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.

SERIAL CHAINSAW: 103K CUT DOWN AND COUNTING

Elon Musk, an unelected quasi-official and pseudo-department chief, who answers to no one but the president (if that), has now put 103,452 federal workers, many of them crucial—like VA doctors, nurses and administrators, as just one glaring example—out on the street, and is nowhere near done yet.

Let that sink in.

The most filthy-rich man on the planet is arbitrarily putting thousands of people a day—people with families, mortgages, rents, college loans, medical expenses and grocery bills—out on the street, and is answerable to nobody.

How is this legal? Where are the checks and balances? Where is democracy? 

And where the hell is Congress?

THE CHAINSAW MASSACRES OF ARGENTINA AND THE US

Argentine President Javier Milei with signature chainsaw

 Many Argentines cringed in shame this past week as they watched their president make a clownish spectacle of himself by showing up in the US, to obsequiously and gratuitously pander to his personal heroes, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This time, he made the pilgrimage to Washington—where he was also courting the IMF to see if he can land an eleven-billion-dollar credit to shore up his faltering economic program—to present Musk with the signature symbol of his own populist regime. Namely, a custom-designed chainsaw.

Musk, who is basically a filthy rich, unelected appointee, with no real political standing—a sort of high-end bureaucrat, if you will—magnanimously granted Javier “Baby Trump” Milei, a head of State, a forty-five-minute audience, in which the visibly excited Argentine president, giddy as a kid at Christmastime, presented Elonius Rex with the prize saw, a gleaming red and chrome machine with Milei’s favorite slogan emblazoned on the blade: ¡Viva la Libertad, carajo! (Which roughly translates as “Long live liberty, damn it!”).

Musk with his new saw, Milei with his bro-crush

It’s a motto with which the far-right libertarian ends even his most formal of speeches,  and which he utters in a guttural, if reedy growl. It is the Mileian equivalent of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. And, when it comes down to what both those phrases mean to those they are inflicted on, they are rendered Orwellian in terms of their consequences.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of making George Orwell’s acquaintance, an example of what I mean is that, for instance, in his dystopian novel 1984—which is far more relevant today than it was when it was written—the author’s fictitious country boasts four main ministries: the Ministry of Truth is ostensibly in charge of media, entertainment, education, and the arts, but is actually the creator and purveyor of political lies, propaganda and spin. The Ministry of Peace’s apparent mission is to broker and keep the peace, but it is actually devoted to sparking and incrementing violence. The Ministry of Love is supposedly charged with justice and order, and creating a pleasant climate for all, but its true main mission is torture, punishment and “re-education”. And the Ministry of Plenty is officially at the center of the regime’s allegedly plentiful economy, but is actually the entity in charge of supply rationing and distribution.

Similarly, while both Trump and Milei’s favorite slogans might sound inspiring and rosy, the actions behind them are having contrary effects for just about everyone but the rich and powerful. The actions Donald Trump took during his first term from 2016 to 2020, bolstered the power of the presidency and initiated a sharp decline in the influence of the other two branches of government. His economic policies provided tax breaks to the already vastly undertaxed wealthy, and put additional economic pressures on the middle and lower classes—as reflected in the estimated seven trillion dollars that his administration added to the deficit. He showed contempt for democratic institutions and disdain for the rule of law, but was, in the end, held in final check by the other two branches when he sought to, basically, overthrow democracy and remain in office after losing an election. His legacy was division and chaos, and now, after a four-year hiatus, he is back to finish the job, this time with the indispensable help of the richest man in the world. Fitting, since he was and is the president of the wealthy, who, in Orwellian style, bills himself as “the president of the people.”

Milei has made no bones about being an avid admirer of Donald Trump’s. But he had the initial disadvantage over Trump of following, not a highly popular and highly democratic administration like Barack Obama’s, but rather, the weak, corrupt presidency of Alberto Fernández, which was consumed with party infighting and crippling economic woes.

Like Trump, Milei is fond of puerile displays of showy bravado. Hence, his choice of the chainsaw during his campaign and beyond, as the symbol of his promise to “destroy the government from within”—which, without saying it in so many words, is what Trump and Musk (or Musk and Trump, depending on your point of view) are bent on doing as well.

