It's quite funny that this dude's historic wealth might be the most persuasive blackpilling possible on capitalism, and yet the socialist warriors do not take advantage of the opportunity.
Let me explain. His wealth is fundamentally disconnected from personal merit or direct labor. He is the CEO of three companies and in the C-suite at many others. There is simply no possibility whatsoever that he works the hours expected of such positions and that the little personal labor he dedicates to them represents the the incredible wealth he has extracted from them.
Moreover, there are several, well-documented claims from insiders that they have to handle or buffer his erratic behavior, and that the executives that actually do the work are relieved when he gets hyperfocused on another company and leaves them alone. What work he does when he is hyperfocused consists mostly, according to insiders, as extreme micromanagement. He self-describes himself as a "nano-manager," and his official biographer talks about his hyper-critical "demon mode." There is a pretty reasonable argument to be made that his presence harms these companies, rather than helps them.
This is only boosted by how many expensive, high-profile lawsuits his companies have been embroiled in by his public remarks, nonstop posting, and refusal to abide by financial disclosure deadlines. How he treats his employees and unilaterally fires people without cause also causes employment lawsuits.
Substantively, his companies also benefit from him lying to the market to cause speculation and government subsidies won by quid pro quo behavior that would have, in better times, been considered criminal. Musk causes Tesla and SpaceX to consistently lie about its products, and he is never punished enough to offset the personal benefit he gets from the market or subsidies by such lying.
His wealth is an illusion driven by retail investor enthusiasm based on these lies, market expectations based on his lies and the fact that he has yet to seriously pay for lying, and pay packages approved by boards stacked with flunkies that cannot articulate how he can possibly do enough work as the CEO of three companies and executive of half a dozen others to justify his intensely bloated pay packages. He receives that pay even when his companies are not profitable, which has led to constant shareholder lawsuits.
If there was a poster boy of American Capitalism, it is him. He represents everything wrong with the reality of how the system works, and how lying and anticompetitive behavior is not adequately curbed.
The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant profit-generating machine for corporations.
Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.
That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.
It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.
Music is made to be as profitable as possible, which means giving it the broadest possible appeal using formulaic song structure calculated to cause a chemical response in the largest number of human brains.
Movies are designed to draw the largest possible box office revenue at the lowest possible risk to studios and investors, often by just rehashing a movie that’s already proven successful in the past or by slapping together a story about an IP with pre-existing mass appeal.
Food is made to be fast and addictive rather than nourishing.
Healthy human connection has been commodified as social media intertwines with friendships and dating apps insert themselves into the development of romantic relationships.
Human sexuality is being warped and twisted as internet porn normalizes violence and degradation for the maximum number of clicks.
Attention and engagement have been monetized, creating an information ecosystem dominated by conflict and gossip designed to appeal to our baser instincts.
Advertisement is injected into every possible corner of our waking sensory experience, with any available space where the eye might rest or the ear might listen being flooded with psychological manipulation compelling us to consume. They’ll start running commercials in our dreams the instant they have the technology to do so.
You spend eight hours at the office working to generate corporate profits, then you come home and consume products to profit other corporations. You need your beer and snacks to unwind, your streaming services and social media to distract your mind from the stress of it all, your online clothing purchase to try to feel good about yourself, and your prescription drugs to get to sleep at night. People live their entire lives like this.
And that’s those of us who are lucky enough to be living in the global north. In the global south you get wage slavery and exploitation with far more toil, far less relaxation time, and no cheap products made by impoverished workers on other continents with which to comfort yourself.
All of humanity has been roped into this mess. And for what? To make the numbers in some bank accounts increase. To get some green arrows pointing upward on the stock exchange. To enable a few billionaires to buy islands and elections.
All while destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival.
This, we are told, is the best possible system we could possibly be living under.
I personally do not believe this is true. I personally believe we can have better. Those who benefit from this current arrangement are going to assure us it’s impossible and do everything they can to stop us from changing it, but we do have the means to reclaim the wealth, dignity and happiness that they have stolen from us.
They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.
@ThePosieParker Hey Kristallnacht, any comments on this:
https://t.co/SUvJ1YoHeP
Seems like one of your fellow aryans didn't get the memo on civilised behaviour.
@ThePosieParker Supremacism, the last refuge of the genocidaire and the pogromist, who seek to exalt themselves through blood and soil bullshit and the false belief that they are part of whatever might makes their culture good.
@CortinoVictor@ThePosieParker A: Not your "bro". B: It's pretty easy to find Western influences in a lot of music from Muslim majority cultures. Do you guys even leave the house? There are fundamentalist who dislike music, but you can find people like that among Jews and Christians.
@logicalityman@ThePosieParker Go and get a Kebab, you'll hear the guys there playing music from all over the Middle East. Like many of Kristallnacht Kelly's pronunciations on this matter it's not hard to disprove.
@letsgetitbetter@ThePosieParker I can't speak to that particular case, but I do know you're pretty ignorant if you think there's no music culture among Muslims. You could just do a quick Internet search and find that they have a music culture, although the fact you don't know this is outstanding.
@eoinjwalsh@dropalltables@243_cal Don't expect these people to be coherent. Half of them are AI clankers and the other half are just hoping that Elon's money tree will rain on them, like a cargo cult.
@webmasterdave@dropalltables He's just a drug addicted, racist, with some government contracts, a slew of subpar products, a propensity to bullshit beyond any realistic timeline or production scenario and a real talent for grifting and white collar crime. He belongs in prison. Fixed it for you.
@ThePosieParker So, no argument then. Just an opinion stated as if it were fact, with no examples to back it up. Sheesh, you get more dumb every day. Carry on smoking Elon and Nigel's crack pipe.
@TheDunstonator@ThePosieParker@61harpy@MilneChas Don't try logic on that one. She a Farage/Musk sucker, oblivious to reasonable argument. She's far too busy channeling Karl Lueger. A racist demagoguic antisemite from the early 20th century, who influenced Hitler.
@KingArPharazon During the 80's Asian youth around the UK formed neighbourhood protection groups, in response to the violence inflicted on them. But the formation of such groups is fraught with danger when you're a minority. Not against it, but worth remembering that
They always draw communism as an empty fridge and capitalism as a full one.
They never draw the homeless person outside the capitalist supermarket, the farmer dumping food because selling it isn’t profitable, or the hundreds of millions who go hungry despite a world that produces more than enough food to feed everyone.
Under capitalism, the fridge is full if you can pay. Under socialism, the goal is that nobody is denied food because they’re poor.