Scumbag Trillionaire

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

A million dollars was a lot of money back in the 1950's, such a formidable sum that there was a popular television show built around the premise of a very rich guy who would send his manservant out each week to deliver a million dollar check to random individuals - a million on which the taxes had already been paid.  The recipients never knew who their mysterious benefactor was, and the weekly shows followed the lives of the newly rich individuals as they figured out what to do with their money.  It was a tour de force of self-discovery in which ordinary individuals sometimes were able to improve their lives, but at other times brought about their own moral and economic collapse - a big lesson in "be careful what you wish for."  The program was called "The Millionaire."

But my point (I think) is that time, seventy years ago, a million dollars was an almost unfathomable pile of money.   A millionaire in the 1950's was a rare bird indeed.  Today, according to Google's AI chatbot "Gemini," there are between 23.8 and 25.5 million millionaires in the United States alone.   More than 40 percent of the world's millionaires reside in the United States.   Another way of looking at that is one in fourteen to nineteen people in the United States currently are millionaires.  (If they all paid their taxes honestly we would know EXACTLY what that number is.)

The Forbes World's Billionaire List reports that the United States currently has 989 billionaires.  (A billionaire is a person who has a minimum of one million dollars times one thousand.). For those with an interest in where the world's wealth is gravitating, Forbes has a site on the internet called:  "Forbes Real-Time Billionaires Ranking."

Yesterday new ground was broken in the race to see who ultimately will control the world's wealth and the lives of its humans.   US immigrant Elon Musk opened his company, SpaceX, to public trading and quickly became the world's first trillionaire.  (A trillion dollars is represented by a one followed by twelve zeroes.  It could also be visualized as one million piles of one million dollars each.)  Musk, who will be 55 on June 28th, has said that he envisions himself being worth ten trillion dollars during his lifetime.

According to the Forbes "Real-Time " list, this morning Elon is worth $1.1 trillion, with Google billionaire Larry Page languishing far behind in second place at a paltry $294.1 billion.

A positive aspect of individual human beings controlling that much of the world's wealth is they are magnanimous individuals who appreciate the advantages that have come their way - and are focused on sharing their good fortune with those less fortunate than themselves.

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, and certainly nothing that would ever cross the mind of Elon Musk.  Musk showed the world who he was in early 2025 when he ran the cruelty-based Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for Donald Trump and led in the elimination of government programs that impacted the health, safety, and economic security of people around the globe.  Musk was responsible for the hollowing-out of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) which provided critical assistance to the world's inhabitants, fellow human beings whose very lives depended on aid (often food and medicine) from America.  Musk referred to the sixty-year-old operation as a "criminal organization" and noted on social media:

"We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.  Could have gone to some great parties.  Did that instead."

That's who Elon Musk is.  His weekend at the wood chipper caused a marked increase in death and suffering among the world's poorest people, many of them children.

Musk has also used his social media platform, X, to foment nationalist movements against immigration, to promote anti-labor movements, and to attack altruism (such as the charitable efforts of billionaire MacKenzie Scott whom he accused of "destroying Western civilization" through her donations to charities focused on women, minorities, and marginalized communities.  Musk, who grew up white in South Africa during the heyday of apartheid, seems to have a fixation with regard to preserving the dominance of "Western" civilization.

Elon Musk also had at least an email connection with convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein,  A recently released 2012 email from Musk to Epstein read:  "What day/night will be the best party on your island?"  Elon says his emails with Epstein have been misinterpreted.

Elon Musk is complex individual, and those few examples just scratch the surface of the type of individual he truly is.  But, saint or sinner, whether he uses his money for the common good or just piles it up and sits on it, a million dollars a million times over is an obscene amount of the world's total wealth and should not be controlled by just one individual.

Tax the rich.  Let them use their wealth to benefit their fellow travelers on Planet Earth, whether they want to or not.  Paying their fair share for the ride is the absolute least they should do.