Guys, I have a confession to make.
I have never, at any point, now or in the past, had a lot of money.
I’ve worked multiple jobs, I’ve received government assistance at one point, and I’ve had help from family over the years.
But never have I ever considered myself to be anywhere higher than middle class at best.
Now, that’s not to say that I don’t make good money in my profession. New York City school teachers get a pretty decent salary. And every year I’m making more money than I’ve ever made in my entire life. I make more money than my parents do! Starting next year, I’ll officially be making six figures!
I know! That should be a bigger deal than it is!
But this is not to brag. This is all to say that despite all of these things being true, I actually am poorer now than when I was making a dollar above the minimum wage working at my local mall over a decade ago (a minimum wage that has not changed on the federal level since 2009!).
I think about how despite making more money than I’ve ever made, I actually can’t afford to own a house. I’m lucky enough to have healthcare through my job, but I wouldn’t be able to afford that otherwise. I have two cars, which might be a pretty good wealth indicator if it wasn’t out of necessity for the size of my family. And I still have some debt that is definitely shrinking, but will still take too long to pay off.
Now I want to be clear here: I AM NOT COMPLAINING.
I have been uniquely blessed in countless ways and my situation is still way more favorable than many other people in this country. However, just because I’m not at the bottom of the totem pole doesn’t mean I can’t speak up about a system that is clearly rigged and broken.
I might even be uniquely disqualified from discussing this in the first place because I very clearly have a bias in that I would benefit directly from the status quo being shaken up.
But I think, for me at least, there is a truth here that resonates, and should resonate, for all of us. And by us, I mean the 99% of us that don’t hold a majority of the wealth in the world.
Friends, trillionaires should not exist.
The World’s Richest Man
I have not always been an Elon Musk hater.
I remember years ago and I heard about the work that he was doing with Tesla and SpaceX, I really admired someone who was actually using their money to help make the world a better place. Long range full electric cars to better the environment and take the boot of the fossil fuel industry off of our necks. A space exploration company meant to push the boundaries of space travel and what we know about our galaxy. And he did it in a way that made him seem like he was an everyman.
He was brash, he spoke intelligently, he participated in meme culture. He was exactly the type of person I was prone to focus on back when I was in my early 20s.
I remember specifically a time when I was reading one of my favorite webcomics, The Oatmeal (now probably more known for his board game collection like Exploding Kittens or my personal favorite, Throw Throw Burrito), and the comic in question was all about Nikola Tesla. At the end of the comic the creator spoke about how the land that Tesla’s laboratory was built on was going to be sold off and demolished, and so they started a fundraising campaign to save it.
It seemed like a long shot, and in sort of a “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” situation, the creator reached out to Musk, knowing that he had a product named after the famous scientist, to see if he would be willing to donate money to save the place. As luck would have it, he actually responded and donated 1 million dollars. The lab was saved and it was a really cool thing to know that someone out there cared enough to make a difference.
That was my first impression of Musk.
But in the wise words of the ancient philosopher, Shrek, ogres have layers.
We could spend time talking about where his family made their fortune (emerald mines), but the topic is contested and debated.
We could talk about how Elon Musk offered to solve world hunger for a year and asked the UN to come up with a detailed proposal, and when they did for about 6 billion dollars (2% of his net worth at the time), he did not respond and spent 44 billion acquiring Twitter.
We could talk about when he was given unfettered access to US government spending records through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he not only gutted and was responsible for unfathomable amounts of ineptitude directly leading to putting millions of lives in jeopardy around the world, but he also dissolved and dismantled many of the institutions who had lawsuits against him and his companies. Oh and he didn’t find any fraud either.
Instead I want to focus more recently and analyze the system that created the monster in the first place.
Adam Smith’s Utopia
As we now all clearly know, I am not a fan of capitalism. I think that it is an immoral system that requires there to be losers so that the winners can profit. And, hot take here for a second, I don’t think that sacrificing everything in the name of profit is a good thing.
