one-third of Americans who couldn't survive a single month without a paycheck.

They're cold comfort to the families raiding their retirement savings to pay rent. They mean nothing to the workers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who are sleeping in their cars. There is now a resounding sense across this country that the rules of the system have been rewritten quietly, deliberately, and very much on purpose for a very small group at the very top.

The same forces that reshaped one working man's valley in Wyoming are reshaping towns and cities and counties across the United States of America. As the midterm elections get underway, the question on voters' minds is not complicated. In fact, it's very simple. Who does the American economy and our democracy really work for anymore?

Every piece of evidence we have is that the IPO is being engineered to rise very rapidly after it prices, and then fall very dramatically after that.

That is a recipe for retail investors especially to take large losses

Here's how the scheme works and what you can do about it.

So are, are there really three hours of questions

or, or

how does it- Yeah. We- Are you fucking serious? Yeah. I have to be careful about saying things about companies that might go public.

Um. You know.

That's never been a problem for you, Elon. Yeah, you

can't hype companies, um, that are, that, that may, that might go public.

$1.75 trillion. That's the value Elon Musk has floated for SpaceX when it goes public this month. More than Walmart. Is it worth that?

SpaceX is a real company. It shoots satellites up in the sky.

It provides things like Starlink. It, it's, it's a very impressive, uh, engineering company.

That's Robin Wigglesworth, editor at the Financial Times.

There is definitely real business to be done there and real asset value there. Uh, the question is whether it is as large as Musk claims it is.

George Perkies advises investors where to put their money.

Last year, SpaceX made about $19 billion, most of it from Starlink and government contracts. But a company's market value is partially a bet on what that company will earn in the future. That bet is called a revenue multiple. Facebook went public at roughly 10 times its projected revenue. SpaceX is asking for over 50 times.

The combination of sheer size and this extreme multiple is completely unprecedented.

Based on the numbers that we know, that is absolutely batshit.

This valuation seems too good to be true. Some investors may need it to be. In 2022, Elon Musk raised $44 billion and bought Twitter. His backers, Andreessen Horowitz, a Saudi prince, the co-founder of Palantir, and Jack Dorsey, the guy who founded Twitter in the first place.

Musk renamed it X, and within a year, it's worth less than half he paid. That's a problem. There was also a solution. AI was hot. Musk owned an AI company, so he merged X into xAI. No cash changed hands. X investors received xAI stock. But that solution raised another problem.

xAI is essentially a money furnace.

The

solution, Musk has a rocket ship company. He uses it to buy xAI. Again, no cash exchanged. Three companies, two mergers, $0 actually paid. Everyone who helped take Twitter private now holds SpaceX shares. Now, SpaceX isn't just a rocket company that sells internet. According to Musk, it's the future, data centers in space.

If some of my predictions come true, SpaceX will launch, uh, more AI than the cumulative amount on Earth combi- of everything else combined.

I see no evidence that it's a viable business opportunity. There are far too many physical challenges with doing this.

But the value has to hold because so far no one has been paid.

Investor shares are only worth something on paper. To turn paper into cash, SpaceX has to go public. When a company goes public, it opens its doors. Early investors cash out, get paid for the risk they took. Everyone else gets a chance to own a piece of something that used to be off-limits. It's called an initial public offering, or IPO for short.

It is a very normal part of a company's evolution and life cycle.

There isn't just Twitter investors here. SpaceX's original investors took a big risk. Peter Thiel, Palantir's other co-founder, Google, and Andreessen Horowitz. But SpaceX's IPO is anything but normal. In a typical IPO, 90% of shares go to institutional investors, pension funds, banks, insurance companies.

Regular people get 10%.

SpaceX says they're changing that, 30% to ordinary people, Main Street, not Wall Street.

When you see an IPO give a far larger allocation to ordinary investors, it's usually a sign that they can't get professional investors to buy at that price. The price is nuts. And if you can't sell it to professional investors, well, you sell it to unprofessional investors who don't know any better.

If people want to invest in SpaceX's IPO, that's their right. The problem is Musk found a way to make people invest in SpaceX whether they want to or not. How? Index funds

The index fund is one of the rare examples of the finance industry coming up with something that lines the pockets of ordinary people and not Wall Street itself.

An index is a list. Someone decides which companies go on it. A fund is a basket. Someone builds it to mirror the list. When a company gets added to the index, every fund mirroring it has to buy shares, not because they think it's a good investment, but because the rules require it.

Index funds have both outperformed the vast majority of active managers in every market, in every country, over any timeframe in the long run.

Thousands of indexes exist.

Nearly a third of American stock is tied to one of

them. One of the most popular tracks the NASDAQ 100, the 100 biggest non-financial stocks on the NASDAQ exchange. Under NASDAQ's index rules, SpaceX isn't eligible to be included in the NASDAQ 100. New companies have to wait up to a year.

It's called seasoning.

Seasoning a stock is just the process of having it trade publicly for a while. Public markets tend to be unsure of how to handle certain kinds of investments, um, novel, um, sorts of companies really quickly

Like a rocket company that makes most of its money providing satellite internet and wants to build AI infrastructure in space.

If Musk could change that rule, he could trigger mandatory buying of SpaceX stock by every fund that tracks the index. This spring, NASDAQ changed their rules. This document outlines the proposed changes to the NASDAQ 100 index. The most important, a fast entry rule. If a huge company goes public, it gets into the index in 15 trading days.

No seasoning. There was a public comment period. Wall Street was for it. They say companies are more mature now, and these changes allow the index to better represent the market. The opposition came from regular investors concerned about buying unproven companies at high prices. But the rule change isn't the goal.

The goal is what the rule change enables, a plan with four different steps Like everything, the price of a stock is based on supply and demand. How do you increase the price? One, artificial scarcity. Most IPOs offer 15 to 20% of their shares to the public. SpaceX, less than five.

Two, of those shares, retail investors get 30%, or up to three times the normal allocation.

Remember, Main Street over Wall Street.

Combined, a bunch of demand and a small supply. That means a higher than normal price. Three, 15 trading days after the IPO, SpaceX enters the NASDAQ 100. Any index fund tracking the NASDAQ 100 now has to buy SpaceX.

You have this wall of money coming from index funds that, that it has to buy no matter what the price.

Turbo-charging the price. Step four, let early investors cash out. There are restrictions on this, a lockup period. Same idea as seasoning. The people who know the most aren't allowed to sell until the market has had time to actually figure out what the stock is worth.

According to SpaceX's own IPO filing, Elon has to wait a year, but some early investors can begin cashing out before the standard 180 days The people buying as the price rises,

retirement savers through index funds.

The people selling? If history is any guide, the original SpaceX, Twitter, and xAI investors.

I, I like to stay optimistic when I can, but the setup there is for some pretty abusive market manipulation. Um, legal? Probably. Ethical? Doubtful. Um, and in fact, absolutely not.

None of this works without Nasdaq changing the rules.

Musk made sure there was an incentive to do so.

Nasdaq is both an index provider and an exchange.

Ben Schiffrin spent 18 years at the Security and Exchange Commission, which oversees the stock market.

You know, it kind of used to be the case that the exchange, um, you know, wasn't really supposed to be this for-profit money-making entity, but now it is.

Two stock exchanges compete for every major listing, New York and Nasdaq.

For the Nasdaq stock exchange, having SpaceX i- is a big win. You want big prestigious tech map companies to go public there, and the New York Stock Exchange wants them to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

SpaceX was the prize.

Musk knew it. According to Reuters, Musk conditioned where SpaceX would list on one thing: fast-track SpaceX into their major index.

It's all gravy for Nasdaq.

SpaceX pays Nasdaq to list their stock. The real money is somewhere else.

All the data and trading fees that they then sell over time, year after year, to other trading firms, to asset managers.

Nasdaq changed a rule that shapes trillions of dollars in retirement savings. No regulator approved it.

If an index wants to change how it's going to include certain stocks in that particular index, that is not something that has to be approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Upwards of $30 trillion is being directed by a process that's effectively self-regulated.

I think at some point we are going to have to say that these are incredibly influential investment advisors in practice, and they should be regulated and supervised accordingly.

Because it's not just SpaceX or Nasdaq.

You can see how, you know, one index provider getting the ball rolling would perhaps lead other index providers to follow.

You've probably heard of the S&P 500. It's the most powerful index in the world. Bloomberg reported the S&P is considering its own version of what Nasdaq just did. They'd shorten the seasoning period, and they'd let the largest companies in without ever showing a profit. The reason isn't a mystery. OpenAI and Anthropic are both expected to go public this year at massive valuations.

Neither is profitable. There's no regulator watching. The only check is the index provider's own internal comment process. Nasdaq just ran one of those. When I asked Nasdaq if the change was made because SpaceX demanded it, and if there's a conflict of interest in being both an exchange and an index provider, Nasdaq never answered the conflict of interest question but did say that the rule change reflects how markets have evolved.

The consultation they said followed industry standards. The S&P is running the same playbook on the biggest index in the world.

Dr. Atul Gawande, the former head of Global Health at the United States Agency for International Development, reported in The New Yorker, as of November 5th, it is e- it estimated that USAID's dismantling has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. That's 400,000 children. Dr.

Gawande followed the journey of one mother trying to save her baby suffering from malnutrition

So this is Jane Sandy. She's about 15 months old. We need to monitor such a patient very closely. If the skin is thin and weak and breaking off easily, they lose a lot of heat, and, they're not able to control their own temperature.

Yeah,

so they become hypothermic.

They become hypothermic easily. And, for caloric intake, we feed them every two to three hourly. This is a difficult case for us. For a long time we've not been seeing such cases.

20 years ago in places like Kakuma, children with severe malnutrition had a death rate of around 20%.

That is now less than 1%. It's been a public health miracle.

But management of malnutrition is a system so fragile that one budget cut could make everything just fall apart. Clinic 7 provides the highest level of care, for all refugees. We started to see the impact of the funding cuts quite early when we had the first wave of people being let go of.

There was a lot of incredulity, "This, this can't be happening. This actually cannot be happening." It seemed unimaginable that the cuts would be as bad as they were and affect the sectors, where life-saving activities were ongoing

Joining us now is Dr. Atul Gawande, physician and former head of Global Health at the United States Agency for International Development.

He's now the executive producer of the new documentary, Rovena's Choice. It's currently available at newyorker.com, and you really must see it. Doctor, what happened to Jane Sunday, the baby we saw in that video?

I don't wanna give away the ending, but I will say that, Rovena's Choice, as the film is called, is about a mother who is having to navigate with Jane Sunday, that baby that you saw, who is sick, who's suffered from malnutrition with food aid cuts that have left th- the, that baby and the family with just one meal per day.

And then took apart the clinic functions that can rescue a child like that, and the mother was forced into a choice that no mother should have to make.

I, I, I'm so grateful for you, getting over there and actually getting at this story because it has been invisible here. We, we don't have enough cameras there.

We don't have enough reporters there. What did you, what did you discover that you couldn't know from here, from this side of the Atlantic?

One thing to understand is why we don't... if 600,000 children and adults have died, why do we not see it? And part of the answer, a big part of the answer is that, first of all, data capture has been part of what has been cut off by, Marco Rubio and DOGE when the cuts came through and they dismantled USAID.

They fired the inspector generals who would be in the field doing audits and be able to show what is happening. But also, when you have work that's ongoing across 65 countries where you are lowering the death rates for children from, say, 4% to 3%, when you have it bounce back up to 4%, that's a, that's a one-third increase in deaths.

But you don't notice it just walking around. You have to follow people's stories, and that's what we set out to do because the statistics for 2025, the final ones won't be out for a couple years, but we know what has happened when, individual countries have seen cuts, and these are conservative estimates that are at 600,000.

And you could see the f- the falling apart of, in this case, malnutrition care, life-saving care. You can see it in HIV, you can see it in TB, you can see it in childbirth. And I saw it, and, and, and the filmmakers I've been working with have been documenting it for, now several months.

Y- you make the point that this kind of assistance is more than just medical, that this helps support a society generally and, and that Kenya, for example, was moving up, in economic development in a way, in ways that were thanks to this kind of work.

Yeah, this is important to understand. John F. Kennedy formed USAID out of the inspirational lesson of the Marshall Plan, where instead of, pillaging countries that we had defeated in war, they invested, we invested in those countries to bring them into development and enable them to be partners.

That's what USAID did in India, in Korea, in Latin America, where 80% of countries are now middle income or high income, where they had been low income before 20, 30 years of work to advance their economies, to build governance, to save lives while they're, they're progressing. But I know from my parents' country, my family came from India, India was a country of famine, and food aid kept people alive.

But then the investments in the Green Revolution and agriculture that the US spurred helped turn India into an, a food exporter and a partner to the United States in important ways.

for 10 years we've been living in essentially the headspace of a maniac, Donald Trump, a bittered, half-formed, selfish, endless vacuum of a human being who has brought a renewed wave of open bigotry and hatred and nativism, into American politics in a way that really wasn't the case before him.

Even during the worst backlash against President Barack Obama in his first years after he was elected, there's nothing quite like this. Not- nothing quite like the open racism and open misogyny and open xenophobia. This is a little novel, as someone who does remember the before times, you might say.

And so I think that 10 years of living with this guy, who also refuses to let go of the public stage, who demands that you pay attention to him at all times, I think 10 years of that has taken a psychic toll on Americans and made them feel worse than they otherwise would. I know that certainly goes for me, and I- I'm sure it goes for a lot of you.

I'd even say that for people who like the guy, having to deal with him all the time, especially if you're just approaching him as another politician, it, it carries a toll. Outside of the cult of personality, I think paying attention to this guy constantly carries a toll in that it, it is shaping how Americans relate to their country.

So I do think that's the case, but that's quite narrow. I think there's larger things at work, too. Some of them have to do with the political economy of the United States, especially if you're on the younger end of things. It is harder to, to make ends meet. It is harder to imagine that you might be able to own a home, that you might be able to, secure a comfortable retirement, that you might be able to really do anything but survive.

If you are closer to my age, I'm 39 If you're in this approaching middle age into middle age period, there's all of that plus anxiety about the state of the economy, 'cause you're getting to the point where if you were to lose your job, if you were to lose the thing that is helping you get through, get by, you may not be able to find something else that would be as lucrative, if it's even lucrative to begin with, right?

So there's that stress and anxiety of what might happen with the economy. And if you're older, there's all of that. You're worrying about retirement as well. You're worried about the cost of l- living even more acutely, and you might be worried about your kids in their teens, in their 20s, who are struggling in this economy.

And so the extent to which this economy does not appear to be working for many Americans, the extent to which this economy does appear to be working exclusively for, the richest, the wealthiest, not just the top 1%, but the top tenth of a percent, the top, hundredth of a percent, people who have extraordinary wealth and don't seem satisfied with it, seem to just want more and more.

The extent to which our government is pulling back on the kinds of services and aid it provides to people to help them weather any of this, that we don't really get all that much support from our government to help us make our way through all of this. So in addition to feeling like it's hard to make ends meet, it also feels as if we've been abandoned to our fate.

This country has always been quite cruel, but things feel crueler than they've been. I think all of that contributes to the sense of pessimism. But then related to that, and this is, the other part of my answer when I was talking about this on this panel Related to this is the absolute lack of control and efficacy it engenders.

When Elon Musk can play a couple financial games and become a trillionaire, when income inequality is such that there are such vast gulfs in wealth and influence and power that it feels as if your political participation doesn't matter because you'll just get outweighed by the rich anyway. When unions are on the decline and you don't really have any say in your workshop, in your office, in your shop floor.

When even the political system itself, inasmuch as it's responsive to people, seems to be responsive to a select minority who just happen to live in the right places. And if you are like the bulk of Americans who live in a city or a suburban area or an exurban area, you might quite live in a place where you have effectively no representation, either at the national level, in national elections, either in the national legislatures due to gerrymandering and malapportionment, or even in your state legislature, depending on how, things are organized or how gerrymandered your state maps are.

Many millions of Americans effectively cannot elect a representative of their choosing thanks to extreme partisan gerrymandering. In places like Ohio and North Carolina, Democrats, for example, have to win supermajorities of the overall vote in order to get anything like a majority share of the seats in the legislature.

It just feels like it doesn't matter. So there's a real lack of efficacy, a real sense that no one is kinda looking out for you, and that no one is really attentive to you that I think is part of this pessimism. For being a country that is explicitly, and ostensibly founded on self-government, on popular sovereignty, on the idea that we rule ourselves, it doesn't feel as if we rule ourselves.

It feels as if we're being tossed here and there by forces far outside of our control. It feels as if there's no real port in the storm for ordinary Americans. And so when I think about how one might try to resolve all of this, it's not just a question of providing more economic security, although that's absolutely a part of it.

That's maybe part of the foundation of it. And it's not simply having a more responsive political system, although that is absolutely part of it. It's also the foundation of it. I think part of reinvigorating people's connection to the country, reinvigorating people's optimism is providing them a sense of efficacy, providing them a way that they can shape their fate, and pushing against the sense that nothing is within our control.

Now, how you go about that, I don't know. That's something I think about a lot. I think about it in terms of revitalizing unions. I think about it in terms of re-revitalizing civic institutions. I think about it in terms of the kind of political reform I'd like to see. But I do think that at the foundation, in addition to the economy, in addition to the political system, there needs to be this kind of civic revitalization if we ever want to see a point where Americans feel better about their future, where Americans think their future might be better, than their past

, they also tell you that the way up is to not rely on government handouts, and yet.

And yet.

And yet, where would Elon Musk be without those government handouts? He's also... what would you be doing, right? You're a trillionaire. You'd be enjoying your life probably. Instead, we have white supremacist Elon Musk, who is, amplifying racism constantly on the social media site that he owns and that many people who profess values that fight against Elon Musk still use for some reason.

But he has been using that website to generate, more animus surrounding what is happening in Belfast right now. So a stabbing happened. A man unfortunately horrifically got stabbed. He's in a coma. He lost one eye. He suffered deep wounds to his face and his neck. And this video went viral online.

And what do white supremacists love? They love images of a non-white person committing an act of violence against a white person. Why? Because they can use it to do exactly what they did in the situation in Belfast, where Elon Musk took to Twitter, was talking about how the real enemy is multiculturalism.

And people in, Northern Ireland started going door to door, burning people's houses down, burning buses, burning cars, trying to find immigrants to harm.

After nights of riots, disorder, and streets set alight, Belfast saw a different scene today. Thousands gathered in an anti-racism rally. Their message: We must stand up against violence and hate, and be as loud as the rioters.

This is the real Belfast. We need to work together, both sides of the community, to say that all people are welcome here. And I just want to say that the people who were out rioting do not represent us.

Every single time that fascism wants to breathe, we need to suffocate it. Particularly as a white person, you need to sit in your white privilege and be loud and be at the front, and make sure that you're the person carrying the brunt of this.

That's not the Belfast that I know, which is primarily a city of welcome, of love, a people who stand against racism. So that's why I'm here to stand with my neighbors who maybe weren't born here, that they are welcome, that this is their city too, and to call out the politicians who I'm afraid, with some of their inflammatory rhetoric, have fueled the violence this week.

And this is what they reject. Masked men taking to the streets, burning buses, throwing petrol bombs, and blocking roads. Anti-immigration protests erupted on Tuesday night after footage captured the moment a man was violently stabbed in the street before passersby came to his rescue. Hadi El-Odida, a 30-year-old Sudanese national, was charged with attempted murder on Wednesday.

