Elon Musk has been all over the headlines today, 12 June, as he tips over the threshold to become the world’s first trillionaire. And inevitably, Musk is a walking, talking argument against the existence of such wealth — which he uses to oppose democracy and amplify the far-right around the world.
The real-life Bond villain (thanks, Financial Times) owes his latest windfall to SpaceX. The company, of which Musk is the majority shareholder, makes its initial public offering at a value of around $1.8tn.
Of course, once any individual’s personal wealth enters the billions — never mind the trillions — it becomes largely hypothetical. We, humanity that is, just aren’t made to comprehend that kind of amount. NBCtried to visualise the total:
A stack of $100 bills worth $1 million stands just over 3 feet tall. Scale that up to $1 billion, and the stack is over half a mile high. At $1 trillion, however, the stack reaches a staggering 679 miles in height, nearly 11 times the distance from Earth’s surface to the edge of outer space.
Elon Musk — Buying up democracy
Personally, we at the Canary still find it difficult to picture that kind of thing. We’re activists and journalists — we work in concepts. Fortunately, there’s a ready example in those terms, too. $1tn will buy you, more or less, one global democracy, or a sizeable chunk of it at the very least.
Back in January, Oxfam released research highlighting that billionaire wealth had reached its highest level in history, breaching $18.3t (trillion) globally. Inevitably, that wealth also brings vast political power. In fact, compared to the average citizen, billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office.
Elon Musk already tried his hand as a fascist politician — after a buy-in donation of over $250m to the Republican Party in 2024. Under Donald Trump, he became the unelected co-chair of ‘DOGE’ (the Department of Government Efficiency).
Of course, the department did absolutely nothing to alter the USA’s national debt, which actually spiked in 2025. However, Musk’s wild slashes to the USAid budget caused a conservative initial estimate of 750,000 deaths around the world. Likewise, that’s not even mentioning the 300,000 federal employees he left out of a job.
All that in the mere 10 months of DOGE’s tragic existence.
Amplifying the fash on Twitter
However, even outside of direct political office, Musk — seen here sniffing around for a party invite from convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — has still proven himself perfectly capable of buying political influence and stifling democracy.
Actually, scratch that, ‘capable’ is the wrong word — $1tn just makes up for an awful lot of incompetence.
After seemingly accidentally backing himself into a corner and being forced to purchase Twitter for $44bn, Musk gained massive power over (what was once) one of the world’s more popular social media platforms. Over and over again, he’s used that power to amplify far-right voices and talking points.
Since the ill-fated Twitter purchase, far-right accounts have seen a boom on the site. As NBC Newsfound in 2024:
at least 150 paid “Premium” subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months, often in apparent violation of X’s rules.
In several cases, the Nazi accounts gained traction because of Musk’s active help. He personally retweeted several prominent ‘race science’ adherents. Mother Jones described him as:
spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers.
Oh, on that note, a quick aside. Musk — pictured here giving a Nazi salute at a far-right political rally — has argued it should be criminal to describe “non-violent” people as Nazis or fascists. Oh, and the same goes for telling people to hate America.
So much for Musk’s famed ‘free speech absolutism‘ (except when he’s defending his AI bot generating child sexual abuse imagery).
Attacks on UK democracy
One of Musk’s favoured pet fascists is Rupert Lowe, founder of the extreme-right Restore UK. Since launching Restore back in February, ten of Lowe’s X posts have received over 10-million views.This, in turn, has caused massive issues for Reform UK, as it faces pressure from the even-further-right.
Another key beneficiary of Musk’s algorithmic patronage is Tommy Robinson, one of the organisers behind the white-supremacist ‘Unite the Kingdom’ (UtK) rally. The white-supremacist agitator/all-round scumbag has openly admitted that Musk previously covered his legal costs.
Likewise, Musk addressed the 2025 UtK rally via video link. He called for “a change of government in Britain” along with a:
dissolution of Parliament and a new vote held.
The Financial Timescounted more than 100 of Musk’s social media posts attacking British multiculturalism. More recently, he exploited the tragic murder of Henry Nowak to foment the riots in response. Likewise, he also amplified Robinson’s dogwhistle calls to riot in Belfast earlier this week.
In response, Green Party leader Zack Polanski stated that:
This man is a threat to our democracy. He backs violence and extremism.
Blaming a group of people for the awful actions of an individual leads us to a very dark place.
Musk, Lowe, Farage, Robinson – these men don’t give a shit about this country, they want to rip us apart.
In our deeply broken system, money is power. A billion, let alone a trillion, gives an individual the power to buy things that should never have been for sale. Musk is a living demonstration of the fact that no reasonable society should permit the existence of such obscene wealth.
Featured image via Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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