Actually, hotter take here: I don’t care if I ever become a wealthy man. And I think a lot of people would agree with me.
The majority of us, at the end of the day, just want enough money to eat, take care of our families, and enjoy our lives without stressing about what the next day will bring.
Would it be nice to experience luxury every once in a while? Sure. But I think that having the permanent mindset of always wanting more, the “grindset” if you will, has detrimental effects on the individual which then trickles down into society as a whole.
Now Adam Smith, the agreed upon father of capitalism, believed that when individuals seek to better their own situations, they inadvertently also better society. He also believed that the market would dictate what should or shouldn’t happen, and that governments should not intervene or interfere.
I can see the logic behind this, but the assumption is always that the people who are making the profits are also morally upright, and I think that tends to be the exception more than the rule.
In fact, more often than not, it seems increasingly more likely that the higher wealth you are able to attain, the more immoral means you will need to stomach in order to get there.
I just can never get behind a system that prioritizes money over people. It’s why the AI bubble has me anxious, but not hopeless (see previous post on Artificial Intelligence).
It is made ever more complicated by the fact that our current political system doesn’t only allow this, it encourages this. Corporate interests dominate American politics more than any other time simply due to one thing: Citizens United.
This 2010 Supreme Court ruling got rid of spending limits for campaign donations, essentially making it so corporations could spend millions of dollars backing the candidate of their choice, ensuring that whoever they endorse will work to achieve their interests. It also typically meant that whoever did not receive this enormous backing had a major uphill battle to gain the support of the everyday, on the fence voter, since those voters were being flooded with ads fueled by the corporate donations.
In short, it made it way easier for corporate money to swing elections in their favor. I say “typically” because only recently are we starting to see voters reject candidates who are taking large amounts of money from organizations.
So in a system that prioritizes profits and allows entities with seemingly bottomless amounts of wealth to continually influence elections and policies so that they can continue to benefit off of the already favorable policies that exist, what is the average person to do?
This is the kind of ecosystem that the super wealthy, Elon Musk included, can absolutely thrive in. Little to no regulations, tax breaks galore, and politicians who have been compromised and swayed to hold and protect your positions.
The American Lie
If you find yourself saying at any point since we’ve began, “Mike, that’s the beauty of America! Anyone can rise up and take their slice of the pie. The only thing stopping everyone else is the willpower to get it done!” then I fear you have fallen for their trap.
The lie that has been sold is that this is attainable for anyone if the chips fall the right way. You too can work the stock market to your advantage. There is opportunity everywhere for those who know where to look for it. And while I think that can be true, I think the ceiling to that truth is much lower than people realize.
I’m a huge believer in the American Spirit; the ability to think that you can achieve anything despite the odds. I do think that this sentiment allows our people to be easily manipulated into exploitable situations.
As it currently stands, the top 1% now has as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined.
This tells me that the snarky commenter on my social media pages telling me to pull myself up from my bootstraps is statistically more likely to be closer to the poverty line than to any real sense of wealth.
According to the Economic Policy Institute our productivity in the workplace has grown 2.7x as much as our pay has. We are doing more at our jobs now than ever before and we are not being compensated fairly for that work. Meanwhile your wealthy elite can coast off of their passive income, stock buybacks, and other totally legitimate means of “working hard.”
In 2024, EPI also found that CEOs are making 281 times the amount of typical workers. I can only imagine that number has gone up in the two years since then.
The truth is you’re working harder, getting paid less, and having the rules stacked against you in a system that is designed to make the rich richer, and put the financial burden on those with the least. It is a system that cruelly looks down upon those who need assistance and stigmatizes those who cannot take care of themselves.
And yet, in this system where homelessness is rampant, medical debt is out of control, and unemployment and inflation and greed are skyrocketing, we have produced a trillionaire.
And people are cheering for this.
