UNITED STATES – Elon Musk, infamous ruling class power broker and fascist mouthpiece, has become the world’s first trillionaire. Capitalists rejoice at this milestone while their repression of the workers who actually created the value intensifies.
Musk is extracting value from the working class from more than one angle. On the one hand, there is the basic contradiction of capitalism in which the workers receive only a fraction of the profits they create while Musk hoards the rest for himself without doing anything to earn it. On the other hand, Musk subsidizes his wealth with workers’ retirement funds. SpaceX stock, considered by most to be a falsely overvalued IPO, was added to major stock indexes, forcing workers with retirement plans to invest whether they want to or not. This means that money from workers’ retirement savings will vanish into thin air when SpaceX stock value inevitably crashes.
Musk siphons away not only the profits created by exploited workers, and not only helps himself to their retirement savings, but also steals their very lives for personal gain. The higher capitalist profits skyrocket, the more people struggle to pay for food, clean water, safe housing, and medical care. Prices for necessities rise while wages shrink. Though real wages may stay the same, the buying power of those wages shrinks, creating the need to sell even more hours of labor power for wages. The more hours of labor power a worker sells to a capitalist for wages, the less of themselves is left over: less time for rest, education, hobbies, family, and friends. The hours of their days, and thus their very lives, have been stolen from them by the capitalist for profit. Musk steals the profits of the people’s labor, the dollars from their retirement savings, and the priceless hours of their days. What is left for him to steal?
In Texas, the community of Boca Chica had its houses stolen from it by Musk. In 2012, SpaceX identified Boca Chica, a community in the middle of a wildlife refuge and park lands, as a new launch site. By 2019, daily life had been disrupted for years by rocket launches and explosions. SpaceX then offered to buy every house in Boca Chica with a three-week deadline to accept. This offer was said to be “non-negotiable,” and SpaceX threatened residents with eminent domain if they did not agree. In 2025, Musk had stolen enough land to create a company town: Starbase, Texas. This “city” is run by a mayor and two commissioners employed by SpaceX. Boca Chica is gone; the village that used to house and nurture a community is now Musk’s personal rocket explosion site. This was always his intention. In 2018, Musk stated, “we’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it’s cool.”
Musk is a striking example of this crisis but doesn’t deserve the credit for creating it. He is not a mastermind; he is merely a thief. Musk is a capitalist, and his accumulation of wealth at the cost of workers’ lives and freedoms is a basic function of capitalism.
To understand why a single man can seize a trillion dollars while the rate of profit trends downward, it helps to see what actually drives that tendency: competition forces capitalists to adopt labor-saving technology, raising the organic composition of capital, the ratio of machinery and materials to the living labor that alone produces value. As this ratio rises, the same mass of profit must be measured against an ever-larger base of total capital, pulling the rate down even as production expands.
This same rising organic composition drives an accelerating centralization of capital. As constant capital swells relative to variable capital, competition increasingly rewards those who command the largest total mass of capital, since only at sufficient scale can the falling rate be offset by sheer volume of capital in motion.
This is precisely the mechanism behind fortunes like Musk’s. As the organic composition of capital rises industry-wide, accumulation increasingly rewards concentration itself. The density of capital under his command grew so concentrated that even ordinary, unremarkable rates of appreciation translated into historically unprecedented absolute gains, the same dynamic behind the broader explosion of the billionaires, whose numbers have multiplied more than fivefold since 2000 while wages’ share of national income has fallen nearly everywhere.
Capitalism cannot function without this concentration of capital, so capital must concentrate to maintain capitalism. At the same time, the degree of centralization Musk commands cannot exist without capitalism, so Elon Musk, and those of the international capitalist class, must preserve the basic contradictions of capitalism to maintain their position.
Elon Musk’s fortune is an inevitability of capitalism that neither taxes nor technocratic adjustment can surmount. Only the international proletariat, in conjunction with the oppressed masses, can overturn the world imperialist system. Only revolution, not reform, can end the conditions that produce men like Musk.
[Image Capitalism Devours Everything, 1920, Dmitriy Stakhievich Moor]
