The Bad Guy Won

There was supposed to be a James Bond to save us at the last moment. Right before Goldfinger's scheme comes together. Right before he had the chance to steal the gold from Fort Knox.

On Friday, June 12th Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire.

In the weeks leading up to the IPO every financial expert of note cautioned their audiences. The numbers didn't add up. The shareholders wouldn't have a fraction of the power they would for any other public company. Grok was already a third tier AI and the likelihood of it becoming the foundation of a 28 trillion dollar company is nil.

The leading story was that Elon had forced NASDAQ to change its rules to fast track SpaceX's inclusion on the index and then force most of us to buy the stock in its post IPO glow.

But SpaceX didn't need those tricks to make Musk a trillionaire. Retail investors gladly opened their wallets and bet their futures on the golden child again.

In short this is another historic loss in an era lousy with them.

In the Bond films the eccentric, megalomaniacal villains are felled as much by the rules-based world order of the West than Bond himself--the US military was always at the ready to save the super spy whenever he got in too deep which seemed to happen in every film.

At this point Musk's sins are well known. In just a few months steering the US government he has caused incalculable harm to people, to industry. He has stopped even to pretend to use his largesse for the common good. Days before the IPO he contributed to pogroms in Belfast.

We know who this man is, and the harsh truth is that many people like it. Part of the value and appeal of SpaceX isn't the promise of colonies on Mars, or data centers in space, it's that Musk can continue his illiberal, eugenicist project here on Earth today.

Musk stands as a living rebuke to every axiom we've developed in the post Civil Rights era and it's important to treat it as such. An active rebuke to liberalism. In those goals he has amassed followers and devotees. They pay to see more, prod him further.