'A Wolf at the Door'

We should have made becoming a billionaire illegal. There needed to be limits on how much wealth a person or corporate entity could amass; not to hamper ambition but to mitigate the hoarding of wealth and its detrimental effect on this world in peril.

We (mostly) don’t allow individuals to stockpile military grade weapons in their homes because of the threat and potential danger that poses to society as a whole.

That may sound radical but so are UFC fights on the White House lawn attended by Mark Zuckerberg, who, along with Elon Musk, helped the biggest bad actor this republic has ever known accrue power and purchase over the democratic mechanisms of our country.

They are not only not paying their fair share of taxes, they are consuming what belongs to all of us. The common thread running through all of these perpetually adolescent men is a lack of emotional maturity - and a voracious greed mixed with a complete lack of moral duty or civic responsibility.

Their cluelessness is a clue to the threat they pose.

Multi-billionaires cannot and should not be trusted with the power they wield. We should view the enormous accumulation of wealth under the same lens as we would any other weapon - for it is now being wielded with ever greater destructive consequence by men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Not to mention increasingly repellant folks like Jeff Bezos and Larry and David Ellison, who have played an outsized role in turning much of our media into partisan propaganda aiding the oligarchy.

Amazon causes enormous damage to the environment while simultaneously reaping the benefits of massive tax subsidies, reducing their obligation to almost nothing; all so its billionaire owner can play ‘I have a rocket too’ and prance around with puffy-lipped poseurs pretending to have taste and culture.

Wealth should not be used to court celebrity and false perch on some sort of social stratum. I want to live in a country that celebrates teachers, not tech titans; where those that have been given the most strive to care for those with the least.

We are approaching a tipping point on this planet - one which is cooking and buckling under the strain of global warming, and the endless carnage of conflict caused by dictators and despots.

One must only look at the heat wave in Europe this week, and the continued chaos around the globe, to see we are in deep trouble and in desperate need of solutions that value human rights and ecological sanity.

The war against democracy is becoming a war of attrition, and it is ironically being fueled by the very forces that are attempting to stop it. The opposition is becoming increasingly centered around the same technological infrastructure that is accelerating our demise.

Social media-driven algorithms, AI, and the data center boom all have the same consortia of scoundrels at the top of their pyramid scheme: conspiracy theories, alternative facts and cringe.

A cabal of influencers and online grifters have all contributed to the acrid smokescreen that has allowed bad actors to climb our castle walls and reach our battlements with impunity. Now they are turning our own weapons against us and in the confusion and chaos many are succumbing to the threat of inertia and malaise; it is enervation by design.

The United States is now a country fully geared towards greed. This is not a good thing.

Elon Musk has now become the world’s first trillionaire, a year and a half after sentencing many of the globe’s poorest to certain death or abject suffering by his ketamine-fueled dismantling of USAID.

I write about this often because it is so devastating to me personally. I know many good hearted folks who dedicated their lives to serving the Global South through our country’s aid organizations and their partnerships abroad, who rather selflessly served (when compared with what equivalent skillsets would earn in the private sector) the mission of soft diplomacy by implementing our nation’s institutional wealth and scientific advancement for the betterment of humanity.

The folks I know who lost their jobs believed in the mission and believed in America, they were forced out for no other reason than human rights and the dignity of the world’s poorest fell out of favor with the current administration. What they had dedicated their lives to over many decades was essentially destroyed in a weekend by an overgrown adolescent who is now wealthier than anyone in human history.

The fact that Elon Musk would be seen to be out of his mind by any true measure of sanity is almost beside the point; after his destructive reign playing politician and riding shotgun with Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term, Elon has now set his sights on fomenting discord in Great Britain and much of Western Europe.

We saw the results of his racism and xenophobic flame throwing at the anti-immigration riots in Belfast a couple of weeks ago, which were stoked by well-funded online agitprop.

We must increase our awareness of the growing emergency that democracy faces around the globe. Wall Street, and the loosening of rules to allow SpaceX an IPO on NASDAQ, essentially handed Musk an economic nuclear bomb. And he will use it to punish us all, not to mention defraud investors (such as the index funds that are now basically forced to buy into his company).

Mark my words, or just read the recent The New York Times article on his ‘Space Town’ in Brownsville, Texas, to get a preview of what may be in store. The fact that much of the horror that is occurring from the dismantling of USAID by the DOGE bros is taking place in Africa is not by accident.

Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa, with a famously racist father who was so enamored of the human rights violations of the Black citizens, he moved his family from Canada to join the cruelest cause on the planet at the time.

Musk’s father also had a child with his own, much younger step daughter, which goes a long way towards explaining Elon’s own proclivities and myriad children with many different women. He has fourteen children with four women, several of which he is estranged from, but who can forget the charm of his toddler son ‘Little X’ picking his nose in the Oval Office and telling POTUS to shut up.

Elon also seemingly used his favorite son as human shield in public places by carrying him on his shoulders to protect his hair-plug carpeted skull from potential snipers; even doing so in the halls of the U.S. Congress.

Not to mention his association with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who hosted Musk and his then wife, British model Tallulah Riley, at Epstein’s townhouse in 2012.