40-year-old Stephen Ogilvie lost his left eye in the attack. He remains in hospital as he recovers. His family said they do not want this terrible tragedy to fuel hostility. But the rioters ignored their plea and went door to door, targeting Belfast's ethnic minority communities, the government describing their behavior as racist thuggery.

Earlier this week, I visited the largest mosque in Belfast, which now has 24-hour security.

We just don't want an individual act of lawlessness to affect the whole community or our whole community be targeted. We always say two wrongs doesn't make right, so we condemn violence in any way or shape by individuals or organization or whatever.

It's just not acceptable. We are living in a country of law and also, so we just want to give the authority, a chance.

Unrest in Belfast follows similar protests in Southampton over the killing of Henry Nowak. There, 13 people have been jailed over violent clashes with police. And in Northern Ireland, 23 people have so far been charged.

But after three summers of riots flaring up in Northern Ireland, there are many in this community who've had enough

Horrific stuff. And rather than use his largesse, his over $1 trillion of net worth to make the world a better place, Elon Musk is stoking racial animus and literal violence against Black people in Ireland. And it's... I tell you what, it, it is heartwarming to hear so many activists, in Ireland, on the ground, citizens of the country, residents of Ireland s- coming out to say, "This ain't who we are.

This is not who we are, and it needs to stop."

Yeah, and just to clarify some of those posts from Elon Musk, he reposted a video of himself saying, or someone else quoting him saying, "Elon Musk was always right. You either fight back or you die." Elon Musk reposted it and said, "That's what it comes down to."

There was another one where he responded to someone saying, "Call me racist all you like, but I'm not up for getting beheaded in the street for the sake of diversity and multiculturalism." Elon Musk responded with two 100 emojis. Someone wrote, "Does a government that fails to police and defend its own borders have any value or legitimacy whatsoever?"

And Elon Musk wrote, "No." And what you said about people protecting their communities I think is very notable here, because similar to what we saw in Minnesota, we've actually seen people mobilize on behalf of their neighbors. And there's someone named Lee Hurley who is a writer in Belfast, and Lee wrote this on Bluesky.

"Hundreds of strangers in Belfast working together, doing shopping, providing accommodation, driving kids to school, people to hospital appointments. Have just been told of a woman close to us who hasn't left her house since Monday, so we'll be sorting her out today and getting her anything that she needs."

And what's remarkable about this, several things are remarkable, that the community is coming together so many communities do in the face of absolutely horrific racist violence. But- think through this for a moment because these racists love to use these one-off examples to then weaponize people, racists, against an entire community of people.

What would people like Elon Musk do if women decided to go door to door after a white rapist was, in the headlines? Every time a Brock Turner pops up, what if women went door to door dragging men out of their houses, lighting their homes on fire? That's the same situation here, right?

You're using it... One example of a person, an individual committing an act of violence and saying that this broadly represents the entire people in that community of people. It's completely illogical. It's stupid. It's ignorant. And Elon Musk is happy to use this, his massive platform, to generate more violence against vulnerable people.

Who would have thought that the man who threw up a Nazi salute during Donald Trump's inauguration celebration would be involved in this? Exactly. Shocking. Shocking. Of all those people who denied that Elon Musk is a racist, is a white supremacist, is a neo-Nazi, i- has a- affection for these, ideologies, where are they now?

They're cheering on the violence in Belfast is where they are. And it's not, look, it's not just regular folks. There are people in the media who are absolutely standing up in defense of the violence and the terrorism that's taking place on the streets of Belfast, Brian Kilmeade included.

Belfast, how they're standing up because their leaders have let them down in their own streets, trying to take their country back.

They wanna label them as racist or xenophobic. All they wanna be is Irish. They want Ireland back, and that is what we've been saying for the longest time. So when you see their fight in the streets, and I've never been to Northern Ireland, I see a lot of the same fights here as they almost beheaded a guy for being Irish by another guy that came from another country, from Sudan, who felt as though they haven't beheaded someone lately, so he thought he'd start then.

I'm gonna, we're gonna pau- I, it's got a minute and 14 left, and holy shit, we're pausing.

It gets worse the longer that you listen to it.

Standing up is what these p- these people who are going door to door, trying to remove Black and brown people from their homes, and then lighting them on fire if they don't come with them, they're, all they're doing is standing up for their country and trying to, take their country back.

The same thing that h- we're seeing here in the United This is what he has to say about it? This is what on Fox News he has to say? This is the endorsement of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News? Shocking shit. He continues

Sometimes what you're seeing i, in Northern Ireland is they feel like, and this is just my opinion, they feel like that maybe the, administration and their politicians not, don't, doesn't have their back.

The American people know that President Trump and this administration has their back. We're pushing against them. The Biden administration is the ones that caused this problem on our streets. We're fighting every single day to clean this mess up. We're chasing the criminals down. We're getting the worst of the worst, and we're going after them with the best of the best.

Our employees in law enforcement and DHS literally emphasize the best of the best. Keep in mind, they've been shut down four times over the last year by these radical Democrats. President Trump now has finally funded them for three years because of his vision in that, and they were willing to do their job for free just because they're going after the criminals 'cause they believe in what America can be.

And listen, we're not anti-immigrants. We want you to- Of course ... come here and, and believe in our system, believe in our law and order, and wanna add to what America, values can bring to your lives if you choose to embrace it. If you wanna bring your country that you ran from and bring that type of activity to America, you're not welcome here and we're gonna send you back.

Not gonna happen. Meanwhile- "

We're not anti-immigrant," Markwayne Mullin says, and then you hear Brian Kilmeade go, "Of course," after he was just saying, "They just want their country back. That's why they are going door to door and lighting the homes on fire of people who aren't white."

there's not a lot of real clear arguments in this week's Economist against wealth taxes.

But the one which they really go with, the one, the only one which they really develop, even though it's, two f- two full pages on this, is that it deters innovation. So let's dig into this idea, which is that a wealth tax of 2% on wealth above 10 million pounds is going to deter innovation.

Imagine you're in this situation, okay? They're saying that if we tax very wealthy people at just 2% on their wealth of above 10 million pounds, so you don't pay anything unless you are worth more than 10 million pounds Some, young, bright spark is gonna be like, they've just come out of university, and they're thinking, "You know what?

I've got this amazing idea, and I think if I put this into a business plan, then I might become worth more than 10 million pounds." And y- you won't be paying even 1% unless you're worth more than 20 million pounds. So maybe you're thinking, "Oh my God, I've got this great idea, and it's gonna make me worth 20 million pounds," one of the, in the t- richest, .1% more than that of society.

I'm gonna live a life of incredible luxury. But if it works, I might have to pay 1% a year to the government. it. I'm not gonna do it. I just, this is... Okay, so assume anyone watching this, if you had the business idea that you thought would make you 20 million pounds, but in the future you might have to pay 1% to the government, would you then say, "You know what?

it. I don't wanna be worth 20 million pounds"? And this is in the context of an existing tax system which taxes graduates at a top rate, top marginal tax rate in the UK of 71%, 78 and a half percent in Scotland, right? And puts anyone who wants to do, a degree in, often hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of debt.

And you think the thing that is going to deter innovation is people thinking, "Oh my God, if I become a multi-millionaire, heaven forbid even a billionaire, I might have to pay 2%." Like this is totally insane, right? A- and it is... it just completely... the, this is the flip of exactly what is really happening, right?

Which of these two things is going to make you less likely to really try to become, a business superstar? The fact that if it works you'll have to pay one or 2% to the government, or the fact that on the way to get there, first you have to take hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of debt, and then you have to pay 70% of your income to the government on the way there.

Th- this is the exact reason why it's tax wealth, not work. The beauty of the wealth tax is it does not tax doing the thing. It doesn't tax getting rich. It doesn't tax making money. It doesn't tax creating a business. All it taxes is the hoarding of enormous amounts of assets. It's as simple as that.

So how can you possibly say that moving a tax system away from one which aggressively taxes further study, aggressively taxes innovation, towards one which taxes that less and taxes hoarding more, is preventing innovation? It's it's absolute madness, right? But even if you believe that, even if you think, "Okay, the reason people are not innovating is because they're worried at some future point I'm gonna get taxed 2%," even if you believe that, the same would be true of inheritance taxes.

So it's... I just... I think it's so interesting and so revealing that, in a system where we have aggressive taxes on profits, on work, on profitable investments, and we have no taxes on the hoarding of enormous amounts of wealth, where if you are gonna make money you're gonna pay 50% of that on the way up, that the Economist thinks that is going to be less disincentivizing to you than the idea that if you become a billionaire you might have to pay 2%.

It is honestly beautiful. It's so absurd. There's two whole pages of this. The only other argument that is really made against wealth taxes, there's just a lot of them, trying to shit on Gabriel Zucman, really. The only other argument is that, one, it's confiscatory, right? Confiscatory.

I just... W- whatever that means. If wealth taxes are confiscatory, are income taxes not confiscatory? If wealth taxes are confiscatory, are inheritance taxes not confiscatory? Once again, there's no, That is the nature of tax. Tax is money that you make that you have to give to the government.

That's what tax is. It's confiscatory. That's the nature of tax. It's a nonsense argument. And the other one, the other argument they make, which is probably my favorite one, is seizing the assets of society's most productive people is a road to economic ruin. We are building an economy here where the only way to have a house is to have a rich dad, and where ordinary people are going into hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt to get degrees that get them the best jobs in the country, and can't afford to buy a house.

Who's seizing whose assets here? We used to be a country where ordinary working people could buy property. Now we're a country where you can only inherit property. Who... This is... Are the most productive people in the country holding the assets here? If the way to get assets... This really reminds me...

I remember this. Early on in my career, I went on TV to argue against... the Bet365 CEO had paid herself something like 360 million quid, and I went on to debate someone against it with... from the IEA, which is a right-wing think tank here in the UK. And the argument she made was, " this is the cost you pay for talent.

The, this is... the reason why," I think her name was Denise Coates, "got paid something like 360 million pounds is because she's the most talented person in the country to run that job." And unfortunately for her, the woman I was debating, I had looked up how Denise Coates got that job, for which she got paid 360 million pounds.

She got it because her dad owned the company. This is... You know- If you want a country that gives assets to productive people, stop charging ordinary working people, university graduates 70% when you're not paying, when you're not charging billionaires anything. So I just wanna say, and, I would love for The Economist to answer this, when you are opposing wealth taxes and you are supporting inheritance taxes, where is your intellectual integrity? How can you be viscerally opposed to taxing the richest people in the world 1% on their stock of wealth every year when you are simultaneously, allegedly supportive of taxing them 50% every 30 years?

I, I... Is it the time horizon? I- it's are you aware that for the super rich, inheritance taxes and wealth taxes are effectively the same? I just do not understand w- where this has come from. And I... So then this asks the question, basically, how... And I think this is probably the most interesting thing.

How and why have, the Western intellectual classes, as typified by The Economist here, managed to get themself to such a, picturesquely stupid situation as simultaneously opposing and supporting the same tax based on whether it is every one year or every 30 years? So I think if you wanna understand what is, going on in the heads of these people, who hate wealth taxes but apparently love inheritance taxes, I think probably the best answer I've got was given to me in one of these meetings.

So last year I had these two separate meetings where, influential figures in British economics and politics said to me, "Oh, wealth tax is never gonna work. What we need is inheritance taxes." And, the first time it happened to me, I was, ho- honestly immediately quite shocked. I was just like, " how?

How can you support wealth taxes and be against inheritance taxes?" And then this lady said to me, "Listen, wealth tax is never gonna work. What I need you to do is get the public to want to support inheritance taxes." And I had my head in my hands and I said Do you not understand? If what you want is for somebody to build public support for a tax which taxes the richest people in the country based on their stock of wealth so that we can actually get some tax out of these guys, I have literally delivered that to you on a plate.

And you are now turning around to me and saying, "Oh, we don't want that. We want it to be specifically called an inheritance tax." And I remember she looked at me... Honestly, oh, God, it reminded me of being at church as a kid when these guys looked at me like, "What the are you saying?" This is just...

I cannot accept this. I cannot believe it. Like brain does not compute. It came up again then in another meeting with somebody a few days later, and, I don't know, it's probably a few weeks later, and, I tried again to explain to this, this gentleman, if you want- The public to accept a tax on the very rich.

I have built that public support for you, so come and help me do it. And this guy turned around to me and said, "Oh, but your tax, the specifics of your tax don't work." And this guy was, allegedly one of the tax experts of the country, and I said to him, "Work with me to help me make it better so that it works then.

Help me do it. Help me build it. Make it work." And this guy just flatly laughed in my face. And I think what this shows you is the reason these guys support inheritance taxes whilst opposing wealth taxes is because they don't want to pay tax. It's as simple as that, and they know that wealth taxes are becoming a political possibility.

And I think in the medium term, they're even a political probability. Like wealth taxes are probably going to come into place. The new Hungarian government is gonna do them. We... These are going to happen, and these people, who in many cases are themselves rich, they look at that and they say, "I don't wanna pay tax on my wealth."

So what they want is to throw this distraction away and say, "Listen, make inheritance tax," because quite simply, they know inheritance tax is hated, inheritance tax is demonized. If it's called an inheritance tax, it won't happen.

We've just heard clips starting with

MS NOW charting how extreme wealth concentration, from Jackson Hole workers sleeping in cars to billionaires bankrolling elections, is reshaping both the economy and American democracy itself

More Perfect Union exposed how SpaceX's IPO, valued at over 50 times projected revenue, was structured to enrich early Twitter and XAI investors at the expense of ordinary retirement savers.

The Last Word aired Dr. Atul Gawande's warning that DOGE's dismantling of USAID has caused an estimated 600,000 deaths, reversing decades of progress that had cut child malnutrition death rates from 20 percent to under 1 percent.

Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie argued that Americans across all age groups feel abandoned by an economy rigged for the ultra-wealthy and by rampant gerrymandering, left powerless to shape their own lives.

I Doubt It broke down how Musk used a viral Belfast stabbing video to push anti-multiculturalism messaging, triggering racist riots while Fox News hosts like Brian Kilmeade justified the violence on air.

And Garys Economics debunked The Economist's central case against wealth taxes, arguing that elites prefer inheritance tax framing precisely because they know it is too unpopular to ever pass.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

*But first, speaking of the upward concentration of wealth leaving the rest of us behind, I'm just repeating the sad news about our show going through some financial troubles, we even had to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up, cutting our budget by about a third.

Right now, I'm taking some time to rethink everything about the show and reimagine what all we're capable of producing, using new tools that simply weren't available when I got started the first time. Progress has been steady so I'll be excited when all of the new processes I've been building over the past month or more begin to bear fruit.

And, to our members supporting the show, you're really getting us through right now and we appreciate your patience while we go through this process of renewal.

If you haven't signed up yet but are thinking about it, each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor so it's not particularly cheap to produce and essentially every dollar we can spare right now beyond basic costs will be going toward finding new listeners.

So, if you get value out of the show - and think others would too! - and want to get it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

Speaking of bearing fruit, I began with the lowest hanging fruit which is the relaunch of our listener voice message segment which people would regularly say was their favorite part of the show.

I've been asking a discussion question in each episode to kick things off but you should also feel free to respond to anything you heard on the show, including other voice messages.

So, here are today's questions:

When you've argued about taxing billionaires with someone in your life, what objections come up the most and has anything ever changed their mind?

And one more, on a different note: the Belfast part of this episode talks about how, after the riots, hundreds of strangers ran errands for neighbors, drove kids to school, and sheltered families too afraid to leave home. If you've ever been part of that kind of showing-up after something terrible, what was it like, and how did it come together? Rebecca Solnit wrote "A Paradise Built in Hell" to highlight how good it feels when communities come together in the wake of tragedy, and people always benefit from hearing those stories so if you have one, share it.

And here are a few messages we've received recently:

   Hey, Jay. Love the show. This is Jan from London. Just a quick idea about why people, are not so up in arms about, billionaires and now trillionaires. So I think that a lot of people when they hear the word one million, they understand what that number is. It's, one with six zeros. I think that many, many people, think that a billion is just two with six zeros. Like, a billion is the same as two million. And a trillion, I think they think it's just a three with six zeros, like three million. And that's why people don't really care about billionaires, or trillionaires. That's what I think. That's why inequality is-- doesn't really impress people that much. Just an idea.

 hi Jay. Just wanted to add one more thing to my previous comment about the million and billion and trillion. I think people think a million is one with six zeros, a billion is two with six zeros, and a trillion is three with six zeros. I think it'd be more effective generally to say instead of a billion, a thousand million, and instead of a trillion, a million million. That's just my, million cents on that topic. Thanks.

 Hey Jay and the rest of the Best of the Left team. My name's Truman. This voice message I'm leaving in response to the most recent episode about counterfeit populism. At some point, a commentator was talking about Rob Sand and how he has real bipartisan appeal because of his time at the state auditor, and people view him as a fiscal hawk. And I thought this was really interesting because it's always seemed silly to me how conservatives are lauded as the fiscally responsible ones, especially under the Trump administration, it's more obviously fictitious, and I think that there's a real opportunity for Democrats and the left more broadly to take over the fiscal responsibility branding. It seems to me that there are countless arguments that left-wing policies are actually more cost efficient, and the strongest would be that universalized programs are way cheaper to administer than means-tested ones, or in general, investing in the well-being of people with their tax money seems like the most, quote-unquote, responsible thing to do. And lastly, it seems very obvious, to me that constant tax cuts are fiscally irresponsible, and Democrats could claim the term deficit hawk when justifying higher taxes on the wealthy. However it comes to be, I think that especially for the swing voters who decide based on vibes sometimes, it would be nice to hear the Democrats finally be the hawks and not the doves about something. It makes them sound cooler. anyway, That's my thought. Keep up the good work, and bye.

Thanks to everyone who's called in. If you would like to follow these brave trailblazers and have your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes. I also upped the limit on the length of the recording time to give you a bit more breathing room when you're getting your thoughts together.

A couple of quick responses: I'm sure Jan is on to something and that people have probably found almost every way possible to fail to understand the sheer scale of wealth inequality in the world right now. People in the know have been trying to clarify it for a long time, but the numbers are simply so big that they're almost pure abstractions to people and hard to wrap your mind around even while looking at a very precise explainer designed to help you wrap your mind around them.

As for the Fiscal Hawk angle, I think Truman is on to something with the reframing, but the problem has been with us for quite a long time with the help of very intentional propaganda and people's own built-in assumptions. The Republican Party has essentially always positioned itself as the pro-business party and I think people think about how businesses have to function within their budgetary constraints, and then imagine that a party that's pro-business must also be good at balancing the governmental budget in the same way but that's a leap in logic that simply doesn't hold up. Particularly when "pro-business" just means giving tax cuts to businesses and the wealthy that starves the government of tax revenue.

And the propaganda that justifies the continued tax cuts goes back a lot farther than most people realize. The current discussion about trickle-down economics only goes back to about the Reagan era, but way back in the 1800s they were pitching the same horse shit, but called it horse and sparrow economics. The idea that they laid out was that if you fed a horse more hay, then there would be more seeds left on the ground for the sparrows to feast on. You can understand why they went with "horse and sparrow economics" instead of "eat shit economics" but it all comes to the same thing.

As for today's topic,

One of the left's sharpest weapons against Elon Musk right now is to not just call him a loser, but to explain the details of why he is, in fact, a loser. It's the classic strategy of hitting a person at their perceived strength, and it works on Musk on multiple levels because he has a cult following who specifically think that he is cool and he is absolutely desperate to cultivate exactly that image.