Milei at one of his Trump-like rallies

The Argentine president is every bit as disdaining of anyone who opposes his most extreme measures, and of those he perceives as his political enemies, referring consistently and publicly to anyone left of the center right as “zurdos de mierda” (fucking leftists). And when numerous governors from Argentina’s twenty-three provinces opposed cuts in federal aid at the beginning of his term, he angrily vowed that he was going to “piss on the governors”.

He also suddenly turns on those who dare criticize him, very much in the dismissive style of Trump, who has dissed his former political allies that have failed to accompany him to some of the extremes to which he has taken his policies and personal misdeeds: Generals John Kelly, James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, as well as former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and former Vice President Mike Pence spring to mind, but there are countless other examples. In Milei’s case, for example, early on he expressed praise and admiration for former Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, the architect of the late President Carlos Menem’s convertibility and privatization policies, which marked a ten-year neo-conservative era in Argentina. When he was first elected, Milei touted Cavallo as “the best Economy Minister in Argentine history.” Until just a few months ago, he was still referring to Cavallo as “a hero” and saying he hoped to emulate him.

But in his personal blog, Cavallo recently issued a warning to Milei about the dangers of a falsely appreciating peso. The Harvard-educated economist said that since Milei took office, a little more than a year ago, his economic policies had caused the peso to appreciate by twenty percent in real terms. Cavallo said that this was a similar trend to the one witnessed in the last three years of convertibility, leading to the crash of 2001 (the Corralito Crisis).

The former economy minister pointed out that real appreciation had led to “a very costly deflation, because it transformed the recession that had begun in 1998 into a true economic depression.” Cavallo counseled Milei to lift exchange rate restrictions within the next three months before the effects of a (falsely) “strong peso” started affecting domestic industries and discouraging export investment.

Echoing the sort of capricious flipflops Americans have come to expect from Trump, Milei suddenly referred to Cavallo as “a disgrace”, and as “unpresentable”. And in another Trumpesque move, within hours of reacting to Cavallo’s blog, the Argentine president fired the economist’s daughter, Sonia Cavallo, who, until then, had been posted as Argentina’s delegate to the Organization of American States. He justified the vengeance move by saying “Her father is constantly sabotaging the economic program, and you can’t have your cake and eat it. You’re either on one side or the other.”

The grotesque posturing of Milei and Musk on the far-right CPAC stage with a shiny new chainsaw this past week was chillingly symbolic. Tens of thousands of federal workers turned out into the street in Argentina, and thousands so far given the axe by Musk in just one month of the new Trump regime speaks to just how chilling. Milei is fond of crowing to his far-right supporters that the US “is taking its cue from Argentina.” And his presentation of the fashion-designer saw to Musk is an apparent attempt to underscore that exaggeration. But Trump’s first term precedes Milei, so it’s pretty clear who is taking his cue from whom.

The parallel he strikes, however, is worthy of consideration. What I mean by that is, if Americans want a preview of what the Musk-Trump duo’s policies will likely lead to, they need only look to the almost caricaturesque example of Argentina. For one thing, while Milei boasts about his policies reining in hyperinflation, peso inflation in his first year in office has still soared at 117 percent in 2024. But worse still, the consequences of his crawling peg exchange rate policy have also caused prices to explode in dollar terms.

When Milei came to office, it was, in part, on a promise to “dollarize” the economy, since he described the peso as a “shit” currency. But since taking office in December of 2023, he has only “dollarized” in the sense that Argentina has become the most expensive country in dollars in all of Latin America, while he has at the same time “revalued” the peso by removing a lot of local currency from the market, artificially driving its value upward.

No example could be better than my own experience, living here in Argentina’s Patagonian region, to illustrate the consequences to middle and lower class residents of these and other policies imposed under the Milei government. For instance, until December of 2023, my wife and I were paying about two hundred fifty dollars a month for excellent private health care—uphill for two retirees in Argentina, where the standard of living is nowhere near as high as in the US—but doable. Furthermore, it kept us independent from the pensioners’ health care plan paid for, in large part, by the State, since the amount paid into the health plan by pensioners is minimal.