Maxwell was in the procurement business and Elon isn’t exactly smooth with the ladies; he once offered to buy a Space X masseuse on his private jet a horse if she would perform a sex act on him mid-flight. She demurred but reports of sexual harassment and racial discrimination at his non-union Tesla factories abound - and are the least shocking thing ever.

I believe that Musk targeted much of Central and Sub-Saharan Africa intentionally by dismantling USAID with an eye towards colonizing much of the land for SpaceX operations and data centers - once he wipes out most of the population through famine and disease.

And it goes without saying how attractive and necessary the rare earth minerals and other elements are to his manufacturing. If you don’t think Tesla batteries would take precedent over the indigenous populations of those countries in the mind of Elon Musk, you haven’t been paying attention to how racist and crazy his rhetoric is online on a daily basis.

Musk is a full blown white supremacist who gave a literal Nazi salute at Trump’s last inauguration celebration. The world has never seen anyone this racist and this wealthy before; given our collective track record in the West we should be quite alarmed at how much political power he wields in the United States. The tech titan had a very specific hand in both helping Trump get elected to a second term and shaping his Cabinet once he was installed.

The seeming incompetence of folks like RFK Jr., Dr. Oz and Doug Burgum are not by accident but by design. Do you think Elon would hire similarly inexperienced folks for SpaceX? Of course not - he poaches NASA employees, former astronauts and top of their class tech wizards.

Musk wanted to break the U.S.A.’s ability to respond to global health crises, where we provide aid and stability to vulnerable governments - so he could go in, commandeer the wreckage and set up shop for himself. He moved much of his operations from California to Texas because he knew how amenable the Texas GOP was to manipulation and outright bribery; Governor Abbot has essentially allowed Musk to write his own rule book, ignoring the needs of the citizens and the law.

One must only look at what he has done around the once environmentally-protected area of Boca Chica to see this in effect. Musk has a private, heavily armed force in tactical gear patrolling his gated town which is essentially a private town on public streets. Non-employees are not allowed to use the retail businesses or the infrastructure; trespassers are subject to prosecution.

The non-SpaceX residents are offered no compensation for the fallout from his rocket launches which often coat the town in toxic dust and debris.

MAGA, and the entirety of the GOP, now know that Musk’s vast wealth will be a force to contend with in political life for decades to come. What he is doing now on our planet, and in our atmosphere however, may reverberate for centuries.

On the same Friday Elon bragged about the successful launch of the SpaceX IPO, he also boasted about putting another twenty-six satellites in orbit from a SpaceX rocket in Florida.

If you look up at the night sky these days, you are likely to mistake one of his SpaceX satellites for a star; Musk has now launched into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) more satellites than entire nations, including China.

The Starlink network now encompasses over 8,000 LEO satellites, which is the vast majority of active satellites and poses not only a hindrance to the science of astronomy, it is obviously a major national security risk having one man responsible for much of the communication networks on this planet. We have already seen him shut off wifi communications on the battlefield in Ukraine at the behest of Vladimir Putin - imagine what he would be capable of in the future were his needs not met.

Elon Musk may have the ability to blackmail, or worse, influence American military operations abroad. For the moment he is working in concert with the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, and that is obviously not a good thing, but a far worse thing may be what happens in subsequent administrations.

If a Democrat was elected president would Musk not declare him an enemy of his ambition? Or would he use his unprecedented riches, and wield his technology, to serve the party out of power? One perhaps aligned with his xenophobic and racist dogma, and villainous designs on accumulating even more wealth and influence. Everything about his track record is self, not society, centered - and this should alarm us all.

The pursuit of extreme wealth should be seen as an abomination of the spirit. We are glorifying the wrong instincts. We have gone beyond the desire to provide for our own families into the realm of greed as the goal itself.

When I look at the mansions and megayachts that line the wealthy enclaves on the oceanfronts of the USA, I do not see something aspirational but something that is deeply broken.

How can one live in luxury when so many others live without? This is of course, an age old question, but one that has never before been so pressing as it is in this perilous moment. We have reached the precipice as a people, and if we do not learn to pull back, we will all suffer.

There is a better way, and that that does not mean living in austerity. It means reaching for equanimity before opulence - and realizing that true luxury is living in a world where no child goes hungry and not one person goes without.

It means sharing the abundance that isn’t necessarily man-made, but universally given. We must move from hoarding to harmony to protect our very existence.

This truth applies to all of us in the United States and the world beyond.

I gazed up up at the heavens last summer while on Nantucket Island for the Fourth of July. It’s my favorite place to see shooting stars when I am lucky enough to visit.

I have been doing this for enough summers to realize the Starlink satellites are not only becoming quite visible, they are too numerous to count now. It seems strange to ponder how one man can literally make an imprint on the night sky.

As my eyes settled back towards the horizon line, I saw the twinkling lights of the many megayachts that had taken over the harbor.

As the fireworks exploded overhead, it seemed the land of the free and the home of the brave was for sale in a way it has never quite been before.

As the saying goes - if you have to ask how much, you probably can’t afford it.

That’s not liberty, it’s larceny and servitude, disguised as capitalism and freedom.

We must wake up before it is too late.

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