Of course, he's not the only one. There was a Guardian piece that went around about how Musk and Zuckerberg's desperation to be thought of as cool is itself painfully cringe-worthy and adds insult to the injury of the global damage they're doing.

Here's the operative quote, "I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers."

That was written by Rebecca Shaw, and she ends the piece fittingly with this, "It's too much. I can't take it. There needs to be a change. It's time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds."

There's nothing wrong with that article or the general strategy of puncturing the auras these broligarchs are trying to cultivate other than that they are insufficient.

Calling them losers is a lot more cathartic than calculated, and it doesn't actually present an alternate idea or an action item for what to do once you've identified the problem. To go deeper, we have to understand the role of these dudes' cringeworthiness through a structural lens and their most potent personality trait is their endless capacity for embarrassment.

This is the most obvious element that drives the fact that they're desperate and pathetic affirmation-seeking losers, but only applying that on the personal level doesn't get us anywhere. Understanding that the economic system we've built, with its wildly misaligned incentive structures and its pathetic susceptibility to celebrity culture and hype is what helps us understand that the system that picks winners and losers, granting wealth and power, itself selects for unbearable, cringeworthy losers capable of the type of embarrassing self-promotion required to generate the hype to attract investors.

Progressives shouldn't be criticizing people for being cringeworthy, that's not the problem with them and it's punching down based on personality traits. I know and love several cringeworthy people and wish nothing but the best for them. The problem is the system that selects for the wrong traits. As is often said, our digital town square shouldn't be designed by people with no social skills, not because people with no social skills don't deserve love and support, but because they are profoundly ill-equipped for the task at hand.

And beyond being impervious to embarrassment, the path to unlimited wealth and power also selects for a few other traits, none of which have anything to do with skill, intelligence, or craftsmanship in the construction of businesses. In addition to shameless showmanship that builds hype as a financial instrument, cozying up to government to benefit from crony capitalism and building businesses that are aligned with the government contract pipeline to feed at the public trough is an interlocking strategy to lock in cash flow, which attracts outside investors and seamlessly converts money into political power.

None of those things are meritocracy at work. It's not the late nights toiling away at cracking the code of building a better mouse trap that are rewarded, rewards are granted to those who are the right kind of clown with the right kind of connections and almost nothing more than that.

In particular, Musk's companies have benefited from public money and public programs that have profoundly helped them become what they are today. Some of that came in the form of government contracts and loans, where services were provided and the loans were paid back with interest. Other benefits came in the form of subsidies and tax credits over decades. Without government policy in place, for instance, had Tesla even survived until 2020, it would have lost money that year instead of turning a profit.

Now, I'm a progressive, and I believe in the power of government to spend money to do good things. Sometimes that means supporting companies with missions that are good for humanity, and I would put electric car companies in that category. To be precise with our criticism, it's not that we don't believe in using the power of the federal budget to tinker with the functioning of markets. The criticism now about Elon Musk is that he's a deadbeat. He took all the benefit from the government to build his companies and is now trying to avoid paying taxes on the backend while pulling up the ladder behind him to prevent competition and cement his economic and political power.

He's certainly not the only one to pull that move. It happens frequently in a lot of different areas, but it is reprehensible and it's not universal.

In stark opposition to people like Musk, there are the patriotic millionaires, an organization of actual wealthy people who lobby to restructure the tax code so that people like them are forced to pay more. They understand that, to benefit society, we can't just depend on the wealthy giving back through philanthropy. We can't maintain the current system and just hope for good billionaires to counteract the bad. We need rules changes that forcibly redistribute the wealth, precisely what Musk is fighting against as he supports far-right parties who align with his values of anti-immigrant racism and pro-oligarchy levels of taxation.

Continuing with our structural analysis, the greatest fundamental problem of the type of extreme wealth consolidation we're seeing is that it precludes almost all policies designed to benefit the vast majority of people. When power is handed over to the ultra-wealthy, you're never going to get health care for everyone. Instead, you end up with things like USAID being fed to the wood chipper, resulting in the literal deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in just over a year with many more to come. Peer-reviewed projections through the end of the decade put the toll at more than fourteen million, a number that rivals or exceeds the Holocaust when counting all populations targeted by the Nazis for extermination.

Speaking of math that's hard to swallow, Musk spent $277 million in the last election and I did a little calculation to figure out what that would be equivalent to comparing his current net worth with a middle-class American with 100 grand to their name.

The number I came up with, 25 bucks. So Musk spent the equivalent of what a person might spend on a single movie ticket and a snack to go with it and that made him the single largest donor in the country for the election cycle.

Trump ended up winning the election by carrying a few hundred thousand votes in the swing states that Musk's money targeted, and there's no reason to think that didn't help make the difference.

The callousness and cruelty of people like Musk and Trump who are indifferent to the human casualties of their policies isn't incidental. It's a natural product of the way wealth tends to alienate people from their humanity. The cutting of USAID reveals a worldview that treats people who survive on aid as an inefficiency to be corrected. That logic, that some lives are a drain and worth cutting, is fundamental to eugenicist thinking. And when people in power act on it, it tends to lead to mass death. That is why all people of good will rejected those ideas in the middle of the last century.

Granting political power to those who are structurally removed from their humanity and capacity to care about other people is precisely the same backward mechanism as allowing the most socially awkward people in the world to design our social networks.

It's cathartic to point out that these people are dangerous and inhumane losers, but what's more important is to point out that the systems we have in place select for dangerously ill-equipped people to be given large amounts of wealth and power. The systems are the real villains here, both capitalism on its own and our capitalism-entwined election campaign financing, and fundamental changes to these are what we need to be fighting for. The inhuman oligarchy is just the personified representation of our systems. They are not themselves the problem because if it weren't this particular batch of losers, the system would have selected different, equally dangerous losers all the same.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 5 topics today. First up;

Section A, The Trillionaire and What He Reveals

Followed by Section B, The Human Cost of Concentrated Power

Section C, The SpaceX IPO Heist

Section D, Belfast, How Musk Fuels Racial Violence Abroad

And Section E, The Reckoning, Billionaire Rhetoric and the Case for Taxing Wealth

I think that the more incremental already feels like a dream at this point, but, the Bidenomic interlude was actually a very good faith effort to do just that, right? It was an economic policy shop that was filled with Bernie Sanders people and Elizabeth Warren people who had studied their neoliberalism and who were like, "We need to switch this up.

We need return to better workers' rights. We need a care economy. We need to diversify. We need to figure out where the cutting edge technologies are going and make sure that we're not being completely outpaced." And that ended up being a kind of devil's bargain with a quite hawkish anti-Chinese economic policy as it ended up being rolled out with a more expansive, social democratic redistribution as policy inside the United States.

But what happened there, and I was on a panel with someone who was part of that administration at a high level in the trade policy, and I mentioned something about, about Roosevelt, FDR, and she pointed out that Roosevelt had three terms. That this stuff just takes time, right? If you're- Come on

trying to shift the, the ship of-

Come on.

Okay. You're not buying that?

Is that really what they're... Or, see, that's, what I would point out is the attempt to create that more resilient model that is not so reliant on, seven, tech companies- Yeah ... fails because we trip over our own dicks bureaucratically.

That, and that lack of ability to, when you say we're gonna get b- rural broadband out there and Musk- Yeah ... has Starlink, and he can just- Yeah ... throw them out there and do it, and you've got four years, and you don't lay any cable or get any of it done Democrats have to learn how to govern. It just-- You can't just govern on paper.

You can't just let the elites design a program and put it down and not realize when it's not being effectively implemented.

Yeah. I think this is a good direction for the conversation to go. It's actually about the willingness to govern and discipline capital, which has, been- Yes ... quite lacking in the...

And this is, I think, very relevant. It's maybe a good place to land in the conversation- Yes ... because- Agreed ... so much of this is happening in the shadow of Chinese competition, right? Mm. And so much as it hap- of, of Silicon Valley ideology is emerging in the shadow of a kind of China envy for the last ten years, right?

This feeling like that's a place where people can get things done.

Move fast, break things, boom. Yeah.

Enormous projects. Yeah, exactly. Like, things are streamlined. They just clear the way. Regulations are reshaped according to what the goal is, and that's led to a kind of narrative that was propagated in two of the big books of last year, one, Abundance, the, the other, Breakneck by Dan Wang.

And the idea in both was kind of that Americans are too lawyerly. They're too obsessed with, veto points and regulations and environmental review and so on. And the implication really is, we need to backpedal on the democracy a bit to make sure we can get big projects done better or at least, reform regulations and bureaucracy.

So the problem gets pointed out at that very grassroots level that we were just saying is now acting as a, as a kind of helpful resistance. Our re-understanding of that is that the Silicon Valley people and Musk himself have got China wrong. So China doesn't work because they clear the way of democratic veto points at the bottom level.

China works 'cause they discipline capital because they take in, they take control of the investment function, and they say, "This is where we want you to invest." And they don't let, actually, the financial class do all of the wasteful short-termist things that they do in this country, right? The problem with American capitalism is not, NIMBY-ist, people concerned about the spotted owl.

It's a problem with Share buybacks, chasing dividends- Sure ... the fact that you have a whole retail investor class that this was classic on the WallStreetBets Reddit, someone said, "Is SpaceX really gonna make money?" And the top most favorited comment was, "I don't care if the company makes money, I care if I make money."

Right? So if you have that at the core and that's what's driving the whole SpaceX IPO- Right ... then you're never gonna get China-like outcomes. So that is, I think, the big message that I think we want to- people to take away from the book too, is this balance of private and public needs to be recalibrated to put the public back in the driver's seat.

That's right. And if that means less profits for the capitalist class, then that is going to have to be part- Right ... of the settlement that they agree to.

And, and by the way, and that's the, the, the narrative that they like to, opine on is the free rider aspect of capitalism is what's- Right

actually dragging us down, is you have people- Right ... there who don't, put anything into the system, but they're free riders on the system and we provide them food and, a blanket and that's what's dragging us down. But what they never talk about is the free rider aspect of our system of these corporations.

They rely on our infrastructure that's paid by tax dollars. They rely on subsidies. They rely on a government that makes it so that capital is not in any way treated as badly as labor. It's always been exalted. And we make no demands. Like in the 2008 financial crisis, we give them all capital and we make- Yeah

no demands on that capital and that has to change.

Yeah. And the amazing thing is when there are rumblings of that changing, when there was discussion of antitrust lawsuits under Lina Khan at the FTC, for example, that was the point that the Silicon Valley class just set their hair on fire and said "We don't care how much we lose by tying ourselves up with this fascist who's coming back into office.

It's worth it because the worst thing that could happen would be capital gains getting taxed differently- Right ... or any kind of antitrust happening. So that's, you're, you're right that w- you mentioned earlier that we're rebuilding monopolies. It's one of the least observed things about the 21st century that's very strange, is the number of companies in the United States is getting fewer over time instead of more.

For decades there'd be more companies, but now you're getting these new conglomerates that buy up the competition. A new rival appears- Sure ... they acquire them. They buy out all of their staff- They do it in AI ... and buy it outright. They just buy

them and

put them behind a wall. Exactly. So what they fear is, yes, any erosion of their increasingly concentrated ability to direct all investment power in the country.

And there needs to be a kind of filter put back there, whether it's through electing more left-leaning people in charges of state pension funds, or the return to the kind of basic shareholder democracy provisions that, that existed until recently, even in something like the NASDAQ. Part of the reason Musk moves from Delaware to Texas, because he can get away from shareholder lawsuits.

Right. He can get away from any kinds of that bottom-up- Sure ... avenues. So even speaking in those very conventional terms of making capitalism work better, it seems like there must be some common ground to, cobble together a transformative economic program.

And also make it so that, the, the downside of globalization, which is the race to the bottom for corporations to go for what they can pay for labor, can't be repeated in the United States.

You can't allow Texas to be, as, as the country resents China. Isn't Texas doing the same thing to New York?

Yeah, that's the end result of, of course, decades of right to work legislation too. So there's that, we now have it compounded. We have all of the problems of neoliberalism and all of the problems of Muskism now thrown on top of that.

Because it seems like we've designed our political system to favor those who have access to it, which are the corporations. Mm-hmm. So much of the laws that have been created over these past 50 years have been to the positive for corporations and to the negative for people.

Mm-hmm. And there's actually new frontiers of this being developed every day.

Javier Milei, as aforementioned-

Yes ...

fanboy of Musk, has just pushed through new legislation in Argentina for corporate rights for non-human led corporations.

What is that S- what is that Sims? What? I don't even know what that is

The idea is there can be AI agents which could theoretically form their own companies

Oh my God

could then be recognized as corporations.

So you could have there a business model where not only is the corporation cosplaying as a person, but the co- corporation doesn't even involve any people in its leadership or direction. It's still science fiction-y

We are in a simulation. But the thing that I always return to is the optimism of that which has been, rendered can be torn asunder.

And, and I do think there is an ebb and flow here. Yeah. And the fact that your book is coming out and people are beginning to discuss this In a clear-eyed way-

Yeah ...

gives me hope that there will be, the backlash to the backlash to the backlash. Yeah. That it, it feels like it's coming.

Yeah. And it's cyclical. This is one of the things we really wanna push in the book too is, the history of technology has not just been one-way oppression. Actually, you can only explain the rightward shift of Silicon Valley people by the fact that people were using network technologies for emancipatory ways in 2020, in 2021, right?

Right. The biggest street protests in American history, you don't get those without people being able to, film things on Periscope, get c- c- organize things on Twitter. You don't get the trans rights movement, you don't get the rebirth of kind of anti-racism, attacks on workplace harassment like Me Too.

These are like hashtag activism movements, but they had real-life political effects, and they changed the mood in the country. And it was because of that, the kind of scrambling of affiliations, new kinds of solidarity that actually horizontal communication makes possible, that people like Musk freaked out and were like, "No, we need to buy that technology now."

And the Supreme Court has to say, "Let's-- We can't allow that to be- Yeah ... what is pri- have primacy in our system- Yeah ... so corporations have to be able to dominate."

Yeah. Right. Exactly. So-

Right ...

we have this callback to Donna Haraway, the communication scholar, this wonderful essay called The Cyborg Manifesto in the 1980s, where she said, the cyborg is a product of the military industrial complex.

It tends towards informatics, right? The computer is developed by the military to fulfill its own needs, servo mechanisms, anti-aircraft guns, and all the way through. But it also has a potential to do interesting and new things to human identity, right? If we are able to connect to each other in that way, we can dissolve traditional gender binaries, traditional racial hierarchies, theoretically.

Like, it's the liberatory side of on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Like, if you think about that as, an actual, like, rousing political slogan for a moment, then what Musk is trying to do is to squeeze that all back in a box and do what we call cyborg conservatism and say, "We want all the technology, but none of the emancipation."

Right. We want to hold on to these hidebound hierarchies.

It's control. It's, it's all about- It is control ... ultimately who is the programmer- Yep ... who is the user, and- Who guides the map. Yep ... and who is the NPC.

Musk's companies have received billions from the government. Total contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits by company. We are talking billions a year, whether it's Tesla, whether it's SpaceX. They also go on to say the total amount is probably larger.

This analysis includes only publicly available contracts omitting classified defense and intelligence work for the federal government. This, i- including, by the way, early on at the beginning of SpaceX and Tesla. It's not as if these companies were already incredibly profitable, making lots of money, and then they got some government contracts.

No, they got help at the very beginning. So as CNN writes, "SpaceX's first major windfall was a $278 million grant from NASA in 2006." Elon Musk is propped up by government handouts. That is simply a fact. Now, Guardian writes here as well, "Musk companies got billions from government. Now he's pulling up the ladder behind him."

It's one thing if you have the world's first trillionaire, and I don't know. first of all, that wouldn't happen if you're a good person. But somehow if it did, and you used your time to help others, and maybe speak out against how ridiculous the system is, that only you and the few up near you are benefiting from while there are tens of millions homeless and without food and shelter, m- maybe there'd be a different story here.

But this is the reality with Musk. He is a piece of garbage. "Few individuals embody ladder pulling more starkly than Elon Musk. Though he has been lauded as a self-made inventor and visionary to entrepreneur," which he is not, because of all the people that actually do the work in his companies, "Musk's empire only exists thanks to the support of massive public investment.

Yet as leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, quote-unquote, DOGE, he has directed and overseen the dismantling of the very government programs, regulations, and subsidies that enabled his rise." if I did a video just on DOGE alone, we would be here for an hour. But the amount of cuts that were made that w- programs both domestically and internationally were benefiting people, is disgusting.

And to do that while this man has doubled his wealth since these cuts shows you how insane the system is. Now, I have shown this a few times, but I'm gonna do it again in case you missed it. What does $1 billion look like? I wanna sh- be clear here. This is one billion. You have to take this when I show you the billion

and imagine that times 1,000 to get the true billion. But let's imagine here 1,000 pixels, $1,000. A million pixels, a million dollars. Almost fits in the screen. There you go. So a lot of money, a million bucks. I'd, I would love a million bucks. Please, I would love it. but then we get to a billion, and this is where I am scrolling as fast as I possibly can.

You can see the numbers just flying by. Let's pause here. Where are we at? oh, we're only at 267 million, I think. keep going We are at almost halfway, 400 something

Where's the billion? Come on. Almost there. 700 900, and we made it. There we go. That's one, one billion. Most people, from what I've seen, most billionaires have more than one billion. So how does this make any sense? How can anybody possibly justify a system where people are making one billion, let alone a trillion, 1,000 times what you just saw there?

Now, I understand it's not in the ba- it's wealth, but this is why we need to tax wealth. Nobody should be worth that much money. As, Kyle Kulinski breaks down here, "745,000 people are homeless in the US, medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, over 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, bottom 80% of Americans have just 7% of the wealth, yet this criminal is now a trillionaire.

We're a failed country." Jenny writing, "Capitalism is better than socialism because one man gets to be a trillionaire instead of everyone having healthcare." Clearly saying this sarcastically. Anyone in your life who is defending this or praising the idea of Musk becoming a trillionaire, just lay this line on them and see how they react, because nobody can possibly defend that this system makes sense.

I would argue even Elon Musk shouldn't be defending it because of how much of a loser the man is. The com- such an egomaniac. Incredibly insecure. The world's richest man is one of the saddest people on earth. If you see how, he bought Twitter, changed the algorithm so it benefits him, makes, tries to make him look good as AI, tries to make him look great. it's so sad. He we'll get to more in a second, by the way, how he, paid off gamers to play a game for him so it made it seem like he was playing the game and that he was actually good at the game when he wasn't. just levels of loser that previously not thought possible but are being attained by the world's first trillionaire.

I would argue this system isn't even benefiting him. Bug Girl writing here, "In nature if a monkey hoarded one trillion bananas, the other monkeys would beat that monkey to death and take his bananas." Nothing else to add here. F You I Quit said, "If you earn $10,000 a day from the dawn of humans 300,000 years ago, you'd have earned less money than Elon's wealth." I'm finding it hard to even know what to say. Rachel Gilmore writing, "Put differently, if you made a dollar every second, you would be a millionaire in just under 12 days. It would take you just under 32 years to become a billionaire. You would have to be born 31,709 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic era to become a trillionaire."

Again, who is possibly justifying this? I just, I had to include this. The trillionaire build looking fine there the comparison is truly uncanny. Tom Toro sharing this comic: "Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders

Volodis, or Vledos? Whatever your name is. "There's no better case for socialism than the world's first trillionaire being a massive loser who cosplays as his mom and baby online, and lies about being good at video games in attempt to give his life meaning." Yes, this is true. So Futurism covered, at least one aspect of this.

