Obscene

Just as absolute power corrupts absolutely, obscene quantities of money corrupt obscenely. That’s what is going on with our national nemesis, Elon Musk, ever since he crept into our consciousness on the wheels of his silent, exhaustless Tesla cars. He was just a really wealthy guy with the idea that electric cars are the future. Then he had this idea of building global Wi-Fi, which sounded just as wild, using a cloud of low-orbit satellites launched by rockets that could return their boosters to earth for reuse, which had a far-fetched crazy kind of feel to it. Then his rockets and his ideas began to take off, and his wealth and ego swelled, and he looked around for something to buy with his ever-fattening wallet and found Twitter. In a dizzying series of moves, Musk bought Twitter, stripped it of employees, and turned it into a platform of free speech for the far-right and Nazis. He had begun his reversion to type.

Until then, I think people had thought, okay he’s from South Africa, but he left when he was still in school, and this country has absorbed a lot of people from less-than-admirable home countries, and as smart as he is, maybe he’s one of the good guys. He could sound a little libertarian-ish, but he supported Democrats until 2022. With his purchase of Twitter and cancellation of its program of monitoring extreme posts on the platform, Musk began his turn to the right. He started giving money to hard-right Republican PACs like Citizens for Sanity, and in 2023, supported Ron DeSantis for president, donating millions to his campaign. By 2024, he was all-in for Donald Trump. He would go on to contribute more than a quarter-billion to Trump’s campaign and travel with him to rallies. Musk turned into a cartoon version of himself, jumping around behind Trump onstage at rallies, making unhinged statements supporting Trump and other Republicans. Behind the scenes, however, he was pumping millions into winning one battleground state after another for Trump, giving special emphasis to Pennsylvania.

We know what happened when Trump won and began his ongoing rape of the federal government. Musk lent platoons of his minions to the Trump take-over, helping to strip whole departments, like USAID, of employees and funding. His cartoonish behavior seemed to redouble. He gave a Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally, following the salute by telling the crowd, “My heart goes out to you,” and later claiming it was a common gesture to express that sentiment.

There was a spasm of criticism, but soon, others on the right, like Steve Bannon at the CPAC convention, began to copy Musk’s Nazi salute. Musk had made his point. With enough money, spread around to the right people – principally Donald Trump both before he became president a second time and after – you can get away with anything.

Musk’s money is the connective tissue in all of this. He revels in being called “the world’s richest man,” and moreover, he acts like it. It has become dogma that Musk’s massive spending in the battleground states virtually bought Trump the presidency. Trump thanked him by appointing him to “streamline” the government by creating DOGE and attacking every federal department and agency on the books.

It seemed inevitable that Trump would tire of competing with his erstwhile right-hand-man for attention in the media, and today, he held a press availability in the Oval Office as a kind of Musk-farewell, telling reporters that Musk wasn’t really leaving, that he would remain as a key adviser, that DOGE would keep going. Musk first claimed that he would save the government $2 trillion; then it was $1 trillion; then it was $200 million; today the DOGE website says the number is $175 million. Holes were quickly poked in that obviously inflated figure, with some experts saying that the whole Musk effort may have cost more than it “saved.”

We’ll probably never know for sure, because the thing about billionaires specifically and wealthy people in general is that they are very good at recording money they acquire, but much less good at accounting for it when money is lost. See also: the five Trump bankruptcies and the many, many abortive scams he ran like Trump vodka, Trump University, and all the rest of them. He couldn’t even open a hotel while he was president in Washington D.C. and put his name on it without losing money .

We’ll never know what really went on between Musk and Trump, but I think it’s safe to assume that if Musk was throwing more than $250 million in the direction of Trump’s election campaign, at least some of it ended up in The Donald’s sweaty pockets. And the minute Trump got involved in crypto with World Liberty Financial and his entirely scammy $Trump meme coin, he opened a payoff superhighway that now includes using his so-called “media” company that owns Truth Social, raising money to “invest” in $2.5 billion in Bitcoin. The New York Times called the move a “transformation from a social media company into a financial services and crypto play.”

Which is like saying, Trump just built another off-ramp on his payoff superhighway with which he will drain suckers of money they think they are investing in the genius of Donald Trump.

Any money “invested” in crypto disappears into the unregulated black hole that this imaginary secondary financial system has always been. It’s like a dark room you go into carrying bags of money, or empty bags to fill with money, and you can move it around from one person or entity to another without anyone knowing who is doing what with how much or for what reason.

Trump always hated the idea of borrowing money from banks because everything was recorded, and if he didn’t pay the money back, that was recorded, too, in bankruptcy proceedings. Crypto is anti-banking. If you’re Donald Trump, you don’t borrow, you just take – as with his $Trump meme coin, the value of which has gone up and down except for Trump, who has made some $350 billion from fees and trading the “investment.” How? All you need to know is, of course he has.

It's obscene. All of it. Musk, his billions; Trump, his hundreds of millions; crypto entities like “World Liberty Financial” that with Trump’s control of the FTC and SEC is just a license to print money.

Money is all they can do, really. They’ve proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can’t govern. Trump can’t even round up and deport penniless undocumented immigrants without breaking laws and violating due process and getting slapped down by court after court, even by his own judges, causing him to publicly disown the Federalist Society, accusing Leonard Leo of causing him to appoint judges who follow the law.

Most of the stuff Musk and DOGE tried to do is now being reversed by courts ordering the rehiring of fired workers and reinstatement of departments that were closed without congressional authorization.

Trump is selling access to himself for $1 million that will buy you a Mar a Lago ticket to a “fund raiser,” and $5 million for a “private meeting,” and $5 million for an instant citizenship, and whatever you want to give him for a so-called “meme coin.”

This is the way things are now. The “economy,” in which people have jobs, go to work, earn money, spend it on food and clothing and rent and mortgages and, of course in this country, healthcare, and to pay taxes – that economy is for the little people, like you and me. That’s the way it’s always been.

What’s changed is that the other economy, of greed and theft and not paying taxes, all of which used to be done in secret, is now right out there in the open. If you want to see it happen in person, the next time you’re in Washington D.C., take a stroll past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s going on inside the big white house behind the big black fence, and they’re not even trying to hide it.