Facing a Giant
It’s natural to wonder what can even be done about this. The average person is not equipped to deal with this from a knowledge standpoint, and obviously from a resource and influence standpoint.
But consider this for a moment.
One of my favorite units to teach in my middle school ELA classes is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Aside from it being a major tragedy in American history, it represents a landmark moment for a labor movement that was struggling to find a foothold of legitimacy.
For those unfamiliar with the event, in 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, largely filled with working immigrants, burned down when a supervisor flicked a lit cigarette into a pile of cotton material. Due to the unsafe working conditions, including only having one elevator, one entrance in or out, and limited fire escapes, many of the workers either burned alive or jumped from the 8th floor, where the fire started, to their deaths.
Due to the very public nature of the event (a block away from Washington Square Park), and the trauma of people searching for their loved ones afterwards, it left many people feeling like something like this could have been prevented. Frances Perkins, who the unit focuses on and who later becomes Secretary of Labor for FDR, gives a detailed account of how the perception of worker’s rights shifted that day. Even for those that did not have to worry about their safety when going to work, their perspective changed when faced with a real tragedy that could happen to any of us.
And although this was a horrific event, it was enough to propel the worker’s rights movement forward, which led to 8 hour work days, weekends, 40 hour work weeks, and many of the other protected labor laws we now enjoy today.
Why do I bring this up?
Hopefully it doesn’t take hundreds of people dying in order to see change happen in our time. Just ask Marie Antoinette. The French Revolution was built off of the unrest that has been brewing here for a while now, and our politicians have more or less written anthems to “Let Them Eat Cake.”
Realistically though, collective activism is the only way to take action and move things forward.
Show up to town hall meetings. Vote people who have your interests at heart at the local, state, and federal level. Don’t settle for anyone who is taking corporate money and who only seeks to keep things the same. I want people in office who are going to address affordability and the staggering wealth gap that has caused a schism in our country. America is already showing at the poll booth that they are looking for progressive candidates with affordability at the forefront (like Zohran Mamdani).
You may have heard the phrase “it’s not a fight between the left and the right, it’s a fight between the top and the bottom.” Perhaps you’ve rolled your eyes at it before. But I don’t think it’s wrong. The issue of trillionaires is not because of any one political party, it’s because there is a population of people dedicated to getting rich and staying rich while pulling up the ladder behind them.
Elon Musk has been allowed to fail upwards his entire career, pretending to be the smartest man in the room simply because he has the biggest number next to his net worth. The truth is just that his margin for failure is much much more forgiving than any of the rest of us. Given the same time and resources as him, any one of us could produce or create just as impressively.
All the same, he now stands atop the capitalist hierarchy as the world’s first trillionaire. To put in perspective how much money that actually is, even if you earned $100k an hour, it would still take you 1,141 years to make your first trillion. He has done so on the back of exploiting his workers, gaining reckless and questionable access to key government agencies investigating him, censoring and suppressing free speech on a major social media app, and who knows how many other countless unethical, immoral means.
The truth is, trillionaires shouldn’t even exist in the first place. We cannot rely on Adam Smith’s thesis that individual gain will eventually benefit everyone. Historically speaking, that has never been the case.
Now more than ever we need to rally around each other, fight for the common good, reject the corporate oligarchy, and wise up to the propaganda seeking to feed us lies to tame our unrest and impatience.
They would not fight so hard to suppress us if they weren’t afraid that if we banded together, we could collectively overthrow this oppressive system. It’s a tall order to get people to root against their own wealth. But right now the top 1% has the same wealth as the bottom 90%.
This ratio needs to be flipped or evened out, not just for the sake of our own wellbeing, but because the resistance grows each and every day against anyone allied with the wealthy elite.
And they’re sharpening their guillotines.
As always, thank you for reading. Please subscribe, like, comment, and share with as many people as you can. I greatly appreciate it.
And remember:
Hope is the Rebellion
Built on Hope 
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