One of the first things Milei did on taking office was completely deregulate private health insurance—and just about every other commercial activity in the country. The result was that, within his first three months in office, our health insurance costs had gone from two hundred fifty dollars a month to six hundred fifty-eight. It became impossible for us to continue to pay, and we ended up on the State retirement health care rolls.

Milei’s own brand of “moving fast and breaking things” also removed all restrictions on price gouging—an even more common practice here in Argentina—especially in remote Patagonia—than in the US, while de-subsidizing all services. Between the artificially bolstered peso and the removal of all restrictions, then, our grocery bills here in Argentina have doubled in dollars, going from between seventy and ninety dollars a week when he took office, to about one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty dollars after his first year in office. And the prices of just about everything else have risen accordingly, especially in areas like clothing, new car sales and electronics, in which local industry is heavily protected.

A noonday luncheon special in downtown Buenos Aires now runs an average of eighteen dollars—more than a minimum wage worker makes in a day—while in other major Latin American capitals, research shows a comparative average of seven dollars. A cup of coffee averages thirty percent more there than in São Paulo (Brazil) or Santiago (Chile) and more than twice as much as in Bogotá (Colombia). Meanwhile, Argentina’s minimum wage is higher than on Brazil’s depressed job market, but considerably lower than minimum wage levels for either Chile or Mexico.  Moreover, forty-five percent of Argentina’s workforce works off the books, with no minimum wage guarantees or benefits of any kind.  

As with the Trump administration, Milei’s regime is doing nothing to address these inequalities. On the contrary, he is, like the Musk-Trump duo, slashing social services wherever he can get away with it, and seeking to break the country’s once powerful Peronist labor unions. He is also, like Trump in his first term, jockeying to try and get himself a more malleable Supreme Court.  

Nor have vital services been spared: fuel prices rose one hundred eighteen percent in Milei’s first year in office, while de-subsidized natural gas services rose by more than five hundred percent. Water was up more than three hundred percent for the year, and electric power services increased more than two hundred sixty percent.

Milei, like Trump, promotes himself as a political outsider, bent on dismantling the “political caste”, which, according to him, has led to the country’s economic decline. Also like Trump, however, he is seeking to replace that “political caste” (i.e., elected representatives of the people), with a corporate elite, seeking a country where a place at the international business table is sought using the average Argentina’s impoverishment as a stepping stone.

While Trump and Milei’s ideologies strongly overlap—Milei was a guest at Trump’s latest victory celebration and got a shout-out from the then president-elect as “a true MAGA guy”—the political and economic contexts in which they govern differ substantially. The US economy under Trump was the world’s largest and still relatively stable, despite challenges, mostly of Trump’s own making. In Argentina, however, Milei came to office already struggling with high inflation, widespread poverty, and significant public debt. This fundamental difference in starting conditions means that while Trump’s policies could often be masked or justified by a booming economy, Milei faces the much more immediate consequences of severe economic disarray.

Both Trump and Milei’s governments have been criticized for their exacerbation of social polarization. Trump’s rise has been  marked by deep divisions within American society, particularly on issues of race, immigration, and cultural identity. His inflammatory rhetoric and policies have often targeted minority groups, including immigrants and African Americans. His current campaign to forcibly eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion by decree in the US is only deepening the divide.

Milei’s rise to power in Argentina has similarly highlighted the nation’s profound political divide. While he has framed himself as a defender of individual liberty and economic freedom, his rhetoric, like Trump’s, often smacks of authoritarianism, with frequent attacks on the media, the judiciary, and his political opponents. His presidency has already seen increased protests from various sectors of society, particularly labor unions and public sector workers who fear the consequences of his austerity measures. Milei’s confrontational approach to governance, much like Trump’s, risks further fracturing of the social fabric of Argentina, deepening divisions between those who support his vision and those who see his policies as an existential threat to their livelihoods.

While Milei has managed to get fairly good international press from business media and multi-lateral organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, none of these are known for being concerned about the social devastation wreaked by the kind of cruelly radical  neo-conservative programs being implemented by Milei and his Economy Minister Luis Caputo to wipe out a decades-long deficit overnight. All these sectors care about is hammering developing nations into good credit customers who pay their debts in timely fashion—unlike major economies like the US which, despite admonishing the developing world to be good citizens and keep their debts in check  if they want aid, are the world’s biggest debtors (as of last year the US had eight trillion dollars in foreign debt, or a little more than a fifth of the country’s entire federal debt).