Sure, Elon Musk did role play as his toddler son on his secret burner account, but he probably isn't pretending to be his mom. so they cast some doubt on the idea of him being his mom. I don't wanna get into the whole deep story here, but basically there was a tweet online where it was his mom apparently replying to one of his tweets, but in her tweet she said, "Your mom."

So it seemed like he was actually... He didn't realize he was supposed to be on his dad's account, but he was instead on his mom's account. And so I don't know, but they cast doubt on that being the case. Regardless, he did in fact, or he does in fact pretend to be his son. I th- I guess he finds it funny.

I don't know. They write here, "With a heavy sigh, here's the part where we tell you that Musk secretly owned an alt account that he used to role play as his toddler son, X. plus he has a track record of manipulating the website to boost his own posts, and his AI chatbot, Grok, frequently lavishes a suspicious degree of praise on its creator, including insisting that he was as a great mind as Isaac Newton, and that it would be more ethical to kill one billion children if it meant saving him."

This is the world's saddest man. He may be the world's richest man, but he is not happy, and that should give us all, a little comfort in knowing that wealth can't in fact bring you happiness if you're a massive piece of shit. Kotaku here. "Yes, Elon Musk admitted cheating in Path of Exile 2 and Diablo IV amid fake gamer controversy."

So I wanna be clear, he was caught. It's not as if he came out and was like, "Yes, I pay cheaters and I'm cool because of it." No. He was caught playing a game that he actually wasn't playing. He was pretending to play Path of Exile 2 when somebody else was playing it for him, making him... boosting his account because he wanted to seem like he was, like, one of the greatest players in that game, and when he wasn't. I don't understand how much of a goddamn loser you have to be to do something like that. Look, I, I, I play lots of games. I love video games, but I play them because I enjoy playing them. I would never think to try and raise my profile online to get someone else to play a game for me. I'm not gonna get someone else to play Marathon because I wanna, I want people to think that I'm really good at Marathon when I actually suck, but even though I enjoy playing it. it's so bizarre. the man is incredibly sad, incredibly insecure, and the money has done nothing to change that.

The world's first trillionaire. I suppose that's just inflation, isn't it, really? What is a trillion? Is it like, it's like 10,000 billions? It's 1,000 billions. Is that all? And that's in dollars. uh, a million millions. That's what a billion is, a million times a million dollars. Now, that does sound, ridiculous. I think Musk made at least $250 billion on Friday, or 250,000 million. It does sound better when you do it like that, doesn't it? 250,000 million. It's not a bad day at the office. That's quite a good line, that. I looked it up, right? it's enough money to completely eradicate extreme poverty worldwide, for a year. but, but if he gave away $250,000 million today, he'd still be as rich as he was on Friday morning. And I know you don't become a trillionaire by giving your money away, but, to- imagine having billions and billions of pounds and waking up every single morning and not thinking, how can I help?" how could you not look at your bank balance and think, "I'm gonna try and save the world today. I'm gonna buy a couple of really nice houses, and a Lamborghini, and a pointless yacht, and then I'm gonna try and cure cancer, and save the lesser spotted leopard from extinction while I'm at it." How could you not do that?

Not, "How can I make more money?" Not, "How can I change the system in my favor?" Not, "How can I persuade poor people that me paying tax is bad for the economy?" Not, "How much rage-baiting can I fit in today? How much can I piss off the libtards today?" Or, how can I sell more aluminum trash panzers?" t- what's wrong with him?

Are y- are you joking? 10 years ago, Elon Musk was bragging about how we'd all have electric cars on Mars. 10 years later, he's bragging about y- how you can create your own AI child pornography on Grok whilst openly promoting far-right parties across Europe, including the AFD, which is as near Germany as got to the Nazis since, the Nazis.

The guy pays Tommy Robinson's legal bills. He speaks at his rallies. Last year, Musk was suggesting that America should liberate the Brits from our tyrannical government, suggesting the King should recall Parliament. The richest man in the world calling on an unelected monarch to mount a coup d'état. He is objectively one of the world's most prominent spreaders of misinformation, false narratives, conspiracy theories, and outright lies, deliberately stoking civil unrest.

Like the time he tweeted a picture of migrants storming a hospital in Birmingham, and it turned out to be a still from one of the Batman movies. Does being the richest person in the world make you the world's biggest asshole? Or does being the world's biggest asshole make you the world's richest man?

Musk's wealth now exceeds that of the poorest 3.8 billion people in the world combined. That's 46% of the global population. I'm not a religious man, but when I look at Elon Musk, I hope there is a heaven and a hell. That I wonder if one day he'll realize that no bank balance, no matter how impressive, can guarantee you a place in heaven if you believe in it, or indeed shield you from everlasting nothingness if you don't.

If we're lucky enough to live long enough, we are all destined to look back on our lives and be filled with a mixture of regret and gratefulness. I wonder as death draws near many years from now if Musk possesses enough humanity to recognize the true horror of the consequences of every decent choice he could have made but didn't, and whether he is capable of feeling the crippling regret that he chose instead to allow his wealth to enable despots, to amplify lies, to pay far-right racists, to call for the overthrow of democratically elected governments, to aid the destruction of our natural world, and to cause unspeakable inequality and suffering to those he could and should have helped.

On his deathbed, I am willing to bet all my money against all of his that Musk's God complex will suddenly evaporate, and all the voices that once hollered that Musk is the man who tells it how it is, the self-made man who changed the world for the better, all those voices will fall silent, and the only voice left will be the sound of history itself scribbling into its notebook, "Here lies the worst human being that ever existed."

Hats off to him, though. It's quite an achievement.

let's talk about Earth's first trillionaire welfare queen. Guys, I hope you enjoyed today's triumphant story about subsidies and stock hype and why being a racist wasn't bad for business. Elon Musk, as of today, has become the world's first trillionaire on paper. Which is amazing, 'cause most comic book supervillains wait until the third act to actually unveil themselves.

But y- we don't have language to explain this amount of money anymore. I, like a billion seconds is about thirty-one years. Okay? A trillion seconds is about thirty-two thousand years. We don't have a way to measure this gu- If Elon Musk started spending a million dollars a day the day humans began first building Stonehenge, he would still be a rich man.

Do you understand? I trying to, I'm trying to give you the scope, and somehow we're supposed to look at this. A guy who was born, a guy who was born a millionaire and worked his way all the way up from that, we're supposed to look at this and think, "What an inspiring story." No. No. This is the story of a guy who got rich on public money while convincing millions of people that government was the problem.

That's what happened today. The first trillionaire is also the last person who needed more money. SpaceX alone, friends, has gotten billions in government contracts and subsidies. Tesla, was built in part with public support and tax credits and the public infrastructure of the U.S. and government-backed loans and publicly funded research and all manner of taxpayer incentives.

In other words, Elon Musk is what would happen if all of Ayn Rand's heroes were, like, raised totally on welfare, and then they grew up and spent their adulthood complaining about welfare. Do you understand? He's the world's richest recipient of public assistance. Imagine collecting government money.

Imagine being a millionaire at birth and then collecting government money for twenty years and then lecturing people who weren't born wealthy about self-reliance. Do you understand? This is a vampire giving a TED Talk about why you should donate blood. The largest transfer of public wealth into private ego ever recorded.

And oh, that Elon, he doesn't like those poor people on welfare. He hates welfare like a guy on his fifth plate hates the buffet. If this guy was any more publicly subsidized, friends, he would qualify for reduced school lunches. And the gratitude for your subsidies, for your help as the taxpayers in building his empire, it's amazing.

Most people would help, I don't know, give the American taxpayers a thank you note. "Hey, I'm the world's first trillionaire. Couldn't have done it without all the free money you gave me." Dude got rich enough to buy Twitter and then spend his days posting about white genocide. What a return on your investment.

You pay taxes, and d- this dude makes a trillion dollars, and you're the freeloader So now the world's first trillionaire will go down in history as a person who amplifies race panic and retweets white supremacist conspiracy theories, and he boosts extremists, and he tongue kisses white nationalist talking points.

And Wall Street sees all this public racism from a guy born under apartheid, and Wall Street responds like a golden retriever to a tennis ball. D-d-d-d-did he post more white supremacist crap? Sure did. Oh, good. Here's another 200 billion. I swear to God, Wall Street looks on this guy Musk like medieval peasants looking at a comet.

Know what? They don't understand what's happening. They, they, it must be magical. This dude can tweet something objectively racist or insane before breakfast, and these barnacles will call it a, a, a growth catalyst by lunch. And for all the talk about the corporate values and the diversity and the social responsibility and stakeholder capitalism and ethical investing and da, da, w- at the end of the day, fuck you, Wall Street.

White supremacy's not a deal breaker. That's the story here. White supremacy is acceptable when you can make a buck off the white supremacist. Union busting is okay. We knew that. Misinformation's not a problem. Tweeting lies and conspiracy theories are acceptable. Dismantling aid program so hundreds of thousands die overseas, not a problem.

You know what's not a problem for Wall Street? Turning a social media platform into a Nazi comment section. Oh my God, have you been on Twitter lately? I'm still there. I know you guys hate me for still being on it, but it's like you got... It's like it, the whole site is written by like divorced angry uncles on crank at a monster truck rally.

That's the only people posting. And Wall Street doesn't care. There's one truly unforgivable sin in American capitalism. You know what it is? Being poor. Oh, those people are the problem. What are we gonna do about them? They make it all look bad 'cause everything else is negotiable. You can commit any kind of sin.

Musk has shown it, and it'll be okay. Just don't be poor. Ew. What's sad is that Elon spent all these years trying to cultivate this image that he was like Tony Stark, and then we've watched him slowly transform into the guy Tony Stark spends a few movies trying to stop. First, he was the cool futurist, right?

Electric cars and reusable rockets, and we're going to Mars. And now every morning y- you open your phone and it's oh my God, Lex Luthor i- is like the uncle who's forwarding the racist chain mails now. And this guy, the mythology around this man that he was the once in a generation genius, really?

'Cause, I don't mean to disrespect and, don't mean to approach the altar here, but, half the products this guy's promised us still don't exist. Remember the Hyperloop? Remember that was gonna revolutionize transportation in the state of California? Remember Elon talking all about the Hyperloop, and only he could do it?

Remember the full self-driving? Remember the robot armies that we're gonna have that he-- coming right away? Remember the automatons that came out at his party last year that we later found out were remote controlled 'cause they weren't working yet? Remember the Mars colonies? Did, did the fanboys notice that this guy's product is tomorrow?

He sells tomorrow. "I got all this great shit you're gonna buy tomorrow." Oh. Oh my God, he sells tomorrow like Donald Trump sells peace agreements and infrastructure plans. The miracle is coming soon, folks. Always. The future is co- the future is permanently 18 months away, and it's gonna be fi- oh, it's gonna be great.

And Wall Street keeps buying tickets to this because dude has discovered the greatest business model ever invented. Just sell the future repeatedly. Keep selling the same future. He's a stockbroker, and the only stock he sells is a product called tomorrow. And while all this is happening, people can't pay their rent, and they can't afford groceries.

All over this country, people are skipping medical treatment. Families are drowning in debt. Millions of people of all religions, of all colors, in all states, they're working harder than ever, and they're falling further behind. Right now tonight, somewhere a parent is telling the kids that they're not gonna be able to take that vacation this summer.

And yet somehow one guy accumulates enough wealth to rival the GDP of multiple entire nations all at once. Jesus Christ, folks. I don't understand how these people can live in a society that allows trillionaires and poverty, a democracy that allows trillionaires and hungry kids, a democracy that allows this one m- born millionaire to become a trillionaire while people are sleeping in their cars.

And we have democracy, and this is still the system If aliens landed tomorrow and asked us, " how, how do you people on your world distribute resources?" I'd be too embarrassed to explain it, right? " We got some people, they, some people just can't afford their insulin, and this one guy, has enough money to own several countries."

And the alien's "Why?" "Oh, he posts a lot." "Yeah, I'd go, the weird part is how just little accountability exists. Come on, if an ordinary employee lies all the time, they get fired, right? Elon lies all the time and analysts raise the price target. If s- here, if someone at your job kept retweeting white supremacists all the time, I- they'd get fired.

In most corporations, if Musk does it, oh, Wall Street, they're, sees a growth opportunity. "Congratulations, sir, you've reached platinum oligarch status." I swear to God, Elon Musk, he makes me ashamed to be a racist billionaire. I never thought I'd say. Elon Musk is what happens when corporate welfare achieves sentience.

He is a debit to his race. And now he's a trillionaire, history's first. He is not, a philanthropist who helped cure cancer. He is not a philanthropist who helped fight poverty. He is not a philanthropist who helped solve climate change. He's not a philanthropist who helped eradicate any disease, and he could have done all that He still could if he wanted.

Every morning, Elon Musk has a ritual. Every day, whether he's aware of it or not, every day he gets out of bed, has a moment where he recognizes he could end all world hunger. He could get medical care for every child on this planet and food for every child on this planet, and then he decides he doesn't wanna do that, and he goes about his fucking day.

That's the person that our milit- that our media culture is telling us to respect today, friends. The first trillionaire. Guy got famous for electric cars, got richer from government contracts, bought a social media platform with borrowed money, spent years amplifying racist bullshit and conspiracy theories and just white supremacist grievance, and then somehow convinced millions of people that white guys like him is the victim,

But you don't understand. He doesn't actually have a trillion dollars in cash, silly. It's in his assets and the shares that he owns in his companies. Yeah, we know. Everybody knows. Why is half of my feed suddenly people making videos explaining the difference between owning cash and owning shares and assets like that's an actual misunderstanding that needs to be clarified?

And why is the other half of my feed people making videos trying to metaphorically explain how big of a number one trillion is? If you spent a million dollars a day, it would take you so many thousand years to spend a trillion dollars, and it would take an average worker so many tens of millions of years to Earn a trillion dollars.

It's a very big number. Okay, but what is it in football fields though? Because if my cultural knowledge serves me well, Americans love having things explained to them in terms of quantity of football fields. So how many football fields to a trillion dollars? Personally, I'm not actually upset about Elon Musk now officially being a trillionaire because to me, all it's really doing is highlighting the fact that the modern economy is a ridiculously stupid game that makes no sense at all.

'Cause what do you mean a company that not only isn't that large, not only isn't profitable, but actually hemorrhages money is now one of the most valuable companies in the history of the world? Valuable how? By what metric? 'Cause it's not economically, right? Which is supposed to be the one that matters.

Let's ask SpaceX themselves, right? And this is their S1 form, a kind of prospectus to justify their valuation. The first, 14 pages or so are just a bunch of, cool pictures of rockets. It then goes on to say stuff like, "Our mission is to build systems and technologies to make life multi-planetary and to understand the true nature of the universe."

And there's loads of that stuff, right? A lot of this reads less like an investment prospectus and more like a 14-year-old trying his hand at Star Trek fanfic for the first time. Which is actually fitting, right? Because the notion of SpaceX actually living up to their massive valuation is total fiction.

They would have to successfully dominate and out-compete the rest of the AI industry, successfully make the AI profitable in the first place, successfully put AI data centers in space that are economically and energy efficient, successfully send tourists to orbit the Moon, successfully send astronauts to land on the Moon, successfully begin to colonize the Moon, and successfully send a manned flight to Mars, and be the first to actually accomplish all of these things, and accomplish them all in a fiscally viable way that doesn't hemorrhage too much money.

Which is an especially daunting prospect considering, according to his own predictions, a lot of those are accomplishments he's supposed to have already made years ago. The Moon tourism was supposed to happen by 2018, the Moon landing by 2025, the Mars landing by 2028, and he's already long since spent the billions of dollars in government contracts he was awarded failing to accomplish them.

Which I think is actually the core of what's going on here. The world is celebrating Elon Musk officially becoming a trillionaire as some sort of monumental accomplishment, but it's actually the side effect of a failure to be profitable enough to generate enough capital to keep running his company.

Yeah, the most successful capitalist in the history of the world doesn't have enough capital to run The company that has made him the most successful capitalist in the history of the world, and we're calling it an accomplishment. See, selling, I think it's 5% of his company at a massively inflated price has put roughly $75 billion of cash in SpaceX's accounts, which they desperately needed because they were horribly in debt.

Which, on the face of it, would be fine, except they've changed the rules specifically for SpaceX, allowing them early entry into things like the NASDAQ 100. Which means when the early investors of SpaceX start selling their stock in order to finally profit from their investment, which I believe can start happening in, early August, this will make the stock price go down, which means a lot of that loss in value will end up being absorbed by people's retirement funds and 401Ks and index funds that were forced to buy SpaceX at a ridiculously inflated value.

Now, a lot of people are celebrating this because of all of the new millionaires that are about to be made, which is actually true. There are a lot of mid to low-level employees in SpaceX that have chosen to take their pay partially in equity, and they're about to make a lot of money, and frankly, I'm happy for them.

But the choice to put the spotlight mostly on them is a deliberate attempt to take the spotlight away from the fact that the vast majority of early investors are billionaires and giant financial institutions. They are the ones that will end up making the vast majority of the money, so this really does look like it's going to end up being just another steal from the poor, give to the rich Ponzi scheme

I'm not gonna start with Musk being worth a trillion.

I'm gonna go back to 2024, when he invested 250 million in the American election. That was almost certainly enough to win Donald Trump the election. Trump, ne- Trump's winning margin across the three, swing states was only 230,000 votes, so you needed to switch 115,000 voters. If Musk's money, even if it was so inefficient it cost $1,000 per vote switch, Musk's money won the election for Donald Trump.

That's scary fact number one. We've already got an oligarch who put a billionaire in charge of our country. Let me blow you away with fact number two. This is where you need to understand the difference between a trillion dollars, that's what the bloke's got, and 250 million, which is what he spent. It's not 1% of his wealth.

It's not .1% of his wealth. It's .025% of his wealth. Musk bought one American election, and has enough money left over to buy another 3,999 elections. So this, I think we could do the politics of resentment. I don't like a bloke having that much money, it makes me feel bad. But we don't need to. What we really need to do is talk about protecting democracy in an age of this sort of concentration of wealth.

Well, Justin, I, this is... You just made me, very angry talking about that actually. Yeah. Not at you, but at our country and the fact that this is even possible. I want to pull up, some stats, from inequality.org and the Federal Reserve from last year. The top 1% in the United States has 31% of the wealth share.

The bottom 90% have 32.6% of the wealth share. And on Musk specifically, SpaceX, and the reason that he became a trillionaire, it seems, is because he was taking business, taking on business that used to be in the public s- th- that used to be public, that used to be done by the federal government, right? Like space exploration used to be something that, in partnership with private companies at times, but that the, that the United States government led on.

And, other than the e- issues with democracy, with it, which are huge, what does it say that some one person in this country and on this planet could be a trillionaire when you look at the kinds of, wealth inequality that we have in this country and around the world?

Yeah. So it's a funny... The inequality, wow, so much here this morning.

He is a w- i- it's got this sort of into the looking glass feel about it. So sometimes you'll look at the top 10% and you'll say, "Oh, the top 10% are so much richer than the other 90%." Then you look inside the top 10%, and you discover the top 1% are so much wealthier than the next 9%, the rest of the top 10%.

Then you look inside the top 1%, and you discover the top 0.1%, and so on. And so- Yeah ... we have this extraordinary right tail to our wealth distribution. I'm gonna try and be as economist-y as I can and on the one hand and on the other hand to it. The, there is something, you asked the question, Musk is doing a lot of stuff that used to be done by the federal government.

