We can have democracy, or we can have Elon Musk, but we can’t have both. His wealth and his impact on our social fabric, on our democracy, are obscene to the point of total abstraction.
When I was a kid, my family went through a rough patch. It’s not an unusual story. It happens. I was able to get an off-the-books job at a bottling plant when I was 12. I made $4 an hour putting labels on bottles of engine oil additive at the end of the line, and got my checks made to cash. Sometimes, the man who owned the operation would accidentally forget to sign my checks.
At 20 hours a week, the checks I couldn’t cash were for $80.
As of this writing, Elon Musk’s net worth is around $1,000,000,000,000, give or take a few billion or a few tens of billions of dollars. So far, he’s reportedly given around $366,000,000 to federal committees supporting Republican candidates for national office. Most of it — about $275,000,000 — landed between July and September of this year.
$366,000,000 is the floor of his giving. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that he’s giving to groups that don’t disclose donors.
We can look at these numbers and shake our heads and say something like One guy shouldn’t have that much power. But it’s important to sit with it a second. We have to at least try to wrap our heads around what this kind of wealth means for us, personally. It’s almost impossible.