Multiple studies have shown over the decades that IMF and World Bank ultra-conservative economic prescriptions in regions like Latin America have bolstered the international profiles of neo-conservative governments at the expense of the common people’s well-being. This was true of the military dictatorship that ruled the country with an iron fist and at the point of a gun from the mid-seventies through the early eighties, and that is certainly the current case of Milei’s Argentina.

Despite being the darling of the MAGA crowd in Washington, however, Milei may find his forward momentum stalled on his quest “to move fast and break things.” Back from his meetings with the IMF and Trump in Washington, and his clown show with Musk at the CPAC extravaganza, the Argentine president begins work Monday in the face of a scandal sparked—also not unlike Trump—by a blunder on social media that cost local investors big-time. It’s being called “Cryptogate”, and it promises to haunt the president’s government.

A week ago in his social media feed, Milei, a self-styled “anarcho-capitalist”, touted a cryptocurrency meme coin known as $LIBRA. Sharing information about its launching on his feed, the president wrote, “This private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of Argentina’s economy.” The local currency market reaction to the post was immediate, with the coin’s value surging to five dollars almost immediately, only to plummet by ninety percent two hours later.

The practical result of the meme coin fiasco was that Argentine investors lost approximately two hundred fifty million dollars in the blink of an eye.  Milei immediately took his post down and claimed he really hadn’t had all the details of the deal. Worse still, he tried to foist blame off on the investors who had followed his cue, saying that they knew the risks, just as they would if they went to a casino to gamble.

Investors aren’t buying it. Both at home and abroad, he is facing accusations of crypto-fraud, and lawsuits are being filed against him in both Argentina and the US. Opposition members of Congress, meanwhile, are calling for his impeachment, and although they don’t yet have the votes necessary, the fact that Milei has consistently referred to Congress as “a rat’s nest” is unlikely to garner a lot of sympathy.

At best, Milei will have to try and convince people that he was duped by some of his acquaintances involved in the scheme, in which case he will look like a guileless fool. At worst, he will face multiple legal actions, and the possibility of more opponents climbing onto the impeachment train.

Time will tell.

 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

 

The first major government agency Elon Musk attacked in his unvetted ad hoc auditor's post was USAID, one of America's most consequential foreign policy tools, and a major factor in giving the US an edge over China and Russia around the world. That agency has basically been gutted and Musk has been dancing on its shallow grave.

Meanwhile, only months prior to Musk's talking President Trump into turning him loose with a machete to hack the US state to pieces, the Inspector General at USAID--the post in charge of keeping the agency honest--had apparently launched an investigation into USAID's contractual ties with Starlink.

Starlink, as you might be aware, is billionaire Elon Musk's satellite communications firm.

I'll let you do the math.

TROUBLE IN MAGADISE?

 Ah yes, adults in the room. Every dictator’s nightmare.

After the incoming—but not yet official—Musk-Trump administration managed twice to tank legislation to avert a Christmas season government shutdown, there was a frantic flurry of bipartisan activity this weekend on Capitol Hill in which cooler, or perhaps just more highly determined heads prevailed, and a bill was passed that will keep the government open and operating into March of next year.

There is really no urgency to pass a debt-ceiling measure. Except that Trump wants there to be for questions of his personal political expediency. The crisis of this past week was an invention of Elon Musk to keep himself from looking bad in his new role as the supposed budget-cut czar of the incoming Trump administration.

How so? By using government shutdown as a bargaining chip to get President Biden’s lame duck administration to approve a higher debt ceiling before Trump takes office. That way, Musk and Trump could blame higher spending on their predecessor and provide themselves with a veneer of fiscal responsibility, while squandering huge sums on more tax cuts for the wealthy. Bernie Sanders could explain this much more eloquently than I can, but you get the picture.