I think the fundamental question is he doing it more efficiently? And I think that's a very real question. There are some things where we think the federal government does an incredible job. There are a lot of things where, for instance, a lot of our health research, the federal government basically pushes that out to the universities, and it does that through funding, and Musk is basically bidding against them for a lot of these contracts.

So w- if you go over to Europe, one of the things they don't have is any of this incredible concentration, but also they don't have, any of our incredible companies that are rein- that are inventing the next century.

J- Justin, you spend a lot of time talking about the fact that Elon Musk, is bu- buying elections, becoming a trillionaire.

The gap, the yawning gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. I'm gonna put up this, approval rating, Trump's approval rating on the economy, and it hits an all-time low. This is from YouGov economists from earlier this month, a disapproval of 63%. Only 30% of the American people approve of the president's handling of the economy.

And what I'm try- I'm trying to craft a question here to marry the fact that we now have the world's first trillionaire, and behind him are a bunch of billionaires and multi-multimillionaires, and then there are even more, millions more Americans, and if you wanna put in the rest of the people around the world, who are not living that way, and actually are living tougher, harder, more expensive lives.

Do you think that the anger that's out there about what's happening in the economy among the rest of us is going to bubble up and maybe not affect Elon Musk, but might affect not just the president, but his party that's been in control here in, in Washington?

So I spend a little bit of time going and giving speeches to rooms full of very rich people who, Wall Street, blah, blah.

I shouldn't have admitted that. Can you... This isn't live TV, right?

No. It's between us, Justin.

And there's a sense that they understand the system has served them very well, and therefore they need to ensure the stability of the system. But there's also a sense in the last decade that some of our elites have given up on that game, and I think Musk is one of them.

There was a... One of the things I've actually always admired about the United States is the super rich here h- feel that it's their role to give back. There's tremendous philanthropic giving, much more here than in many other countries. And so we actually have an enormous number of incredibly admirable billionaires who've really taken their responsibility seriously.

And then you've got clowns, and at the moment, Musk is a clown. This is a bloke who's walked, who walked into our federal government, ripped it up without any understanding, who, ripped up USAID, a decision that may have cost literally hundreds of thousands of lives, of the most vulnerable, and jokes about it as if it doesn't matter, and who has reshaped America's immigration policy in explicitly racist ways.

Are you ready for this? This is totally amazing. The wealth of the richest Americans has exploded. I'm not even talking about the top 1%. I'm talking about the richest one-tenth of 1%. In the 1990s, most Americans' wealth grew at about the same pace, but look at what happened after 2010. The top one-tenth of 1% pulled ahead of the rest of the 1% and everyone else.

2010, remember that year. Now, see what happens after 2018, in part because of Trump's tax cuts for the rich that went into effect at the start of that year. America's richest one-tenth of 1% are now worth more than the entire GDP of China. What do they do with that money? They're not just shooting rockets into space or building hideous trucks.

Billionaire political spending in presidential elections is also exploding. See what happens after the 2010 Citizens United ruling? 2010. Did you remember? And it keeps getting worse. In the last presidential election, just 300 billionaire families spent roughly $3 billion. Those families gave an average of $10 million each, roughly 100,000 times what an average donor gave.

And the super rich are getting a big return on their investment. They're getting more tax cuts, deregulation, and a government that lets them get away with busting unions, exploiting workers, and monopolizing their markets while poisoning the environment, all so they can get even richer and accumulate even more power, so they can get even richer.

And, you get it. But this vicious cycle is dangerous and unsustainable, both politically and economically. When so much of our economy is in relatively few hands, we will inevitably get to the point where consumers cannot buy all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing. This puts the entire economy at risk.

It's also politically unstable because it's inherently divisive, pitting losers against winners, and laying the groundwork for an authoritarian state where no one's future is secure, including the super rich. So we all have a stake in stopping this vicious cycle. To do this, we need to raise taxes on the rich, not to punish them, but to ensure that the system works for everyone.

This means raising their income taxes and taxing their wealth. And we can establish public financing for federal elections, matching public dollars to small dollar donations in order to balance the power of super rich and corporate donors. Many states and cities already are doing this, and it works.

Finally, we've got to undo Citizens United. One way to do that is for states to follow what Montana hopes to do, take away the power of corporations to make political contributions in the first place. Look, it's time to get big money out of politics

Next, Section B, The Human Cost of Concentrated Power

We talked about when it happened, the cutting of aid and the impact it was having or was projected to have around the world when, when DOGE, when Elon Musk and his, chainsaw, a large red chainsaw gift from Argentine president, just said, "We're gonna take USAID and put it in the wood chipper."

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. And they did. They cut, aid by about, USAID by about 70% around the world. A new study notes that armed conflict has risen in the areas most affected by the cuts, that heightened food insecurity can lead to heightened, tribal tensions and fighting. A Boston University researcher, and this is reporting from The New York Times, estimated that the aid cuts cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide in their first year.

A recently published study in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates, the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030. And I'm, I'm circling back to this because, Trump does so much, he's a hose of chaos, that we were all like, "Oh, no, they cut USAID." But then it was, "Oh, no, look what they're doing to immigrants," and we forgot about USAID.

And then it was, "Oh, no, they we're at war with Iran, and, we don't have... And gas is 100 bucks." Yeah. And we forgot about immigrants and USAID. Yeah. So sometimes we have to circle back and say, we didn't, we didn't reinstate USAID because we started a war in Iran. It's still cut, and it's still having impact.

Forecasts at present rate, the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of five. Is this accurate? We don't know. And the reason, 'cause I've had, when I've brought up some of these stats online, people have said, "Prove it."

Right.

Show me the... And one guy even said, "Show me the death certificates."

Oh my goodness.

That's what they wanna, like- Right ... you c- I don't think it's happening, and you can't prove it's happening. Here's the problem. Numbers of deaths are hard to know because USAID also funded the bulk of pivotal data collection efforts- Mm-hmm ... across much of the world's most food insecure and climate vulnerable reason- regions.

The dissolution of the agency has prompted widespread disruptions in everything from localized weather monitoring to one of the primary global famine early warning systems have been cut by the USAID cut. The end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID. Oh. So partly why we can't say how many people are being affected by this is that the people who studied to those people have lost their jobs.

Hey, Phil, ignorance is bliss. Mm.

But we're also doing some new things. The administration is now withholding aid for vaccines for poor countries in ways that may cost the lives of vast numbers of children. Trump slashed funding for an international vaccine alliance called Gavi, and now the administration is also refusing to release $600 million for Gavi that Congress had already appropriated and that must be spent by September.

Gavi is one of the most cost-effective aid programs in history. That group estimates that 600,000 lives will be unnecessarily lost by 2030. Then there's the war in Iran.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Before we go away from that- Yeah ... have you s- have you seen the reporting about how the USAID cuts are affecting this Ebola outbreak in- No Yeah

No

Uganda and- Tell

me. I could use some good news.

Okay. Ebola, for those who don't know, is one of the most infectious, deadly, awful diseases. Yeah,

and we don't have a treatment.

R- r- depends on the strain. We don't have a cure. It's, yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's horrible. It's, if you look it up, it's, the most awful imaginable way to die from an infectious disease, and there's an outbreak now in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Uganda, and they're saying that, number one, this is looking really, really bad because it's not being...

The prior treatments that have been more effective are not working well on this one. But they're saying because of the USAID cuts, we didn't detect this outbreak as early as the previous ones, which means it could get out of control really quickly, and our ability to contain it and treat it is handicapped because of the USAID cuts.

Now, again, unfortunately, there's a bunch of people who don't care because, it's Africa and it's- It's not us ... it's not us. And that's the thing is because of these cuts, it could well be us.

But right now it's not us.

It's just so shortsighted and stupid. The, the, and the, yes, there are people who are dying right now from this outbreak and the other things that you mentioned because of our cuts, but at the end of the day, USAID was m- put in place not just out of charity or altruism or, or kindness.

It was put in place because it was good for America. It was good for our-

Mm-hmm ...

foreign policy, it was good for our economics, it was good for so many thi- it, it prevented a lot of bigger problems With a little bit of investment at the beginning, and to cut all of it was so shortsighted and stupid- Yeah

and not in America's interest.

Okay, impact of the war with Iran. Why am I doing this, you guys ask? This is bad news, and we're aware of this bad news 'cause you've talked about it before. Why-- I'm not gonna stop talking about it because it's still there, and it's so easy for us to move on to the next story and the next distraction, and now we're talking about Epstein, and now we're talking about a ballroom, and we're forgetting about kids in sub-Saharan Africa who don't have access to Plumpy Nut, the nutritional food they need if they have severe wasting.

In fact, the, the, that reduces their mortality by 80% if they can get on a very inexpensive treatment of Plumpy Nut, which is a peanut product, with- Plumpy

Nut?

Plumpy Nut. That's what it's called. Yeah.

Sounds like a, a bad Peanuts

character. It's in a little pouch. It comes in a little pouch. It's made in the US of A with U- with American peanuts, and it reduces mortality with, among kids with severe wasting by 80% because their bodies- Mm-hmm

they've gotten to a point where they can't eat food, and this is something they can eat. And it's, and it's shelf-stable. It doesn't have to be refrigerated. It's just in a pouch, and they just suck on it, and they f- over a course of about three weeks, they recover 80% of the time.

Sounds amazing.

Trump cut it.

Anyway, impact of the war with Iran. The Trump administration is also unintentionally exacerbating global poverty with its catastrophic war with Iran, and not just because the war has displaced more than 2.2 million women and girls in Iran and Lebanon. Rising food prices are increasing costs of transportation.

Oh, rising fuel prices are increasing costs of transportation and thus food. It's estimated that if the Persian Gulf crisis doesn't end by next month, an additional 45 million people worldwide are likely to suffer severe hunger in the latter part of this year, according to the UN World Food Program.

José Andrés of World Central Kitchen has warned that fertilizer shortages could lead to a multi-year famine beginning as early as the end of this year. Other countries have also cut aid, which is disturbing. They saw us do it, and they said, "Well, then we're not gonna do it either." So a number of, of Western countries have pulled back on aid to some of the most, uh, desperate people in the world.

So why am I bringing this up? I don't wanna forget about it. I don't want you guys to forget about it. I also know that almost everyone in our audience has family members that are Christian and that are generally still positive toward the administration because of their news sources that skip all of this information.

So I wanna keep talking about it so you guys can occasionally, I can't talk to your relatives, but you can and just say, "You know, there's actually some bad stuff happening." What's frustrating in all this is if people are

complaining that the cost to fill up their tank is going up, or the cost of education in America is going up, or they don't have good enough access to healthc- whatever their beef is with what's going on in America, none of those things happened because we were providing medications to AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa.

None of these things- Yeah ... ever happened because we're giving nutritional aid to starving ch- None of that was the cause of it. Far more of the cause, at least in the last couple months, has been because the president decided unilaterally with Israel to go to war with Iran unnecessarily- Right ... and a lot of other bad decisions.

So I, I just, it, it frustrates me that there are legitimate problems and concerns in this country, but there's always a scapegoat.

Mm-hmm.

It's the immigrants or it's the aid to developing countries where-

It's the, it's the Somalis in Minnesota-

Right ... that are defrauding us. It's always some, some melanated person that I don't identify with.

Someone else is taking my stuff.

your book, Tax the Rich, a pretty self-explanatory title. What does that mean in the context of Americans' ability to get by and the state of democracy?

Why tax the rich?

Our basic premise is that some people work for a living, get a paycheck every week with taxes deducted from it, and others of us- Are already rich, don't need to work, and basically pay no taxes at all for all practical purposes. And that's increasing our inequality. If I make money and don't pay taxes, but you make the same amount of money and you have to pay taxes, then every year if we spend the same amount, I get richer and richer while so many Americans are struggling to get by, and that's causing this gross inequality in our country, and that's causing people to, frankly get fed up with this and sometimes give up on democracy and maybe vote for aristocracy or oligarchy instead.

Ray, we can see how maybe vast wealth inequality puts pressure on democracy. We're gonna talk about income taxes and whether they're fair, but also something slightly different, the wealth tax that I just mentioned. What's a wealth tax? How is it different than just, raising the top marginal rate for the richest income earners?

So many Americans are familiar with the income tax, of course, because we pay it all the time. We have to, collect all of the income that we receive, report it to the federal government, and pay taxes on it. However, wealth taxes take a different approach. Wealth taxes look at the accumulated wealth of an individual and imposes an annual tax on that.

Each s- each version of it is slightly different. Elizabeth Warren has about a 2% tax, and the California wealth tax is a 5% tax, but it's designed to look at everything the person owns, not just their stock, but their houses, their artwork, their cryptocurrency, the whole thing, and impose taxes on that accumulated wealth each year.

Usually above a certain amount. You might say, 2% above a billion dollars in assets- Absolutely ... or

something like that. These are focused on the very rich. They are, E- each of the plans has a slightly different amount, but it's focused on the very rich.

Kyle, your home at the American In- Enterprise Institute, I think traditionally hasn't been for things like wealth taxes or higher income taxes.

You can talk about that if you want to, but why do you think we're seeing so many states- And cities, New York City and other places pursuing wealth tax right now-

...

As Ray describes it.

Yep. So I think there are three, three reasons. So the first, I think, is, why do we levy taxes to begin with, anyway?

It's to raise revenue. So there are a lot of priorities that need to be funded, and a lot of these states need to find revenue to do that, so they are coming up with different tax instruments to raise that revenue. The second reason, I think this dates back actually well before, say, the Trump era, is I think that there is this movement towards tax populism, I could call it, in that, and this is particularly the case in the Democratic Party, that they're looking to raise revenue and saying that it can primarily come from very high income households.

This goes back to Obama's promise not to raise taxes on households earning less than 250,000. You have then Biden adjusting that for inflation to 400,000. So I think there's an idea here that we can get all the revenue we need, we just need to be super aggressive at the very high end. And then there's a third reason, which I think is a policy reason, and it, I think it goes back to, if maybe what you'd call a hole in the income tax, is that a lot of very high net worth households earn income that's not visible to the current income tax.

So the wealth tax, and to some degree the estate tax, is seen as a backstop to that. So I think those three, all are pushing in that direction of- What

you're describing is a world to many people where the ultra rich don't actually pay a lot of tax, and that to many Americans is a problem.

So it, the, under the current income tax, and this again is how you define income, if you use the broadest definition of income, which is what economists would say is the amount you consume or the amount you spend in a year, plus the change in your net worth, that's like the accounting identity of what income is to an economist.

The income tax taxes that consumption component, and some of that change in net worth, but not all of it. So if you're an individual that's a shareholder in a corporation and you hold onto that stock and that stock appreciates year over year, that's income to an economist, but it's not necessarily taxed that year.

It may be taxed in the future, but not currently.

Income to an economist and maybe to the average person who's watching the accumulated wealth of multimillionaires and billionaires and how, they're supporting or not supporting the social safety net. Morris, let's talk about California. The governor there, Gavin Newsom, he opposes a wealth tax in California.

He's also positioning himself potentially for a presidential run. Billionaires in California, people like Peter Thiel, have threatened they might leave California if there's a wealth tax. T- talk to us a little bit about what the California tax would look like and how it's being received as they debate it there.

It would look like those of us who are the most fortunate, a few hundred people who are extraordinarily wealthy and who, as, he was just saying, don't have income, but according to the Internal Revenue Service, but have enormous amounts of income, billions and billions according to any normal person's definition of having made money, pay virtually no taxes at all.

Even me, I'm not a billionaire, but I'm relatively wealthy, but I pay almost no income taxes because I have essentially no income according to IRS definition. I have plenty of income ac- according to, an economist's definition of income. So I think that's that gross unfairness that's driving people. And yeah, some people are against it, the few-- the people who are gonna pay and the s- a few people who are expecting to become billionaires, the vast majority of people think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And yeah, billionaires can threaten to move away if they want to, but I think people live in California and New York and places like that for a reason, because these are wonderful places to live. And the whole point of being rich is you can live wherever you want.

So I think that's... The idea of moving because the tax system is changing just seems absurd to me. I'm not moving.

let's talk about the key phrase there, redistribute. We can use the slogan soak the rich. Little bit vindictive, populism, we get it. The ultra-rich have everything while everybody else loses out, so soak the rich.

That's the political appeal. What about the redistribution appeal? Eric in Idaho says he can't afford his h- a home into his 40s. Kyle, millions and millions of young people are similarly situated. They feel that the economy, they can see that the economy isn't filtering resources to them for the same amount of work that they've always done while the ultra-wealthy accumulate wealth.

So redistribution is what he's interested in. Talk about, whether that can work and to the benefit of the country.

Yeah, so when we think about tax policy and its impact on redistribution, we wanna know how much it impacts inequality. And if we're talking about wealth taxes in particular, I don't think they're gonna have much of an effect one way or the other, and the reason is because I think they'll also have a limited impact on total revenue.

Because the amount that the federal government or state governments are able to redistribute depends on how much revenue they raise, and there are other tax instruments that raise a lot more revenue if that is what you want to accomplish. And you look overseas at how, other countries raise revenue, they do it through broad-based taxes on payroll, value added taxes, which are a type of sales tax, and those raise a lot as a share of GDP, and they have systems that are a lot more redistributive than the United States' system.

Adding a wealth tax really is not gonna change that for the US 'cause it's not gonna raise very much revenue. W-

what about the very simple math that you hear All the time. A 2% tax on assets over a billion. Nobody needs more than $10 billion, let's say. Your lifestyle doesn't change whether you have 10 billion or 70 billion, you get the same life.

Tax it at 2% for the richest of the very rich, and we could pay for big expansions to Medicare and Medicaid. People could get healthcare for that money. What about that argument?

Yeah. S- simply not true. So one, the amount of wealth people have and whether that's appropriate, that's a normative question.

But m- from the perspective of how much this is going to raise in revenue, a 2% wealth tax is not going to raise enough in order to finance those types of programs. Those programs are sever- several percentage points of GDP and needed revenue every single year. A wealth tax is gonna raise less than a percent of GDP optimistically.

A lot of these numbers we've, are, that are thrown around are just not realistic. They're not accounting for the type of avoidance that we see in the r- in the literature. They're not accounting for the fact that when you tax wealth, there's less income for the income tax to hit, so that, that's an offsetting effect.

Some of these numbers, like Sanders estimated that, his tax would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade. I w- I looked at that, and I think it's probably less than half that all said and done. So it's just not a lot of revenue.

Ray, Kyle mentions avoidance. It's important. Let's talk about the ways that the current tax code allow the country's wealthiest to avoid paying taxes.

What are some of the biggest loopholes that people use to avoid, taking a salary, essentially borrowing against their own wealth? The ultra-rich have some legal tricks, but they use them. How do they work?

Yeah. What's interesting is that the public has been led to believe that our system is basically fair, and to the extent the rich avoid taxes, they do so by following these highly complex transactions that, there's no point in stopping them.

They'll always find them. And I think that's really a mistake to view our tax system that way because, in fact, the ways the wealthy are able to avoid taxes are really front and center and easy for them to access. As you ment- so there are ... In my book, I talk about the three steps of the tax avoidance playbook for the very wealthy.

The first one, as you mentioned, is avoid salary. So if you look at all of our richest Americans, the highest paid is Warren Buffett at 100,000. Jeff Bezos has always kept his salary at 82,000, and many of our other multi-billionaires get a dollar a year. So that's the first step. Hang on.

Jeff

Bezos makes $82,000 a year on paper?

Yes. And that is an amount that has enabled him to claim the child tax credit, which he has. So- ... so that's, that's been, his s- choice dollar amount. And then the, the next step of the tax avoidance playbook is, ... So of course, when they're forgoing salaries, they're not forgoing profiting from their businesses because, these people own the stock of their companies, and they retain the stock of their companies.

