The Brooklyn Rail

Elon Musk has said, “without me, Trump would have lost the election.” In other words, “I bought this presidency,” and have now discovered I purchased a defective product. This statement is true in one sense, but it conceals a great deal more than it reveals. Musk did provide the cash ($290 million) and the data-mining software that Trump needed to win the presidency in swing states in November 2024. But it can be argued that both the cash and the data-mining capacity were originally given to Musk by the US government, just as the US government financed and built the Internet, and then gave it to the oligarchs of Silicon Valley to build into a new economy, showering themselves personally with vast wealth.

The richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $381 billion, now wants to return the presidential product he purchased and get a refund, or some kind of compensation for his loss. Our question is, What form would this compensation take? We suspect that it, too, has already been paid to him in the form of personal data on individual citizens gathered under cover of his “Department of Government Efficiency,” that was given “god-tier access” to classified information. And it has already substantially come in the form of government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits, amounting to $38 billion over the past two decades, given to Musk’s companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink and xAI. Two-thirds of this amount came in the last five years, and this amount does not include funds from classified contracts for defense and intelligence activities which do not have to be publicly disclosed.

On Saturday, Musk called Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill “utterly insane and destructive” as it lurches toward Trump’s deadline of July 4. Earlier, Musk called the bill a “disgusting abomination” that would drive the country into bankruptcy. He may very well be right, but the irony of the message coming from him is so thick as to be almost impenetrable. The oligarch-in-chief is objecting to saddling future generations with debt because of the policies he made possible, and he is trying to somehow present himself as the victim in this scenario. Well, he did learn from the best in this (self-)regard.

But the real victims of the One Big Bill are the 16 million people who will lose their medical insurance because of the reductions in Medicaid (cut by $700 billion) and Medicare (cut by $500 billion) and the children who will lose access to meals when the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is cut by $300 billion. The Congressional Budget Office says the bill will increase the national debt by at least $3.3 trillion. And all this is being done so that the wealthiest people in the US can receive a $38 trillion tax cut. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia said the bill is “Robin Hood in reverse . . . stealing from the poor in order to give to the rich, this massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top . . . this is socialism for the rich.”¹

Senator Warnock is right: the consolidation of money in fewer and fewer hands has not happened only in the technology sector. In the US in 2011, the 400 wealthiest people in the country possessed more wealth than half of all the other people living in the country. In 2019, the three wealthiest people in the country had more wealth than the bottom half of all Americans.

The Federal Reserve said that at the end of 2021, the top 1% of US households held 30.9% of the wealth in the country, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%. The Federal Reserve data also showed that in the 30 years from 1989 to 2019, the bottom 50% of wealth owners in the US experienced no net wealth growth. None. In that same time period, the top 1% of wealth owners experienced a 300% gain.

Consolidation of money and power in fewer and fewer hands is accelerating and reaching a level of ultimate toxicity. Some individuals and corporations have grown so rich and powerful that they have effectively become sovereign, and that is itself a mortal threat to democracy and the rule of law. The US is becoming a kind of sultanist oligarchy, like Putin’s Russia, wherein the oligarchs choose one of their own to rule for a period of time, and they depend on the sultan for protection and enforcement of their claims.

At the same time, the Silicon Valley oligarchs are falling all over each other to invest lavishly in AI infrastructure, especially in massive data centers being built across the US and in the Middle East. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google will spend $320 billion on infrastructure this year, building data centers from sea to shining sea. These data centers may cost more than $100 billion apiece and burn more electricity than a million US homes.

In the recent Douthat/NY Times interview with Peter Thiel, Thiel notes that Silicon Valley has always been obsessed with IQ, with being more intelligent than other humans and making intelligent machines beyond their capacities—smart machines. Now they are warning us that the superintelligent machines they are currently making may soon surpass human beings in general intelligence, and may come to decide, in all their wisdom, to enslave and/or destroy us.

That is, the materialization and instrumentalization of intelligence is racing toward its toxic end. It is the apotheosis of the desire to possess all knowledge, but the tech entrepreneurs turned knowledge, and thinking, into “information.” They are called “thinking machines,” but they do not really think, in the terms Hannah Arendt used to describe that activity. When Musk talks about AI, it is all about the speed of thinking, as if speed eclipses every other measure. In an accelerationist world, there is literally no time to stop and think. Speed has a politics, and it is an authoritarian politics.