The fact is that the extended tax cuts that Trump has promised his billionaire cohorts, including Musk—Elonius Rex as budget czar is really like putting the fox in charge of chicken-house security—will actually add an estimated four trillion dollars to America’s burgeoning thirty-six-trillion-dollar national debt. That, of course, will come in addition to the nearly seven trillion dollars that Trump already added to the deficit during his first four years, from 2016 to 2020, much of which was also the fault of the veritable tax holiday that he provided then, as well, to his euphoric fellow billionaires.

But this weekend’s vote to leave the debt-ceiling discussions on hold until next year and thus to avert a shutdown tends to show that the “mandate” Trump claims to have been given by American voters isn’t translating to the Senate. The third vote that finally pushed back against Musk-Trump bullying reveals resistance to Trump’s dictatorial bent—after Republicans in Congress caved to him repeatedly in the past as he sought to keep running the show from Mar-a-Lago once voted out of office.

To be clear, this was, by no means, a close vote. The Senate passed the eleventh-hour legislation that will avoid a disastrous government shutdown by a margin of eighty-five to eleven. And the bill—backed by Speaker Johnson—had already been approved by the House by a margin of three hundred sixty-six to just thirty-four. That’s basically the entire bi-partisan population of Congress opposing MAGA on Trump’s attempt to once more savage the whole country for his own advantage. (Some of us are still sufficiently un-amnesiac to recall the last government shutdown fostered by Trump and his congressional  cronies, which tanked Wall Street and laid waste to people’s 401K savings investments—and here I speak from personal experience during that time).

Apparently, only a fanatical fringe joins Team Don & Elon in relishing the chaos that a shutdown would breed.

Perhaps the difference this time has been how Trump’s message reached the Senate GOP. It didn’t come from him. It came from his (world’s wealthiest) handler, Elonius Rex. And, finally, some folks in the GOP “grew a pair” and weren’t having it. Maybe some of that party’s number are finally getting sick of having their party hijacked, not just by Trump, but by any super-magnate who happens along.

Wishful thinking? Yes, maybe. Probably, in fact. Once Trump is back in office, they’re apt to all go back to sleep again. But for now, it has worked.

They’s good reason to believe that Senate Republicans were shamed into action by a week of their being portrayed by opposition  politicians and the media as weak-kneed vassals being manipulated by a not-yet-inaugurated president—one president at a time, please—and his super-billionaire buddy, who holds absolutely no position in government and who has zero government experience.

Alexander Pope once wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Dare we hope Republicans will rein in a would-be dictator and his gazillionaire Rasputin, and manage to keep the wheels on democracy over the course of the next four years?

I have my doubts. But only time will tell.

 

THE THING ABOUT BILLIONAIRES IN SPACE

 We were recently treated to news footage of 90-year-old Canadian-born actor William Shatner emoting over his first real trip into space after, decades earlier in his career, playing the lead role of Captain Kirk, skipper of the space station USS Enterprise, in the wildly popular Star Trek franchise. The cameras made sure they captured the moment when he returned from space and talked to Amazon tycoon and now private space race point man Jeff Bezos, and thanked him profusely for this “most profound experience”.

A emotional William Shatner with Jeff Bezos

And well he might have thanked Bezos, since the Blue Origin flight that Shatner took for free would have cost another passenger between two hundred and three hundred thousand dollars. And only because it was already the firm’s second flight. A seat on the first one, in July, for which Bezos was also a passenger, was auctioned for twenty-eight million dollars.

But, hey, the hype seems to have been worth it to Bezos and Blue Origin. It’s not every day that you get to launch the emblematic Captain Kirk on a real-life star trek. And the kicker was that the actor also became the oldest man in history to travel in space—a flight reminiscent of America’s very first space adventure, when NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space in 1961. Although, the erstwhile Captain Kirk’s flight was only eleven minutes long and reached an altitude of sixty nautical miles, while Shepard traveled slightly more than a hundred miles into space and was there for fifteen minutes before splashing down.