And as a result, they enjoy extraordinary growth of wealth that has been in the $100 to $200 billion range just since 2023. And of course, Elon Musk's wealth has grown by about 600 billion just since 2023, so we're talking about massive growth of wealth. But people think, surely they're gonna have to pay taxes on this growth because they're gonna sell the stock, and that will at least be subject to capital gains.

However, the super wealthy don't need to sell, in order to support their lifestyles. They are able instead to simply use their stock as collateral against which they can borrow all the money they need to support their lifestyle, and that's because the amount that anybody needs to live is just minute in comparison to the amount of wealth that they own.

So it would be as if you or I had to support a loan of, $100. Could we do that for our lives? No problem, right? That's what it is for them to support their lifestyles. It doesn't make a dent into their holdings.

Well, Morris Pearl, w- what about it? Ray just described some of the popular tax avoidance Strategies that the ultra wealthy use to avoid actually paying.

We learned that Jeff Bezos makes $82,000 a year and claims the child tax credit, which I'm sure he puts to excellent use to raise his children. Morris, do you see this kind of behavior among your wealthy friends and colleagues? What do they say about avoidance? It, it- perfectly legal, but their role in supporting the country that has supported them.

Yes. It's not even... it's not even avoiding anything really. I don't pay income taxes 'cause I don't have income. If you don't have any income, you don't need to pay any income taxes. It's not like I'm avoiding anything. I don't need to make money because as Dr. Madoff described, I can just withdraw amounts from my brokerage accounts and never pay any income tax on that, and eventually I'll pass away presumably, and because of the step-up basis rules, neither my estate nor my children or anyone else will ever pay any income tax on all of that money that I made over the years, even using, Kyle's definition of economic income.

If you look at the list of the richest people in the country, half of them inherited money and didn't, never earned it, never did anything to earn it anyway, and the other half are owners of huge companies like Mr. Bezos, like Mr. Musk, who also never paid income tax on their money either. So the richest among us don't pay any taxes really.

Are they gonna move to another state when we raise our taxes? A few of them will. We did lose one guy that moved from Fifth Avenue to Mar-a-Lago, but we can handle that. But the vast majority of people can live wherever they want, and these taxes are so insignificant. Kyle's right about one thing, 2% is not enough to really make a huge difference in the world, but it's a step in the right direction, and I think it's clearly a step that we need to take.

Now, Section C, The SpaceX IPO Heist

nothing here seems to warrant the extravagant valuation and potential raise of $75 billion at listing, right? This must mean that AI is the hidden treasure in all of this. So let's have a look under Grok's hood. Holy shit. They spent $9.5 billion to make 3.2. Good Lord. Grok, you little money-grubbing whore.

I guess we'll have to dig a little bit deeper on the AI piece of this thing since it's 93% of their projected total addressable market. Now, on the total, the prospectus lists $22.7 trillion from enterprise applications, which is awesome. Now, what's that you might ask? No one knows. That figure isn't revenue.

It's a projection from a company with no enterprise AI revenue for a market that doesn't yet exist. And whatever revenue that does exist from its core model is light years behind its competitors because Grok ranks fourth globally in AI chatbot web traffic behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Now, where most of the other AI leaders fake sincerity when it comes to saving humanity, Elon Musk has no such hangups This is the man who built up his side of PayPal without money laundering guardrails to boost revenue before Peter Thiel engineered his ouster.

The same dude who built a tunnel right under Las Vegas without permits or any safety precautions. The guy who's building autonomous cars that are so dangerous that entire countries have banned them. The same guy who gave 20-something coders from X access to our Social Security data when DOGE tried to rip apart the US government, the government that gives him 20% of his revenue.

So Common Sense Media rated Grok among the worst AI chatbots for safety, documenting nearly 67, 6,700 sexually suggestive image requests per hour. The FTC has an active child safety inquiry. The Irish Data Protection Commission opened a GDPR investigation into how xAI handles children's data, and the S-1 describes Grok itself, this prospectus, as a truth-seeking AI model to build on our founder Elon Musk's mission to enable humanity to understand the universe.

Just nothing about, sex inquiries, a chatbot that's under investigation in two jurisdiction for what it did to kids is, per the prospectus, a tool for understanding the cosmos. Now, the xAI merger, which folded Grok and X, Twitter, into SpaceX, was also done without a fairness opinion.

And Morningstar called that a material threat of value destruction. The Colossus Data Center, AI's, xAI's flagship compute cluster, is selling spare capacity to Anthropic, whose Claude is beating Grok in all the global ratings. SpaceX's best AI hardware is therefore underutilized right now by its own product.

So that makes the S-1's enterprise AI strategy, deepen enterprise and government adoption, less of a strategy and more of, a to-do list entry. Now, the most entertaining part of the prospectus is the pages upon pages of risk factors. Now, to be fair, these are always fun to read in any IPO because the lawyers have to think of everything to make sure that investors are fully informed of the business risks.

But these ones take the cake. So here's just a smattering of risk factors that investors have to look past to believe that Elon Musk is about to build a company with a market cap the size of the US economy. You ready? We have experienced and will likely continue to experience launch delays and failures that could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations, and future prospects.

Current FAA regulations do not permit return to launch site reentries for Starship. AI technologies may be flawed, insufficient, of poor quality, rely upon incorrect, inaccurate, harmful, or illegal data, reflect unwanted forms of bias, hallucinate, misrepresent, mislead, or contain other errors or inadequacies.

Others, including orbit manufacturing, passenger transport to the Moon, an established human presence or gateway hub to the Moon, passenger and cargo transport to Mars, energy production on the Moon or Mars, manufacturing capabilities on the Moon or Mars, and asteroid mining do not exist today. We do not maintain key person life insurance on Mr.

Musk. He does not devote his full time and attention to our businesses. Upon completion of this offering, Mr. Musk will beneficially own a majority of the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock and a majority of the voting power, and therefore will be able to elect all of the members of our board.

Mr. Musk can only be removed from our board or these positions by the vote of Class B holders. Translation for that one is he can't be ousted, period. The board can't even oust him because the board has to go to the majority holders of the Class B shares, and that's him. Our substantial level of indebtedness could materially adversely affect our financial condition.

The continued proliferation of satellite constellations in low Earth orbit, as well as the risk of collisions with space debris or other spacecraft, could limit or impair our launch flexibility and satellite deployment, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, result of operations, and future prospects.

Many of our initiatives, including those to develop orbital AI compute at scale, manufacture AI chips at scale, establish a lunar economy, develop human augmentation systems, and transport humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies, or technologies that do not exist or may require significant advancement, and such initiatives may not achieve commercial viability.

And finally, the most honest statement of all. We have a history of net losses and may not achieve profitability in the future So the real kick in the teeth is how many retail investors are likely to get burned in the coming months. A company being rushed to market on hype and bold promises is nothing new.

Nearly everything else about this particular IPO is either very new or so old that it's new again. All of it is shady. So here's the breakdown of the go-to-market con. SpaceX is issuing or floating less than 5% of company shares to create artificial scarcity that forces a day-one spike. Now, it's also allocating 30% of the offering to retail.

That's three times normal, and this could be a sign that institutional investors won't pony up for the list price, though it's not for lack of trying, as we'll see in a moment. Either way, that's a lot of average Joes' skin in the game. Now, the most audacious part of the IPO is that Musk managed to push a rule change on the Nasdaq.

It's something called a fast entry rule. So this lets SpaceX enter the Nasdaq 100 index in just fifteen trading days instead of waiting up to a year. There's no SEC approval even required. So Musk reportedly conditioned his listing on this provision, so Nasdaq also had a direct financial incentive to accept this listing.

And the reason this is so significant is that the index funds that own the Nasdaq one hundred represent huge passive investments from all over the world. Nearly a third of all American stock is tied to passive indices just like this. So for example, your 401k may wind up owning SpaceX whether you know it or not.

So that covers the entry point, but the off-ramp is even more insidious. There's something called a lock-up period that restricts the earliest investors who have premium shareholdings from dumping their stock right after the initial surge. But it's not so in this instance. The SpaceX lock-up is engineered for fast exits.

So insiders like Andreessen Horowitz, a Saudi prince, Palantir co-founder, Jack Dorsey, they all got SpaceX stock through the Twitter to xAI to SpaceX merger chain, and they can begin selling twenty percent of their stakes at the first quarterly earnings call. That's just weeks after the listing. So with estimates of nearly fifty billion dollars in retail and passive flows heading into this deal, it means that a significant portion of it can be liquefied in a matter of weeks by the earliest investors in this thing So we have measures to prevent this behavior.

The largely self-policed Wall Street under Donald Trump is just reverting back to the good old days. Joe Kennedy would be so proud. And there are a lot of dirty hands in this deal. Nearly two dozen banks are splitting $500 million plus in fees, the largest IPO haul ever. And Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are both primary underwriters, and they just had analyst teams circulate projections of not a $1.7 trillion market cap by 2040, 3.4 million.

3.4 trillion, . So they didn't publish it, they just informally leaked it to investors during the live deal. So on CNBC Squawk Box, Andrew Ross Sorkin raised the obvious. Let's go to the

videotape. Both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley's, analysts, of course, the bank itself- Yeah ... is underwriting this, this big IPO.

But their analysts, have put out some, dare I say, sky-high projections. We can hope they get there. $3.4 trillion- Yeah ... I think is the market cap, that Morgan Stanley put on this company 2040. This is something that, that banks frankly did not do, were not allowed to some degree to do post that global settlement- Yeah

that, Eliot Spitzer, made back, I wanna say, what was it? 2001, 2002. So what's happened? What's changed?

What it says is nobody's learned anything on Wall Street. Even Jamie Dimon, the guy who holds himself out there as the voice of reason, the steady banking hand who plays everything above board.

He held a private event for 350 wealthy investors, including Robert Kraft, who took time away from the strip club to sit in the front row. And Jamie Dimon called it the democratization of finance. So those clients face no trading restrictions post-IPO. Fidelity retail customers who sell once within 15 days get locked out of future IPOs altogether.

Dimon said democratization to describe a deal where billionaires get free exits and regular people get a holding penalty.

last week we were a part of a coalition, that filed a lawsuit to block the US Fish and Wildlife Service from giving SpaceX, and Elon Musk more than 700 acres of public land to expand the dangerous rocket facility and to continue their unnecessary rocket launches. the lawsuit was filed by Center for Biological Diversity.

And let me make it clear, SpaceX built its massive facility and company town, called Starbase, on top of wetlands and in the middle of a major wildlife corridor. this was a pristine beach that's next to thousands of acres of protected wildlife habitat for threatened and endangered species like the ocelot, the aplomado falcon, sea turtles, and migratory birds.

There should never be a SpaceX rocket facility or any kind of industrial facility in this area. SpaceX has already burned down dozens of acres of wildlife habitat, is dumping polluted water on our beach, has sent rocket debris into our communities, into communities in Mexico, and these rocket launches have disrupted numerous, airplane flights over the years. we've been outspoken, about the dangers and risks of SpaceX, in our community for, over 10 years now, and we will continue to do and Becca, if you could talk a little bit more about these, th- especially these rocket explosions. We're talking about an area of the United States, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, that's overwhelmingly Latino and Mexican American, includes some of the poorest counties, in the country.

And then yet, yet they're being subjected to, to these environmental impacts? That's correct. my community is majority, Latin, Brown, Indigenous, mostly an immigrant community. Right now, Musk is testing his Starship Super Heavy rocket, the largest rocket in human history, in our community.

Elon Musk is using our impoverished, community as his laboratory to blow up dangerous experimental SpaceX rockets. and truthfully, his rocket testing sounds like a bomb going off. I can hear the sonic booms. I can feel the earthquakes in my apartment about 20 miles away from the launchpad. what it feels like is the SpaceX rocket testing is like Elon Musk bombing us.

And could you talk a little more about this city he's created, Starbase, uh, basically for his employees? Yeah. last year Elon Musk established his own company town on our beach, called Starbase, where those in charge of Starbase have direct ties to SpaceX. it's clear that Starbase is acting only in the interests of SpaceX.

For example, SpaceX will buy land and Starbase will annex it. And Starbase, Elon Musk's company town, has essentially militarized our pristine beach. they have a lot of surveillance. They have a lot of police activity. they've made our beach feel very unwelcome. They actively, deter people away, and they closed the highway to the beach I wanna go to Elon Musk speaking on Friday. I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance, of succeeding at all, to be clear. and in fact, I told people this. I said, "Look, we're probably gonna fail, but, we should give it a try because if we don't, if there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-faring civilization."

Yes. And that's what SpaceX is all about, is to take the fiction out of science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone So that's Elon Musk. If you can respond to that, Becca Hinojosa, and also simply to Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire, making its debut on Wall Street, SpaceX, in the largest IPO in history from your vantage point there on the border in Texas. no one should invest in Musk's corporations because it would mean expanding his toxic data center, his SpaceX operations, thereby making Musk's sacrifice zone of Black and brown communities even bigger. We're urging everyone to stop Elon Musk's sacrifice zone and to defund Elon Musk. and this, idea of one man, having the, a net worth now as the first trillionaire of nearly half of the people on the planet, the 46% of the poorest, inhabitants of planet Earth it's absolutely disgusting. and that's why our community has been protesting, resisting SpaceX's colonization of our community for over 10 years now. but we can't be the only community speaking out. we're urging everyone to, to take action and mobilize to stop, Elon Musk's obscene wealth let's go through some of the proposals.

Last month, SpaceX filed a proposal seeking to build a six-mile long, 16-inch pipeline to bring in massive quantities of natural gas from the Port of Brownsville to Starbase to fuel its massive new rocket, Starship. the underground pipeline would cross protected wetlands, lands and wild refuge. And SpaceX is discussing the potential purchase of 136,000 acres of land owned by ExxonMobil on an undeveloped stretch of Louisiana's Gulf Coast.

That project's environmental footprint would dwarf the already significant Starbase operation. Becca Hinojosa, if you could comment Yes. communities, all across the country are reaching out to us, asking, how do we resist, Elon Musk's colonization. that's what we need to do, is we need to work together, all of these communities to, to resist. Elon Musk is also pushing forth with a massive, land grab in our region. right now they're trying to, obtain the 700 acres of wildlife habitat, but they're also trying to take over another 7,000 acres, of our Boca Chica Beach. what we need to do is work together to stop this.

And Becca, what's been the response of your elected officials, your local, especially your local elected officials? I can understand why the Governor Abbott and the, and the, the, the top, state officials, would be supportive of Musk, but what about the local officials? all of our local officials are ignoring community concerns.

They're ignoring community members speaking up about their homes shaking, about their windows cracking, their home foundations cracking because of SpaceX rocket launches. we've seen elected officials, take money from SpaceX here and lobby in favor of more bills that benefit SpaceX. which is why we need to, mobilize together because our elected officials are selling us out to Elon

Moving on to Section D, Belfast, How Musk Fuels Racial Violence Abroad

Droves of masked men gather. Cars and bins are set alight. Thick smoke fills the air. The mob moves through residential streets, smashing windows and kicking in doors, targeting homes believed to belong to migrants A Turkish barbershop and an Arab-owned business are attacked. Makeshift checkpoints appear as men stop cars and scrutinize drivers' ethnicity.

These are scenes from Belfast, Northern Ireland. The violence followed a brutal stabbing in which a white man was critically injured after being attacked in the eye, neck, and back. The suspect was quickly identified as a Sudanese national who had entered the UK through legal routes. Footage of the attack spread rapidly online.

Within hours, public figures such as Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Katie Hopkins, and Richard Dawkins were presenting the assault as evidence of a wider threat posed by migrants. The attack was framed as an attempted beheading, transforming an individual act of violence into a racial story about a nation under siege.

Far-right activist Tommy Robinson urged his supporters to take to the streets. Elon Musk's platform, X, helped amplify the message to millions. But it would be a mistake to explain what happened simply by pointing to Robinson, social media algorithms, or a handful of far-right agitators. All played a role, yet focusing on them alone obscures a more uncomfortable truth.

Nor should the violence be whitewashed as anti-immigration protests or reduced to vague notions of community tensions. Such language conceals both the racial character of the attacks and the mainstream anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism that made them possible in the first place. The more important questions are these: How did these men come to see themselves as defenders of the nation?

And why do appeals to racial vigilantism increasingly resonate within British political culture? The attacks in Belfast were not merely the product of fringe extremists exploiting a tragedy. They emerged from a broader context of racism that has, for years, racialized migrants, and particularly Muslims, as existential threats.

Through this process, many white citizens have come to imagine themselves as members of a besieged community with a duty to defend the white nation against internal enemies. More significantly, Belfast reveals a dangerous racial dynamic whereby actors within the mainstream invoke, legitimize, or tacitly encourage forms of vigilante politics while maintaining plausible deniability for the consequences.

Far-right actors are not simply born. They are made. Their worldview is cultivated through racial discourses that circulate widely throughout society from fringe online networks and alternative media ecosystems to newspaper columns, television debates, and government policy. For more than a decade, anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism has extended far beyond the organized far right.

Politicians and newspapers have racialized asylum seekers as criminals, terrorists, welfare scroungers, and opportunists exploiting Britain's generosity. Migration has been framed not as a humanitarian challenge, but as a national security issue requiring extraordinary measures. These narratives rarely call for violence directly.

They do something subtler. They encourage citizens to see themselves as participants in a national struggle against a dangerous and illegitimate presence. The result is the creation of a constituency primed- To believe that the survival of the nation is at stake. Once people have come to see themselves as defenders of a threatened white nation, a second move becomes possible, the mobilization of ordinary people to confront the perceived racial threat themselves.

Here, the white vigilante becomes politically useful. He can pursue forms of racial intimidation and violence that mainstream politicians cannot openly endorse, while allowing those same politicians to deny responsibility for the consequences. We saw this dynamic during the controversy surrounding the pro-Palestine marches following the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza in late two thousand and three.

Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman warned of Islamist terror on British streets and urged Britain to stand up and take on the mobs. More recently, a similar summon to violence was visible in Farage's call for the British public to show pure cold rage after the killing of Henry Nowak. Such interventions matter, not just because they openly advocate racial violence, but because they summon a street force prepared to act outside of conventional democratic processes.

This political logic is not unique to Britain. It can be seen in US President Donald Trump's mobilization of forces after his election loss in twenty twenty, which culminated in the January sixth Capitol insurrection. It can be seen in the Modi government's promotion of love jihad narratives that have fueled mob violence against Muslims in India.

It can be seen in settler violence in the occupied West Bank, often enabled or legitimized by actors within the Israeli political mainstream. And historically, it was seen in the intimate relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and local authorities across the American South. In each case, extra state actors enact forms of racial policing that political elites cannot always openly authorize, but nevertheless find politically useful.

Belfast should therefore not be understood simply as a breakdown of UK's political order. In important respects, it was an expression of it. For years, UK political culture has encouraged people to see migrants as invaders, asylum seekers as threats, and Muslims as a problem to be managed. And when public figures repeatedly tell citizens that the nation is under siege, some will inevitably conclude that defending it is their responsibility.

The question is not whether French extremists exploited a tragedy, it is why so many people have been taught to see racial violence as a form of national defense.

Elon Musk's lawyer says that the tech mogul is taking legal action against the German public broadcaster ZDF for a report on his role in the recent Belfast riots. Musk shared a post by far-right British activist Tommy Robinson, calling for people to take to the streets of Belfast after a stabbing in the Northern Irish capital.

