THE RICH GET RICHER

 

If you believe MAGA propaganda, you probably think Elon Musk made a huge sacrifice to be a uniquely autonomous part of the Trump administration, losing money hand over fist while helping Trump "make America great again."

But if that’s what you think, you would be dead wrong. Trump is no longer tweeting about Elon, and Musk himself is suddenly keeping a low profile. Maybe that's because year-over-year reports have begun to come out regarding just how profitable his time with Trump has been, while he has been busy putting thousands of Americans out of work and throwing state agencies into utter chaos.

Here's the lowdown: Depending on the source quoted, just since Trump's election in November of 2024, from which time Musk became an even more high-profile figure in the administration than his boss, Elon increased his net worth by an estimated $83 billion or more. Year-on-year between April of last year and April of this year—a year in which he was a central figure in Trump's campaign, election victory, and the first one hundred days of the Trump administration—his fortune increased by somewhere between $132 billion and $186 billion.

In fact, Musk, who was already the richest man on earth, has now broken even his own record for just how filthy rich one man can be. His net worth is currently calculated at right around $350 billion. Let’s put that amount into perspective: $350 billion is the annual GDP of the Czech Republic, one of the most advanced economies in Central and Eastern Europe, and one of the EU's most manufacturing-intensive economies.

White House reporters claim that, despite the sudden muting of his previously boisterous profile, Musk is still very much in the picture in Trump World. And he is still reaping the benefits of his close link to the Trump administration, and of the MAGA crowd’s infatuation with making billionaires richer.

Nor is he alone in garnering the benefits of the bedlam and confusion that is Trump’s trademark smokescreen for keeping America’s eye off the ball. Statistics show that, year-on-year since April of last year, the top ten American billionaires, including, Musk, have increased their combined net worth by between $365 and $500 billion (in other words, each of their fortunes on average has burgeoned by a hundred million dollars a day in the last year).

Meanwhile, average Americans have seen their 401(k) accounts ravaged and inflation remain out of control, despite Trump campaign promises to rein it in. To understand the inequality of accumulation at the top of the American wealth pyramid, it’s worth noting that ten average American workers—making $66,000 a year, which few middle-class workers actually earn—would have to work approximately fifty-five thousand years each and not spend a dime in order to scrape together the combined amount by which the ten top billionaires in country augmented their wealth in a single year.

And if the GOP manages to pass Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” into law, billionaires further stand to benefit. The bill, as it stands now, includes provisions that could significantly lower taxes for high-income earners and corporations. More specifically, it includes proposals to make permanent the tax cuts enacted under the first Trump administration, which included lower corporate tax rates and increased tax deductions on capital gains.

And although that tax bill presumes to lower taxes for average Americans as well, it is noteworthy that only the higher average wage-earners will benefit in real terms.

According to Professor Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Yale Budget Lab, a research center that analyses government policy, "This is a bill where the positive impacts are really tilted toward rich Americans. It doesn’t really matter if people at the bottom are getting relatively small tax cuts if they're losing their health care, they're losing their SNAP benefits and they're having to pay more money in tariffs."

In other words, cuts that the bill proposes in Medicaid and food stamps will not only wipe out any tax-cut benefits to workers making less than thirty thousand dollars a year, but will also put an increased burden on their already strained finances.

In short, as the old song goes, “There's nothing surer /The rich get rich and the poor get poorer.”  And never has that been truer in the US than it is today.