Another billionaire in the growing private space race, Sir Richard Branson, had earlier offered Shatner a ride on his Virgin Galactic spacecraft. But Branson blew his chance to tap into the Star Trek franchise by telling Shatner that the seat would cost him a quarter of a million dollars—Virgin recently raised the price of a space ticket to four hundred fifty thousand dollars. It’s not like Shatner, whose net worth is around a hundred million dollars, couldn’t afford it. He knew, however, that he wasn’t just some actor, but the space hero of several generations—the inimitable Captain Kirk—and decided to hold out for a better deal. Bezos gave it to him and bested Branson once again.

Sir Richard Branson - Virgin Galactic

In all fairness, when it comes to the space race, Bezos is lightyears ahead of Branson who “only” has a net worth of 4.2 billion dollars compared to the Amazon CEO’s more than two hundred billion. Which places Sir Richard in the category of only minor billionaires, like Donald Trump (although Branson has almost double the money Trump does—that is, if you actually believe how much Trump says he has, since he lies about absolutely everything, and we’re still waiting to see his tax records). So perhaps Branson felt he simply couldn’t afford to give Captain Kirk a freebie.

The other billionaire who is deeply involved in the space race is Elon Musk, who just this past month surpassed Bezos as the richest man on earth. He did that by increasing his net worth some twenty-five billion dollars in a single day, when the car rental giant, Hertz, announced that it was replacing its fleet with Musk’s Tesla automobiles. Pay attention now, because it’s hard to keep up, but just in the last week, he increased his fortune by a similar amount, so that he now has somewhere in the neighborhood (a really nice neighborhood, clearly) of two hundred ninety-two billion dollars.

Soaring at the top of the ten wealthiest billionaires list, he could now, literally, buy Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet and Mike Bloomberg and still have seventeen billion in change left over.  He could also match the GDP of Chile and have enough left to buy Stephen Spielberg, George Soros, Sir Richard Branson and Donald Trump, and still have some pocket change.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk - richest of all

Speaking seriously, there are a lot of reasons why a private space race among billionaires is a really, really bad idea. And the biggest one is the inordinate and indomitable mega-power that kind of wealth provides.

To start with, even though each major country, to a greater or lesser extent, has some sort of “space law”, for the most part, the Solar System is currently, more or less, the new Wild West. The most urgent need for restrictive legislation is in the area of environmental protection. No one—among those with the power to do something about it—seems to be giving any serious thought to this, but there are major consequences looming in the minds of those who know the science.

By 2030, just a little more than eight years from now, the billionaire space race is expected to have spawned a four-billion-dollar industry just in “space tourism—read: billionaires fleecing millionaires for a ride with “the magnificent men and their flying machines.” Bezos, Branson and the flamboyant and unpredictable Elon Musk are already committed to the private space race, and if it takes off as a lucrative industry, other billionaires will surely follow.

While Bezos, for example, recently paid lip-service to his climate change commitment, the new industry, of which he has become a clear leader, promises to have a major impact. The worst for the moment involves the fact that the amount of propellant needed to blast a rocket into space is enormous. While some analysts agree that calculating the impact of each specific craft (billionaires order the building of their own rockets since NASA has been largely relieved of its regulatory powers) is not an easy process. It is clear, however, that as space tourism and other expanded private commercial uses of aerospace technology—asteroid, lunar and planetary mining, for instance—become ever more abundant, they will contribute in a major way to pollution and greenhouse gases.

This, at a time when environmentalists are warning that Earth is no longer in danger of reaching its tipping point, but has most probably already reached it. This means that environmental damage already caused by our imprudence and greed may be incapable of repair, and if world leaders ever stop admiring their own navels and actually start doing something about climate change, all that will be possible is mitigation of further damage to an already ravaged planet.

Within that context, the idea of a commercial space race, among private firms and nearly unregulated billionaires, is utterly insane. Especially when, if we remain on this path, Humankind will be well on its way toward the Sixth Great Extinction, in which future human generations may end up going the way of the dinosaurs.