The suspected attacker is a Sudanese national. Introducing a report, a ZDF news anchor said that a racist mob was hunting down migrants, and it was instigated by Robinson and Musk DW's Simon Jung is in Berlin. Simon, what is Musk alleging and what is this legal action likely to mean for the German public broadcaster ZDF?

Yeah, Sarah, ZDF, which is one of, Germany's, big public broadcasting organizations, says that Musk is complaining, about one of its news programs in which it claimed, that the billionaire had called, for, as you mentioned, a racist mob to hunt down migrants, in social media posts that he, put up about what was going on in Northern Ireland and the violence on the streets there.

Now ZDF says that Musk's German lawyers, have, sent them a legal demand calling, for them to desist from publishing this claim. And indeed, the broadcaster has now, withdrawn that, claim about Elon Musk, from its, streaming platform. It's cut the part out of the program, and it has acknowledged that the words used were, quote, "imprecise and open to misinterpretation."

So they seem to have backed down basically. And Musk himself has said on his social media platform, X, that ZDF's report was a terrible lie.

The German far-right AfD party is wading into the issue as well. Tell us more about that.

Yeah, that's right. AFD, co-leader Alice Weidel has posted on her X account, so it's all quite, cozily happening, on X.

He- she's po- posted in support of Musk saying, that defamation shouldn't go without consequences a- and don't let them get away with it. It's not altogether a surprise, that, these two organizations or these two personalities might be supporting one another. The AFD has often taken a line, criticizing so-called mainstream media, itself, a little bit like Trump's MAGA movement in the US.

And the AFD has also been close to Elon Musk in the past. Last year, he was beamed into a big election, rally that the AFD held by video screen. And he was making a speech calling on Germans to be proud of their, themselves and, and saying indeed that there was too much focus, on, wrongs in Germany's past.

At times at least, the AFD and Elon Musk have been, in tune on political questions.

And beyond that, Simon, you gave us a little bit of a sense of it there, but what is Musk's influence in European politics and debate more broadly?

Yeah, I think Elon Musk has repeatedly sought to, get involved in politics.

Obviously he was very close to Donald Trump at one time in the US, but here in Europe, he's tweeted a lot and spoken out on, particularly on migration. He retweeted in, in, in relation to the violence recently in Northern Ireland, as we've said, he, retweeted some inflammatory posts by, a far-right activist known as Toni- Tommy Robinson.

A- and, in a recent murder case in the UK where the victim was white, but the suspected perpetrator was of South Asian heritage, Musk tweeted more than 100 times, and offered to bankroll the prosecution and the police and so on. So he really does like to get involved. As I said, he's often supported, the AfD and other groups.

For instance, Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist in the UK, people accused of stirring up animosity around race and immigration particularly. And, so some, particularly looking at the AfD, the Alternative for Germany party w- here in, in Germany, that's a party that's riding high in the polls, doing very well, and some attribute that growth in support in part to the support of people, with deep pockets, like Elon

People are terrified in terms of particularly minority ethnic or anybody who looks or sound different are, are really anxious. But in general, there's a, there's a wide anxiety about, and a sort of an eeriness. Speaking to family and colleagues here in Belfast today where I'm not, buses are off today, medical appointments have been canceled, schools are closing early.

There was discussion about potentially postponing GCSE exams. My own school, they're talking about school play not being able to go ahead, tonight because of people's anxiety about, moving around. Last night the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast's, Northern Ireland's biggest hospital, had to issue guidance to expectant mothers that if you need to come in the course of your labor, w- make contact with us and we will bring you in a taxi.

Don't deprive yourself of medical attention. People, people are, are worried, particularly those of minority backgrounds. And people are angry as well. People are raging that, this level of distortion is allowed to strike fear and is allowed to shut the city down for a day.

It really feels like a lot of the sort of the fanning of the flames happened on social media rather than happening, say, intrinsically within the community. What effect do you think that, sites like X and some of the most powerful men in the world or richest men in the world, like Elon Musk, what effect do you think they've had on these protests?

A,

yeah, an enormous effect. It is absolutely an accelerant. And look, all the positives we know about communication and democratization and all of that, but we also know that in terms of the algorithm, almost all roads lead to extreme content. You know that yourself if you view a video.

And I know of o- over wider kind of social media access, engaging with young people, a few swipes away and you get into some pretty dark stuff, and that's certainly the case, a- around issues of immigration, and of race. So at a number of factors, one, the kind of the, the usual suspects of, of sort of top line grifters, your Tommy Robinsons and all of that.

People who couldn't find Belfast on a map, who don't know a single thing about, what communities like North Belfast have been through, amplified. Obviously the, the, the horrific video we saw of the knife attack, and obviously that was, like, profoundly shocking, extreme content. And anybody who watched that would feel revulsion, would feel shock, would feel fear, and understandably many would feel anger.

But amplifying that, ex- calling people out onto the streets- creating this, uh, imperative, this narrative that's the only way to make your voice heard. And as I say, circulating these kind of ... and I'll be honest, like AI ... No designer sat and listed these protest sites, but, very easy for some armchair chair general to design a list of protest sites.

But as I say, those enormous accounts amplifying that, pushing it out, I suppose making particularly young men who feel disconnected, feeling like they're part of some sort of a, some sort of a, of a movement. And, and I understand, I wasn't ... Tried not to look at them last night, but I understand throughout the course of the evening, sharing, celebrating, glorying in that sort of content.

And there is, there's numerous dangers. One, just the kind of massive power without responsibility that these giants have, that we know they have. And doing it from very privileged, positions. But yeah, it's an accelerant in terms of literally the, the way of communicating, but also the fact that it is deliberately darkening and radicalizing and amplifying, particular viewpoints.

So they, they absolutely have to be brought to heel, and we've utterly failed, and it's a genuine existential threat to democracy and to communities like the one I represent.

See, it's interesting what you just said there about sort of armchair observers, y- piecing together or allocating the riot sites because, you know- Yeah

th- the attack happened in North Belfast, but most- Yeah ... of the unrest was in the east. So I mean- W- what reasoning do you think there is? Is there a specific reason why it happened in a totally different part of the city?

Yeah, so look, I'm not pretending to be any expert in this, but I suppose there's three factors.

One, we've seen this movie before, right? We've seen a lot of the sort of, scapegoating, amplifying, blaming thing. But also, you may be aware and, of the kind of, what's known as the Flags Protests in 2011- ... in, Northern Ireland where it started as a kind of a purported, and maybe there was some degree of organic anger and it springing up in neighborhoods.

Particularly it has to be said and, it is absolutely not the case that there's no racism in perceived Catholic and nationalist communities because there is. But it, it has come from, there, there is an influence of, of some unionist politicians certainly, of loyalist paramilitaries.

And it is also a factor that the neighborhoods that are maybe, w- where more minority communities are living in are neighborhoods where as in any city where the rents are a wee bit lower, where there is, has been traditionally less economic opportunity. And if you overlay that, many of those are what would have been loyalist neighborhoods in Belfast, so that's a factor, as well.

But it is also the fact that there's presumably a strategic, purpose to that. It stretches the police resources. It creates that, as I say, eerie sensation of everything kicking off and, I know WhatsApp groups I'm in, people were going, "Oh my goodness, this, bus, this glider's on fire in the Newtownards road," and, "I'm seeing this," and a- and, and I suppose pinging in different areas.

So it creates that sense of chaos, but yeah, th- three pronged. That was a sort of a pattern developed from those flag protests. It probably, it, it provides a local meeting point, and as I say, it stretches, police resources and public service resources. It's hard to know how to plan and respond.

Even last night my colleagues, my assembly colleague Matthew O'Toole and our counselor Donal Lyons were supporting five or six families who they literally encountered, they had been burned out of their apartments in, on Sandy Row, minority fam- families, a, from India in this case as it happens.

But trying to get them shel- trying to get a community center, even that is made more difficult because of roads that might be, a- affected, and I suppose it, it suits those that are trying to create chaos to do it that way.

It's interesting what you said there. You, you're suggesting that actually this, the riots or the tension is being drawn on sectarian lines, and I suppose that leads me onto my next question because you have heard a lot, a few politicians overnight and this morning calling for a hard border on the island.

I mean- what are your objections to that? And do you see that as i- is that factional pitting? But into

any, yeah, and I just wanna say 'cause I'm either playing it up or playing it down, I'm trying to play a straight bat in terms of, the, the sectarian geography of our city and I suppose some of the historical patterns.

'Cause there'll be those who say, "Oh, she's blaming it all on..." But there are structural issues there including, a no- a not universal lack of leadership in unionist communities including, it's very clear the politicians who were on their feet in Stormont and elsewhere yesterday making inflammatory videos about all of this.

And as I say, there are issues like loyalist paramilitaries. There's areas in my constituency that have had organized anti-migrant sentiment. Big printed banners hung up, all of that. That's not individuals. That's on an organized level and, and it's paramilitaries. The, but the hard border, all roads lead to, the policy solution being a h- a hardened border on the island of Ireland.

Look, we do, the common travel area has existed for, you know- Decades, way over a century. It predates the Good Friday Agreement. It predates partition, in fact. But it is a, it is the logic of the island. We know all this from Brexit. You can't police 500 kilometers of land border, and it also would be, completely untenable and unreasonable because that's not what the majority of people want.

There have been over the last kind of, five, 10 years certainly that I've been in elected politics, there have been different periods of flow north-south. Politicians in the south who have said, "Oh, asylum seekers are coming from the north, to the south," and vice versa. And I think there's probably, I think that's the case.

I think those patterns do change. But yes, that is c- currently the kind of obsession o- of some of those. A- and clearly there are some movements. We don't have data to the extent, of how significant it is. And I'm not saying that, there shouldn't be data sharing, of course.

Of course there should be. But it is opportunistic by those who are amplifying it in reform, on, on, on parts of the British right. And unfortunately, political unionism, like a moth to a flame, will go after where English nationalism i- is going, and I don't think it'll take them anywhere very good because a little bit like Brexit, even if you decide that this is the biggest problem in the world and you must do things to address it, it is impossible, as I say.

People, people, tens of thousands of people cross the border every day on their legitimate business. People from our place, people from all around the world, tourists, workers, whatever. So you can't, make that a hard border. If you are so determined that all of these people need to be monitored, the only logic is to the IRC, and that's what happened with Brexit.

I tried to warn a lot of those people years ago, way before the rex- Brexit referendum, saying, "This can only go one direction. Don't follow this idea because it doesn't end well."

can you talk about Elon Musk? What does he have to do with these protests?

It was he alongside some of these other online space, these social media owners, have been allowing their platforms to be used not only to promote misinformation, disinformation, but also to be used as an organizing space for the racists.

The call went out on social media for people to come out ready to fight, ready to get arrested, to wear all in black, to put on masks, to turn off their mobile phone cameras, warnings for people to turn off their doorbell cams so that police wouldn't be able to identify people through, through video afterwards.

So not only did Elon Musk, however, allow his social media platform to be used in that way, he joined in, and he was re-sharing far-right content as well. We have our own fair share of homegrown racists in this place. We-- the last thing that we needed was people like Elon Musk and others joining the pro-, the, the pro-protest parties.

Sinéad

Marmion, you certainly saw this happening. You're an immigration lawyer. You're dealing with a lot of immigrants right now who are terrified. Many are recruited to come here to Belfast, by, for example, Unison, the massive, what, union. Fifty thousand union members are here to be healthcare workers, to work in hospitals, home care, and yet you have Elon Musk amplifying.

Talk about whose voices he was amplifying.

Absolutely. You're right to say that, our health service relies on foreign labor that, is actively sought. And Elon Musk has been portraying that, he's targeted our Lord Mayor, for example, who's just been in office a week, and saying that she's a betrayer of our people.

She's 30

years old, right?

She is, yeah. And he- What did he

say?

He said she was a betrayer of our people, of her people. A- an extremely- ... evocative statement, and provocative, and it has, undoubtedly led to the mobilization, as Patrick has said, of those racist thugs, of the community groups that have been historically existent here, ready to attack people in their homes.

And I've seen clients, I've heard from clients who were put out of their houses, were burnt out of their houses, clients with young kids who are terrified. And a- as Patrick says, the, it's the community that has picked up the pieces. It's women in the community, it's migrant women in the community that have organized and mobilized the response, and our authorities ha- have been left, wanting, as Patrick has said as well.

So it is an extremely volatile situation, but it's not the Belfast that we know and love, having worked with communities and, worked with, lots of people who, who call Belfast their home.

Can you talk about some calls that you have gotten?

Yes. I received a call over the weekend, from a client of mine from Syria who has a young daughter, and her daughter was sending me, messages saying that her mom was too sad to come to the phone.

She and her mom had slept in the kitchen of the house at the back of the property because they were too afraid to be seen. They have been left, again, without any help from the authorities. And we're looking to try and assist somehow with her, and her child. I have another client who was burned out of her house, and she has a young child as well.

And it, she's now staying in emergency accommodation. So it has been affecting people that have called Belfast their home for numbers of years, who are legally and lawfully here, and have now been targeted in essentially what is racial profiling.

The Belfast Islamic Center, halted evening prayers last week due to the racist violence.

This is Kashif Alram, who's a member of the center's executive committee.

It's heartbreaking. It really is. At the same time, Belfast is full of a lot of decent people. We've had a lot of support from the local community. And the people who are spreading the hate at the moment, they're a minority.

They're very few. But definitely it's sent shocks throughout the whole community. A lot of, ethnic minority people at the moment are living in fear. We're getting a lot of calls at the moment. The levels of distress are very high. I've lived in Northern Ireland, born and bred here, 44 years.

This is the worst I've seen it. Does it change my, kind of perception or does it, make me fearful of living here? Definitely not. I see hope. I see hope, and hope is, not something we just sit and, kinda pray or think about. It's created by action, and we're seeing that. We're seeing a lot of local support.

We're seeing people come together. Communities, are sick and tired of this sort of intimidation, which has been happening in Belfast over the years.

That's Kashif Akram of the Belfast Islamic Center. Patrick, you know him well.

Yes, and unfortunately, the Islamic Center has been the target of repeated attacks over recent years, including last year, an attempted fire bomb attack into the building itself.

The Muslim community in Belfast and across Northern Ireland has been under a very serious threat. There has been a particular anti-Muslim, anti-Islam dimension to these racist attacks. We have seen, murals and banners and placards going up, across Belfast and elsewhere, not just in the last week, but over the last several years, that are specifically targeting Muslims for this sort of race hate.

So they are particularly vulnerable at the moment, and, so our heart goes out to them. But they have also been on the receiving end of huge public community support. And again, to reiterate the message of the anti-racism protest, that's the real spirit of Belfast, and that's the views of most people who live here, not the vociferous and sometimes violent minority that we saw on our streets last week as well.

And Sinead Marmion, if you could talk about the Sudanese women who are gathering to do mutual aid.

Yes, it's been fantastic. There's an organization called the Anaqa Collective in Belfast. Anaqa. Yes, and it's run by, women. It's a women's collective, and indeed, two Sudanese women as well. So th-they have organized, pretty much immediately, immediate support across other community organizations, across certain, political parties as well have assisted.

I say certain, not all. And, we've seen a comple-- re-homing, I think, of two hundred people in the past week. Food deliveries, people getting lifts to appointments. And it's an unbelievable community effort, which is the real spirit of Belfast. But it does come against a backdrop of, from our government, of, hostile envi-environment policies that have been created over the past number of years, that demonizes immigration.

It focuses on negatives, negatives, negative immigration. It hasn't put any positive policies in place for integration. We have no racial equality strategy here in Northern Ireland. We've no anti-poverty strategy. None of that has been moved to assist people who are coming to Belfast to call it their home, and it's against the backdrop of where we have political parties that are stoking the flames and encouraging what they call a legitimate concern on immigration in circumstances where, that is not well-founded and the conversation resultingly is always toxic.

Patrick, as we begin to wrap up, can you put this in a, global context, what we're seeing here in Belfast? Which is not, of course, isolated, and by the way, the anti, the pro-immigration protests that took place here this weekend took place in Derry, took place really in so many places in solidarity with immigrants.

But what about this right-wing push that really features anti-immigrant racism?

So we know we're not alone in Northern Ireland in facing these problems of, of racists and sometimes violent racists, with a backdrop of anti-immigration, anti-migrant political rhetoric, sometimes coming from leaders of countries.

We've seen that across Europe, we've seen it obviously in the US. Sometimes people are coming to build their lives here because they're fleeing some of the wars that you talked about at the top of the program. Otherwise, they're coming for economic reasons to build new lives, just as Irish people have done, to the US and elsewhere for many generations.

But I think what we have seen globally is, is a far-right stoking of people's fears, exploiting people's fears around societies that are changing, shifting a little bit, and I think what we need is real political leadership. The words of condemnation we got from Hilary Benn, from Keir Starmer this week, they're welcome, but they're not really very useful to people who are being burned out of their homes and who are worried about what the rest of this summer holds.

And I think that we need political leaders to step up to the mark rather than joining in the inflammatory rhetoric that ultimately leads to inflammable materials being put into people's homes, followed by flames. And I think that, the Keir Starmers, the Hilary Benns, and our own political leaders have a lot to answer for in terms of the lack of leadership they have given.

Condemnation statements are easy after the event. A bit of sympathy for people, easy after the event. What did you do before? How did you heed the warnings from the summer of violence we had last year, the summer of violence we had the year before? I'm afraid the answer is nothing, and into that vacuum have stepped community activists trying to do the right thing to rescue their neighbors.

But we need political leadership now. We need it in this country, but we need it globally.

And Finally, Section E, The Reckoning, Billionaire Rhetoric and the Case for Taxing Wealth

The economy is in shambles. People can't afford their gas or their groceries. One-third of Americans are reporting that they are skipping meals or borrowing money to obtain healthcare, and we're in the perfect environment for people to be radicalized against the oligarchy, because while the workers suffer, people like Bezos get richer and more comfortable.

So this is desperation, but we need to talk about it because over the past month or so we've seen some tax proposals introduced by Democrats suggesting that certain people with certain incomes should be excluded from paying federal income taxes. In Senator Chris Van Hollen's plan, he proposes no federal income taxes on those making at or below a living wage.

That would be $46,000 for individuals and $92,000 for joint filers. And in Senator Cory Booker's proposal, you won't pay taxes on the first $75,000 that you make. Now, at first, this might sound nice, right? But Jeff Bezos coming out in support of policies like these should really stop you in your tracks and prompt you to ask why.

And I think the answer is that Jeff Bezos is eager to undermine progressive taxation in this country, that is, taxes that increase as income increases. And more than that, he seems to be fundamentally opposed to keeping the government funded, and we obviously fund the government through taxation. He said it himself, raising his taxes isn't going to solve our problems.

But it does. That is how we fund the government. That's how this works. I want my taxes to pay for things the government should be doing for our society, maintaining infrastructure, creating a social safety net, maintaining essential services, and I want Jeff Bezos' taxes to do the same. I want a robustly funded government, not one that is deprived of the funds needed to do what it needs to do.

And you know that famous, Ronald Reagan quote about the most terrifying words being about how you're from the government and you're here to help? Did you hear New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's response to that? And standing here this morning, I cannot help but think of the words of our 40th president, Ronald Reagan.

He famously said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" It's a good quote, but I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually, "I worked all day and can't feed my family."

We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table ... exactly that. I want the government to work, and for the government to work, we need taxes. The problem arises when wealthy people like Jeff Bezos get around paying their fair share of taxes.

