Surprise: Elon Musk is still the richest man in the world — and his wealth has reached unprecedented levels, even as the last vestiges of Twitter crumble under his watch.
Since the start of 2023, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the Tesla and SpaceX (and up until recently, Twitter) chief executive’s net worth has grown by more than $96 billion.
Musk is now worth $234 billion; he has gained $530 million a day in 2023. That means in a span of three days — say, in the three days since Musk introduced rate limits on Twitter and effectively restricted just how much anyone can use the site he bought for $44 billion last year — he amassed approximately $1.6 billion.
As of Saturday, most Twitter users can view only 600 tweets a day; that number goes up to 6,000 for Twitter Blue users. The reasons behind the limit — effectively reducing eyeballs on the site as Twitter struggles to win back advertisers — remain truly unclear. Musk claims that the restriction was introduced to curtail “extreme” data scraping by artificial intelligence firms, while reports float around about Twitter’s nonpayment to Google, which hosts key servers for the company.
Back to Musk’s staggering riches, seemingly in spite of himself: In 2021, when Musk was valued at $255 billion, Forbes declared him “the richest person to ever walk the planet.” For a few brief periods in the past year, the Tesla scion was not the richest guy in the world — ceding the title to LVMH co-founder and CEO Bernard Arnault, who is currently valued at a cool $200 billion, according to Bloomberg. Meta CEO (and Musk’s potential cage match combatant) Mark Zuckerberg also won big in 2023, snagging nearly $59 billion more this year even as his vision for the metaverse has all but collapsed entirely.
Rich people in and out of tech are having a great time; Bloomberg notes that this six-month stretch has been the best time for billionaires since the second half of 2020. Meanwhile, survey after survey has shown that a staggering number of Americans are experiencing stress over their finances — no doubt heightened by record inflation and, now, the Supreme Court's overruling President Joe Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness plan.
capitalist philanthropy is a combination of money laundering, reputation laundering, and tax avoidance. we should restructure society so that poverty is impossible, instead of an inevitable byproduct of the system, but that requires organized revolution, which itself requires mass class consciousness, discipline, training, dedication, education and years of planning. Capitalists realized a long time ago that they don't get any PR boost when they pay high taxes. If the government taxes you $1 million, it's not seen as charitable because it's an involuntary and invisible social machination. But if you donate even a tenth of that you get accolades, parades, parties, gatherings, fluff pieces and new segments in your honor. Everyone shines your boots over what a good little tycoon you are. So capitalists lobby to deregulate, privatize, subsidize their industries with public money, crush unions, brutalize leftists and pay as little taxes as possible, while laundering their reputations through the media spectacle of donating to their own charities, which, they might as well be redistributing wealth from their right pocket to their left pocket. Charity is a win-win for them, and hordes of gormless pundits will remind you how generous they are for "donating" (to themselves) the wealth they earned on the backs of their workers and public subsidization of their empires.
Don't forget evil supervillain plans. A lot of Gates philanthropy is ecofascist anti-natalism because he wants Africans to stop reproducing
Yes, and I'm sure you know this already, but I don't even think it's truly motivated by ecology. It's more motivated by eugenics and racism masquerading as teaching "reproductive responsibility" to "third worlders." The ecology excuse is just window dressing. Also the slower the population of the global south grows, the slower their economy develops, and the more easily they can be managed and kept as raw material exporting neo-colonies with IMF debt and foreign-owned infrastructure. The last thing the imperial core wants is for the periphery to develop/grow too fast and "catch up" with the imperial core. Quasi-environmentalism is a good way for the bourgeoisie to greenwash their racist, neo-colonial, imperialist tendencies, as well as their material interests.
Oh of course, I assume all ecofascism is purposeful greenwashed fascism instead of misguided environmentalism