In order to quantify just how selfish and damaging touristic space flight is, it’s interesting to look at a calculation worked out by University College London scientist, Dr. Eloise Marais. According to Marais, shooting four or five millionaire tourists into space for a ten or twelve-minute joy ride burns one hundred times more fuel—and hence creates a hundred times more greenhouse gases—per passenger than the amount per passenger generated by a normal long-haul jet flight, which is already a highly carbon-intensive activity.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia point out that there are other concerns as well. Among them, huge amounts of aluminum oxide, black carbon particles and water vapor that rocket ships release into the stratosphere. Some of the chemical compounds are obviously linked to global warming. But like many other factors, this is more about general climate change than just about global warming, considering that black carbon particles, for instance, can form a sort of screen that can have an intense cooling effect. The future consequences are, then, as unforeseeable as were those of our cavalier abuse of the environment in the past.  A fiery hell on earth or a new Ice Age: choose your poison.

The idea of degree, as I mentioned before, is also at the top of environmentalists’ mind. Dutch sustainable transport and tourism expert Paul Peeters says that the difference in environmental damage from one sort of space ship to another can be significant. He cites the example of Virgin Galactic’s manned rocket, which is a hybrid. In the best of all possible worlds, the word hybrid denotes a good thing. In this case it’s just the opposite. Branson’s space tourism rig burns both liquid and solid propellant. What that means, says Peeters, is that Virgin is releasing far more black carbon into the atmosphere and stratosphere than kerosene-burning craft do.  Says Peeters, “If hybrid rockets, which are assumed to be relatively cheap to operate, become popular, a climate disaster is looming.”

In light of the billionaire space race, many environmental scientists would like to see space launches included in worldwide environmental protocols due to the damage their increasing frequency will surely cause to the ozone layer. The international Montreal Protocol, which covers deterioration of the ozone layer, does not take space launches into account.

The ozone layer forms a sort of blanket of protection that once covered the entire Earth. It acts as a natural sunscreen to filter out UV rays from solar radiation that are harmful to human and other life on earth. Each winter for many years now, there has been one hole in that layer over South America and another over the Arctic. Scientists agree that these holes have grown due to the effects of greenhouse gases created by human activity. Recently, however, the one over South America has been growing at a faster clip. At certain seasons of the year (winter is the worst) it reaches some eight million square miles.

I happen to live in the Patagonian region where the hole is most focused. Here, doctors promote the ample use of sunscreen, hats, UV-blocking sunglasses, etc. Ophthalmologists say that they are seeing the earlier onset of cataracts in people here, especially those with light-colored eyes, who do not wear quality sunglasses. Scientists also point to the high rate of blindness among sheep on the sprawling sheep ranches in this corner of the world.

Another indicator is the deterioration of usually durable plastics. For instance, irrigation experts that I’ve spoken to tell me that durable plastic sprinklers made in Israel and used in the searing desert heat there last ten to twenty years in their country of origin, while here in Patagonia they last less than half that time until material fatigue sets in.

Vast increases in space launches as the billionaire space race and space tourism build will have a very definite impact on this serious problem that is part and parcel of the global climate change narrative. Worse still is the attitude of billionaire astro-entrepreneurs who tend to take Earth’s serious environmental problems as insoluble and are looking to the solar system as an escape route for the obscenely wealthy—significant numbers of whom got that way by raping and pillaging planet Earth—who will eventually be able to pack up and fly off to “gated communities” on the moon or Mars, while back on Earth, the poorer human race goes gradually extinct.

Bezos, specifically, has an even more nefarious idea: namely, to move all polluting industries off of Earth to other destinations. In other words, instead of fixing the problem of pollution on Earth, he figures it’s easier to write the planet off. Then he and other magnates of his ilk can blast off on voyages to other post-Columbian new worlds, where they can despoil those places as well. The idea is dystopian and unhelpful when men of such extraordinary wealth could be funding vast research with no more than pocket change for them—a billion here, a billion there—to foster ideas capable of vastly improving the environmental and humanitarian situation on Earth, rather than considering our planet “the past” and space “the future”.

While the headline-catching billionaire space race is in its infancy and might right now look to us rather as if we were witnessing the Wright Brothers and Sir George Cayley having a contest with their flying machines at Kitty Hawk, technology is so readily available and the billionaires’ resources so vast that commercial space exploitation is coming, and coming fast. All of this might seem like an accounting of problems that are “far off in the future”—like it seemed far off to us “boomers” in the 1950s and 1960s, when scientists warned that if we kept on abusing the earth, the atmosphere and the oceans, we would face major environmental problems in the twenty-first century. But, hey, here we are. And technological developments that took decades to achieve in the past now happen in months or, at most, a few short years.

