In the United States of America, being rich bestows a golden halo. Many treat the rich as authority figures. They look to them for guidance on their behavior as billionaires-in-waiting. If only they follow their advice, their bank account balance will rise.
Along with the golden halo, the temporarily embarrassed poor imagine the rich wear a magical cape symbolizing their power to save the human race. If they don’t save us from ourselves, nobody can. We are beholden to their grace and must eliminate their taxes or risk oblivion.
The Rich Are Not The Smartest People
Elon Musk tanked Twitter’s stock price with a single tweet, reducing the stock’s value before purchase by billions of dollars.
He’s now facing $2.6 billion in damage after a March 2026 jury found he misled Twitter investors with that single “on hold” tweet.
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
The richest man in the world is a fucking moron. Meanwhile, there are millions of white male knights defending his honorable behavior; after all, he’s saving humanity.
Billionaires Are A Policy Choice
Every billion-dollar fortune takes wealth that other people created. Private jets and super-yachts represent stolen wages, dodged taxes, and privatized public goods. Forty years of tax cuts, union-busting, and regulatory capture built this class. Voters can build it up. Voters can tear it down.
A country that calls Jeff Bezos a genius for supplying cheap socks has stopped counting the cost of handing over its power. Warehouse workers pee in bottles so Bezos can sail a $500M yacht. Musk has driven three companies off a cliff because he can absorb mistakes. AI and robots replace the rest of us.
Billionaires got rich by out-legislating everyone else with expensive lobbyists.
What You Lose When You Kneel
Every time Americans treat the rich as prophets, the rich pass the bill to everyone else.
- Wages have stayed flat for forty years while U.S. billionaire wealth grew 19-fold between 1990 and 2021.
- Your child’s school runs short because the top 25 American billionaires paid a true tax rate of 3.4% on their wealth growth, lower than a typical barber’s effective income tax rate.
- Your grandmother’s prescriptions cost triple because brand-name drugs in the U.S. run more than three times the price of other wealthy countries.
- Your city floods every summer because oil billionaires would rather pump another barrel than keep the planet cool.
- Your news feed is owned by a man who used it to crown a fascist.
This is real. You pay the bill every paycheck, every ER visit, every wildfire season. The longer the halo stays, the bigger the bill gets. Eventually, the bills stop arriving because the country stops working. The country is not there yet, but it’s close.
I already wrote about the insanity of billionaires in space while ordinary people drown in debt. That was five years ago. It has gotten worse.
How To Push Back
You do not need a Senate seat to break the spell.
You need three things: your money, your attention, and your vote.
- Move your money. Every dollar sent to Amazon, Tesla, X, or Meta funds the next yacht, the next propaganda buy, the next lobbying push. Shift the dollar to local, independent, and worker-owned alternatives.
- Move your attention. Cancel the billionaire-owned subscriptions. Read independent journalists. Quit the platforms built to radicalize people into defending their owners.
- Move your vote. Stop electing politicians who genuflect to “job creators.” Back candidates who campaign on taxing wealth, funding the IRS, enforcing antitrust, and busting monopolies.
None of this is free. You will miss the two-day shipping. Your cousin will still post from X. That is the point. A boycott only matters when it costs you something.
Do These Three Things This Week
- Read the Save The Republic charter and sign on. It lays out the baseline fights that put power back in citizens’ hands.
- Pick one brand off the Survivor’s Guide to Earth boycott list and delete the app today. One is a start. Five is a habit.
- Tell one person in your life, out loud, that billionaires are not heroes. Normalize saying it. The halo only works in silence.
The wealthy are responsible for this crisis. They won’t fix it for anyone. Recognize this reality.
References
- Billionaires In Space, on how absurd wealth disparity became a running joke.
- Jury finds Elon Musk misled investors during Twitter purchase, NPR coverage of the March 2026 verdict on the “on hold” tweet.
- Billionaire Bonanza 2024, Inequality.org and Americans for Tax Fairness data on U.S. billionaire wealth growing 19-fold from 1990 to 2021.
- The Secret IRS Files, ProPublica’s reporting on the 3.4% true tax rate paid by the wealthiest 25 Americans.
- Prescription Drug Prices in the U.S. Are 2.78 Times Those in Other Countries, RAND Corporation press release, February 2024. Note: brand-name drugs ran more than 3x, generics less.
- Save The Republic charter, a charter for rebuilding a functional democracy.
- Survivor’s Guide to Earth boycott list, a concrete list of billionaire-controlled companies to move your money away from.