Last Friday, tech oligarch Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in history.
To think a single person is allowed to amass such a mind-boggling amount of wealth —when so many children around the world, including the United States, go to sleep every night without a thing in their bellies—is bad enough. But the fact that Musk was singlehandedly responsible for the dismantling of USAID through his short-lived DOGE agency, which resulted in the preventable deaths of countless human lives, makes this economic landmark an abomination.
Is this how the world responds when a person professes total contempt for basic empathy? By turning him richer than King Midas?
No one captured the hubris of kings and emperors better than the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (less popular today than his wife Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein) with his beautiful poem Ozymandias, which was the first thing that came into mind when I pondered about Elon sitting (figuratively speaking) on a mount Everest of money.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Powerful men (and a few women) left behind monuments as a testament to their passing glory. Even the robber barons of a century ago donated libraries and museums which made a contribution to society. But people like Elon will leave nothing behind, except a barren wasteland of datacenters and vapid tweets which might get collected by a few historians.
Colonies on Mars, you say? Fat chance! As Greg pointed out in a past article, Musk is infamous by his overshooting of all his ‘predictions’, which are nothing more than bait for investors that should know better.
Of course, other technocrats will try to join Musk in the new ‘T’ club, and there’s no telling how much damage they will cause to the economy, and the world in general.
May the Age of the trillionaire trolls pass quickly, and may their memory be erased by the sands of Time.