There is one other aspect of the legislative vacuum in which this is all happening, especially since the most highly developed space legislation is that of the US and, ever since the Reagan Era, it has been focused almost entirely on encouraging billionaires to claim their place in private space development. The aspect I am referring to is that of world security.

Zuckerberg - test case for billionaire ethics?

With the latest revelations about Facebook—now Meta, as if changing the name can take people’s minds off of what has been coming out—the potential for megalomania among the world’s wealthiest people has come into focus.  Mega-billionaires are powers unto themselves—unipersonal “nations” that ignore or sidestep the rules of the societies where they live, as witnessed by the fact that most of those based in the US not only don’t pay their fair share, but literally pay nothing at all in taxes.

To understand the kind of dangers that the vast expansion of private billionaires’ dominion over space pose, we need go no further than the political role of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the undermining of American democracy. Despite having sold off a lot of FB/Meta stock, Zuckerberg has maintained absolute administrative control over the company. And, by all accounts, he runs it like a dictatorial regime.

While Zuckerberg has provided the world with the quintessential social media platform and, thus, a place where the formerly voiceless can now openly express themselves on a cyber-soapbox of immense proportions, that great humanitarian achievement has been far overshadowed by the greed that has led him to not merely provide the greatest podium for free speech ever known, but also, and on the contrary, to manipulate the information that his portal receives in order to spread discord and to support false information because controversy sells. And the more likes and comments accumulated under each post the higher his advertising revenues.

Seen in this way, it is impossible not to conclude that the strategic algorithms employed by Facebook to fatten its bottom line have inversely served to undermine democratic institutions, and to promote both domestic and foreign terrorism. The fact that Zuckerberg and Facebook have systematically imposed such a strategy out of sheer greed and, worse still, have felt no ethical compunction about its results is telling. Zuckerberg has no part in the space race yet, but it’s not hard to imagine that if he sees his fellow billionaires making significant advances in that line, space could well end up on Meta’s “to do” list.

Perhaps one might have been willing to give billionaires the benefit of the doubt before the Trump Era in Washington, and indeed before revelations regarding FB’s nefarious policies. But four years of Trump and his continuing long shadow on American politics has to give any thinking person pause regarding the potential for megalomania among the world’s richest men. And I single out men advisedly, since despite the fact that there are indeed billionaire American women as well—Alice Walton, MacKenzie Scott, Julia Knoch, Miriam Adelson, etc.—none so far has demonstrated any desire to dominate this world or other worlds, a trait that would appear to be quintessentially male.

The Trump Era raises the megalomania issue

Trump has very clearly shown his tendency toward megalomania. In his case, a caricaturesque tendency so ridiculous that far too many people didn’t take it seriously until he sought to overturn free and fair voting results and to change by force the outcome of the election he unquestionably lost. The fact that he has effectively taken over one of the two main parties in the US, and that the GOP leadership has fallen in, rank and file behind him while driving out the few remaining defenders of democracy and constitutionality in their midst is chilling, and reminiscent of other authoritarian designs throughout history. It has become abundantly clear, then, that there is only one small-d democratic party in the US today. The other main party, as a direct result of the Trump Era, has become an authoritarian personality cult autocracy.

Would Donald Trump join the billionaire space race? Hard to say. But if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have to depend on his own “small fortune”, but could do what he has always done an amazing job of doing—selling his ideas to other wealthy men and then slapping the Trump brand on it. And the fact that it was under his administration that the US Space Force became one of America’s armed services demonstrates that it is at least at the back of his mind.

The Trump Era has, then, given us a lot to think about—above all, the thirst for unlimited power of obscenely wealthy men. Which leads to unavoidable connections, like the ex-president’s authoritarian hero, Vladimir Putin, who, himself, is sitting on a personal fortune of seventy billion dollars, so wouldn’t need the Russian state at all if he ever planned to join the billionaire space race.

Excuse me, then, if I can’t help wondering if these are the sort of men we want marauding unregulated through space like so many cosmic cowboys. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel a whole lot less secure.