Elon Musk: The trillion-dollar psycho

He has hastened the deaths of millions

[Credit: The White House]

Conservatives are saying that Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire doesn’t hurt anyone else. We should rejoice in his entrepreneurial success and refuse to succumb to the “politics of envy”.

Really? Musk harms us by inciting race riots (see my account here). But there’s more to it than his promotion of far-right thuggery on our streets. As I explain below, when he was running the Department of Government Efficiency for Trump, he slashed the American overseas aid programme and left hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to die. For good measure, he provoked Islamist terrorism and weakened our protection against pandemics.

It is not “envy” to oppose such a man, but basic common sense.

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[Piece from 22 May]

We are entering the first global health crisis of Donald Trump’s second term and facing the medical and political consequences of his most murderous act.

Maybe because the Western media concerns itself with first-world problems. Maybe because dead Africans don’t count. But the shocks caused by Trump and Elon Musk’s attack on the USAID development agency receive nothing like the coverage they deserve.

The death toll from the closure of much of America’s international development programme is enormous. Research in The Lancet said “a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030” – 14 million according to the highest estimate.

In May CNN quoted aid workers saying that, because it shut down USAID, the Trump administration could not respond effectively to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. And you would have thought that, after Covid-19, we’d know how quickly infectious disease can become a first-world problem.

A report in Science said that the effective elimination of thousands of aid contracts helped trigger Islamist violence in Africa. Once again, we ought to know that terrorism is no respecter of borders.

And then there is the threat to democracy