And as ProPublica reports, the wealthiest people in this country sometimes do get around doing that, like Jeff Bezos did in 2007 and 2011, paying zero in federal income taxes. I'd like to see a focus on this, tackling the ways in which billionaires avoid paying taxes and increasing their true tax rate so that average people are not carrying a higher tax burden than Jeff Bezos.

And there is one chart that stands out in that ProPublica article, well many, but this one in particular. While Bezos' wealth has grown astronomically over the last decade and he's paid a minuscule fraction of it in taxes, a typical American household paid more in taxes than it accumulated in wealth.

Jeff Bezos is acting like it's taxes that are keeping the average American from accumulating wealth, when it is predatory and exploitative labor practices, a president who coddles billionaires and guts policies that are designed to benefit the working class, and of course, a government that is every single day looking for ways to make the Trump family specifically more wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.

They cut $1 trillion from SNAP and Medicaid and ACA to pay for tax cuts for people making over $500,000, and still, people who make a salary that would qualify them to pay zero taxes under Van Hollen or Booker's proposals, they defend Donald Trump. I don't get it. So there is a split among Democrats on this issue, becoming the party of tax cuts or standing firmly that we need taxes to fund the government, that we should all participate in this process, and that it's the wealthiest that should shoulder the weight by paying the most.

And you can count me in in the latter group, but I'd love to know what you think, so please tell me in, in the comments below. Another consideration on this, if billionaires like Jeff Bezos get their way and remove the bottom 50% from paying taxes, what will prevent these billionaires from turning around and then saying that you don't actually contribute anything, so you don't deserve to have a voice, a seat at the table?

He already has such grandiose sense of self that he went on a tirade about his grand contributions to society that apparently should exempt him from paying his fair share of taxes. If I do my job right- Right The, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the, than the good that I do with my charitable giving.

And I think this is an important point to make because peop- people forget, or they sometimes don't see, that when, when you create something like Amazon and you're saving... I get letters from new mothers all the time- Right ... that say, "I have no idea what I would be doing right now if I didn't have Amazon.

Thank you." Or what we did in the pandemic when people could really see what an essential service we provided to them. And so, you know, this is, it, we, Amazon creates tremendous value. And by the way, all companies are creating value of some kind. I didn't realize until this interview that I've not actually heard Jeff Bezos speak for any lengthy period of time, and, not impressed.

He wants to talk about his grand contributions to society. And sure, Amazon provides an important service, especially for people without the ability to access public transportation to get to the store, or people who live in rural areas and don't have easy access to get what they need. But what exactly is he selling there?

That because he had this idea and happened to be surrounded by people who could loan him large sums of cash to get his idea off the ground, and got extremely lucky, that he deserves to sit out paying his fair share of taxes, hoard his many billions of dollars when he could end any number of societal problems in an instant.

We just covered the reporting from about a month ago here where an Amazon worker collapsed, and while they were bleeding out, other employees were told to turn around and keep working. We've all seen the reporting about delivery drivers pissing in bottles because they have to meet their unrealistic targets or be fired.

Jeff Bezos' billions have come at the expense of workers collapsing and pissing in bottles to ensure that people get the packages. But he deserves what now? Immunity from the debate about income inequality? Our system needs to be improved very specifically in that regard. In many ways, but also in how our tax and transfer system does not actually allow for major reductions in equality that we see in other countries.

These billionaires have too much power. They get a seat at the table to undermine democracy, and then they sit there and bitch about the taxes that they pay, when they pay a minuscule percentage, with average Americans having a much higher true tax rate. That is the issue. Don't let Jeff Bezos distract you.

Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month- Right ... in taxes?

That's $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything.

Okay, so at the first glimpse, this might seem interesting. Why do we have a billionaire arguing for ordinary people to pay lower taxes? These are... At the cur- at the moment, we have a tax system where billionaires pay very low taxes, almost nothing, and ordinary people pay, if you add up all of their taxes, close to 50%.

So it's a great tax system, balanced in favor of Jeff Bezos and other billionaires, but he's saying ordinary people should pay less tax. Okay, interesting, perhaps surprising. Why is he saying that? Really the answer is very, very simple. In order to know that, we just simply need to see the question that he was answering.

So here is the question that Jeff Bezos was asked, and his response was cut taxes on, teachers.

But one of the topics that I thought we should talk about and maybe even start with- Yeah ... is these days it feels almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a headline about wealth in America- Mm

uh, about the billionaire class- Mm-hmm ... about wealth inequality and policy and, and everything else. And it's taken a, a uniquely critical turn, I think. And I'm so curious, before we even get into everything else, what you think about that right now?

Okay, so the question was, quite, delivered in quite a roundabout way by CNBC.

Basically, everybody's talking about taxing the, the super rich. You are super rich. What do you think about it? And that is the question, in response to which Jeff Bezos eventually got round to saying, "I think that ordinary teachers should pay less tax." Now if we first analyze this, from an economic perspective, at a surface level, this is, quite a, strange argument, right?

Because just at its most basic, you... So Jeff Bezos very intentionally picked a, a salary level, $75,000 a year, which is quite close to the American average. You, the average man or woman paying less taxes, is just quite obviously not a substitute for billionaires paying more taxes, right? I- if we're in a situation where government needs more tax money and, Jeff Bezos says, "How about instead of that, we, we charge ordinary workers less tax money," that doesn't solve the problem of, of tax money, right?

This is a bit like you and I go to a restaurant and, you know that I'm, like, loaded because you've, been reading the Daily Mail, and you are, like, struggling for money. And you say at the end of the meal, "Hey, listen, how about maybe, you cover this one?" And I say, "Listen, forget about that.

I've got a better idea. I'm not gonna pay for it. But how about you don't pay for it?" This is... It, it, it's, it doesn't really, Especially in the UK context where, government finances are quite stretched, but increasingly US finances are quite stretched as well. The US has a large and, and a large deficit and a large and rapidly growing debt, and borrowing costs in the US are rising like they are here.

It, it doesn't... It's a strange argument, right? It's, it's a strange argument to say, "Okay, tax money is needed, so instead of me paying more, how about you pay less?" And it would be easy, and before I r- made this video, I watched a lot of, there's been a lot of US media about this, and a lot of people like on Jeff Bezos a little bit.

But I think it would be easy to dismiss this as this is, a dumb argument, especially if you're viewing it from the UK perspective. Because we had, just a few years ago, we had a Prime Minister Liz Truss, who basically came in, with this tax strategy of, "What we're gonna do is we're gonna cut tax on billionaires, and we're gonna use that to cut tax on working people."

And what happened is, it basically immediately it caused, an enormous economic crisis. This is not a, a fully fleshed out, economic argument. But I think it's a bit rash to, to immediately disregard it because I think to a degree it is an intelligent argument from a kind of like a rhetorical, like a persuasive perspective for, a very simple reason, right?

So Jeff Bezos, wh- when he, when he made this argument, he used a lot of numbers. And, numbers catch people's attention, especially when they are amounts of money. And Jeff Bezos, he hits this number, $75,000, a, a teacher in Queens earning $75,000, which is a little bit above the American average, which means $75,000 will be quite close to the salary of a lot of Americans who watch this video.

And as soon as they hear that, they'll be like, "Oh, that's somebody similar to me, similar financial situation to me." And then he says, we didn't show this in the clip, but he says, they're paying $12,000 a year taxes. That's $1,000, a month in taxes, and they could use that money to pay their bills or, or to pay their rent or, to take care of their family.

And what he's doing there is he's using the persuasive power of, of money, and he's saying, "Well, listen, if you come with me, you can get this $1,000 a month, and wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be great if you, if you could have $1,000 a month?" And he's contrasting that to- What, what seems to many people to be a kind of abstract concept, and, and he's trying to make it seem like you have this, dichotomy, like you have this choice.

You have, you have two things you can choose from. You can either choose more taxes for me, Jeff Bezos, and he says specifically in this interview, "That's not gonna... That doesn't solve anything." "That's not gonna help you." Or what we could have is less tax for you, $1,000 every single month in your pocket.

And obviously, I, as I've said, you, you don't need to dig far into it before you realize, this is, this is not... Just not taxing anyone is, is not a really at all a feasible economic strategy. But, we live in a world where people, for better or worse, are a little bit obsessed with money.

We live in, in a society which is obsessed with money. We live in an economy where a lot of people are struggling for money, and if this guy turns around and says, "Look, these guys are trying to tax me, but we have an alternative, which is to give every single one of you $1,000 a month," it's gonna be, like, potentially quite persuasive, right?

And when I saw it, it shouldn't be funny because it's, a really serious issue and, my whole channel is about this, but it is quite... What, what made me laugh about this is it immediately reminded me of this is how you distract, a child or a baby who, who is doing something that you don't like.

You say to them, "Hey, look, do you wanna use the iPad? You, you wanna get some ice cream?" You just, you just switch, you just switch the conversation immediately away from something you don't want the child to do. Don't tax me. And he said, "Oh, but, if you do what I want, I'll give you $1,000 a month."

And, and of course, Jeff Bezos knows, he, he's probably not gonna get this policy that, that he's, he's demanding. But it doesn't matter because all he's trying to do is just distract you away from the thing that he doesn't want you to talk about by giving you this, alluring thing here, like $1,000...

Who doesn't want $1,000 a month? That would be, like, fantastic, basically. And it takes advantage of, a lack of, basically, economics understanding. And I think this is the reason why I try so hard to, create a public that just has a basic understanding of basic economic ideas. I've done videos in the last couple of years.

I did one saying, "Forget about money." And the big idea for the forget about money video was forget about money because money's confusing. And the government can print money and it can do a lot of things, but what the government can't print is, is resources. And at any given amount of time, there's a, a certain amount of resources.

There's a certain amount of housing, a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of raw materials, a certain amount of transport, a certain number of cars, and these will be distributed in a certain way. And- When you understand that, you realize that this idea that Jeff Bezos is suggesting, "How about you let me keep my money, and then I will give you more money?"

is, a nonsense. We can't just, suddenly create more money, Jeff Bezos gets more money and you get more money. But I think it will appeal to some people. It's taking advantage of, a lack of economic understanding, this idea that, like... There's, there's an American movie from a few years ago called Idiocracy, which I actually tried to watch, and I, I didn't think it was actually a great movie.

But there's a great scene where, there's a guy who's running to be president, and he says, "Well, what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna give everybody more money." And he takes that sort of, machine gun, he starts, firing money into the audience. Because of course we can print out money, but at the end of the day, there is competition for real resources.

We exist in economies where billionaires pay very low rates of tax. Jeff Bezos himself has paid... If you look at his life, he's worth about $280 billion. He's paid, I think, something like $8 billion of tax, which means on his lifetime income he's paid something like 3%. On his whole lifetime income.

You're paying 50%. His class is getting aggressively richer, your class is gre- getting aggressively poorer. You don't know these things, and he's saying, "Listen, come with me. I'll get richer and you'll get richer." And what this plays on is basically the fact that we all hate tax, we all hate politicians, we all hate the media, and we're looking for somebody else h- who, who's gonna save us, right?

And I think this reminds me very much of basically what, what Elon Musk does, and what Donald Trump does, where they portray themselves as, "I'm not a politician. I'm a businessman. I know how to make money. Come with me. I'll get rich. I'll make you rich." And I think it would be too much to simply dismiss this, right?

These guys, what they're trying to do is portray themselves as the sensible guys in the room. The guys who are smarter than the politicians. And really, they're fishing. This is, $1,000 on the end of a hook, and they're hoping that you will bite that, and you will accept a system which is aggressively impoverishing you.

I think among economists it's perhaps also 70, 80% of economists who support this.

So for instance, you had, last year in July an op-ed in Le Monde that was signed by seven Nobel Prize winners in support of that, and in the French context, where they said, " this is a great idea. And not only it's a great idea, but France can and should do it on its own. Don't wait for an international agreement.

Do it, and lead by example." Seven Nobel Prize winners. Of course, you're going to always to find some economists who don't like it, and what's the reason why you, there is some resistance? I think the main reason is because, there's a long experience with wealth taxation in European countries in particular over the course of the 20th century, and those wealth taxes, they didn't work well, and, for reasons that I'm going to explain.

But they didn't work well, and so many people, many economists, they think, they have a kind of a, literally of a knee-jerk reaction, and they th- they think, "Oh, it's about reintroducing those wealth taxes. We didn't, which didn't work very well, so that's not a good idea." But they don't, when they do that, they don't understand that this proposal is not at all about reintroducing the wealth tax that used to exist in France or in Germany or in Sweden.

It's the opposite in many ways. So first of all, uh, why, why do I say that those wealth taxes didn't work very well? So I spent a lot of time with my colleagues stud- study the international experience with wealth taxation. And the conclusion was... A- and I agree with the economists who say that, the conclusion was that these wealth taxes, they were failures.

And there are two ways to look at that failure. Th- there's one way, which is, okay, we've tried wealth taxes in the past. They didn't work, hence they will never work. Forget about it. And there's another way, which is, and this is what we've tried to do in our work, which is, okay, let's try to understand What failed, what were the problems?

Let's try to draw lessons, and let's try to think about whether those problems have solutions. And the answer is that they do have solutions, and we can do much better than what was done in the past. So what were the two problems? There were two problems with past wealth taxes. Number one is that the super-rich were essentially legally exempted from those wealth taxes.

The law was written such that for the super-rich, they didn't have to pay the tax. How was it done? So in the book, I, I tell the story of France, which is perhaps one of the most extreme case. In 1981, the, there's a socialist president who's elected, and the Socialist Party has an absolute majority in parliament.

They create a wealth tax. But very quickly, so the billionaires complain and, "We don't like it," and very quickly they introduce an exemption, and they say, "Okay, if, someone owns more than 25% of the shares of a company," so if you're a big shareholder we are going to exempt that wealth from the wealth tax.

So if you're really big enough, you don't have to pay the tax. But that's exactly w- what it means to be a billionaire. The billionaires, their wealth is exactly that. It's big stakes, big shareholdings in big corporations. And so the consequence of that is that the effective wealth tax rate for the French billionaires was 0.005%.

They just didn't pay it, and it's crazy. It's if the US tomorrow created a wealth tax and said, " but we are going to exempt Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos," and why? So first lesson is don't do that. Just don't exempt the super-rich. It doesn't make any sense. So that's number one.

Number... And, why did they f- you know... number one. Let me talk about number two first. The second problem with the past wealth taxes is that they never tried to tackle the issue of migration, tax exile, the risk, the threat that they always agitate of moving to other countries, to tax havens.

And many countries, and it's been really a blind spot of the social democratic experiment in Western Europe, perhaps the most important blind spot, which is that it has always taken as a given that there is international competition, and tax competition in particular, and that it's a kind of law of nature, like gravity, and we are just powerless to address that.

The only way we can adapt is by slashing taxes on the super-rich, on those mobile taxpayers, and including multinational companies. But this view is profoundly wrong. It's profoundly w- wrong because first, of course, you can try to forge international agreements, you can try to create coordination, cooperation, and we've been able to do that for multinational firms in some sense in 2021.

But more fundamentally because there's a lot of things that one country alone can do to prevent capital flight, to prevent, tax-driven migration. So very concretely, for instance, any country on its own, the UK, let's say tomorrow the UK introduces this 2% minimum tax on the super-rich. What the UK could do, and what the UK should absolutely do exactly at the same time as it introduces this tax, is to say, "Okay."

If you've lived for a long time in the UK and became really rich there, and now you move to another country, that's your right, but we will keep taxing you after you've left for a number of years as if you were still a resident, a tax resident of the UK for 5 years or 10 years or 15 years. We can discuss.

The UK can do that. There's no need for an international agreement. This is already in some sense what the US does. The US has taxation that's based upon citizenship, meaning if you have US citizenship and you move abroad, you have to keep paying taxes in the US no matter where you live until you die

And so it's only one of two countries that

has that right It's only one of two, and you can say perhaps it's not an i- perhaps the system is not ideal because you can imagine someone who was born in the US, so has US citizenship, and then their parents move when they were two months old, and yet that person...

And imagine that person never sets foot again in the US, and still he or she has to pay taxes until the rest of her life. That's a bit extreme. But what the UK and almost all other countries do is exactly the opposite extreme, and is much less defensible. You've spent all your life in the UK, you became a billionaire, now you move, and immediately the UK says, " that's it.

That's good. We'll stop taxing you." So you can, in effect, you can secede from society. You can move to Dubai or to Monaco and pay zero tax in those countries, even though your wealth, of course, was a social creation, a collective success, like all wealth creation. You benefited from infrastructure, from education, from healthcare, from the locals that protected your property, and so on.

But you also benefited from all the knowledge that's been accumulated over centuries by all of humanity. So there is just, you have duties towards society, towards humanity. So you cannot just say, "That's it. I'm done. I became rich thanks to all the hard work of everybody, and now I move to another planet."

That's just impossible to defend. And so what's more important is how do we make sure that it's not possible? Any country could say, "We are going to collect the taxes that your new country, Dubai or Monaco, chooses not to collect." So you're free to move. If you move to a country that taxes you as much as the UK, say if you've moved to another country that also has this 2% tax, then you have nothing extra to pay to the UK.

You're good. But if you move to a country that taxes you less than the UK, then the UK would collect the difference so that it would be neutral for you to, from a tax perspective, to be in London or in Dubai or in Monaco. No difference. So that's really the most important idea in all of that. It's both that it's feasible.

It was... It has never been done except in the US in some sense, not exactly the same system. It has never been done because I think for a long time there was this fear that once people have left, it's just too hard to keep tracking their income and their wealth. If they moved to Switzerland, there used to be a very strict bank secrecy.

So there was this view that, it was just impossible to enforce such a system, I think. But since 2018, there's an automatic exchange of bank information. So HMRC receives data automatically from all banks in tax havens all over the world. So now it can use that information to keep track Keep tracking the wealth and the income of ex-UK billionaires who would move to those tax havens and keep taxing them.

And so we can do it. We should do it. And tax competition is not this law of nature. It's not gravity. It's man-made. We choose to accept it. We choose to tolerate it. We choose to encourage it. Frankly, the current system encourages international competition, but we can choose the opposite. We can choose to fight it.

And so if you want the tax, the billionaire tax to work, in contrast to all past wealth taxes, you need two crucial ingredients. Number one, no exemption whatsoever. No exemption whatsoever. So the first paragraph of the law should be if you have more than whatever, let's say 100 million pounds, you have to pay at least 2% of your wealth, period.

Everybody understands that if you're so wealthy, you don't need any kind of relief Paragraph two, if you move abroad, it keeps applying for 10 years, let's say. If the law is written like that, it will be completely different from past wealth taxes. Again, of almost the opposite. It would bring a lot of revenue.

There would not be any kind of tax avoidance possible. It would be fair in the sense that the wealthiest people will be made to contribute. And so that's what some economists have not yet understood. They've not made yet sometimes the effort of understanding that this is a n- new proposal.

This is not recreated, recreating what existed in the past. The, it is learning the lessons from past mistakes and proposing something new and effective.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The Rational National

Jonathan Pie

The John Fugelsang Podcast

Democracy Now!

Holy Post Media

Platypus Economics

1A

UNEffing the Republic

PissedMagistus

Middle East Eye

PoliticsJOE

DW News

Garys Economics

The Weekly Show

Novara Media

and Robert Reich with Inequality Media

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

You'll find the link to support us in the show notes along with links to join our Patreon and Discord communities for free where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms as I prepare to relaunch our social media strategy because I will need to recruit you to help boost our signal to as many new people as possible!

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.