The Existential Threat of Ultra-Billionaires

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/power/2025-03-25-existential-threat-ultra-billionaires-elon-musk/



Elon Musk has long boasted that he is a climate hero. By selling electric vehicles, he claimed to inaugurate a future of zero-carbon transportation. “The fundamental intention of Tesla, at least my motivation, was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy,” he once said. The climate benefits of EVs can be overstated. They are certainly better for the climate than gas-powered cars, but they require a lot of emissions to produce, and there are still secondary emissions from the electricity needed to charge them, depending on where you live.

But whatever climate bona fides Musk had previously established are now going directly out the window. Musk, as shadow president in the Trump administration, is overseeing the utter devastation of Joe Biden’s ambitious climate program. As Heatmap News has covered in detail, solar and especially wind are slumping as Trump threatens to slash federal subsidies. Republicans are likely to gut at least some of the Inflation Reduction Act (Biden’s marquee climate law) to make budget headroom for tax cuts for the rich. Federal funding for EV chargers has been slashed, and even existing chargers are being torn out at federal buildings.

Why? Certainly some of it comes down to Musk melting his brain into a fine slurry interacting with his neo-Nazi pals on Twitter/X. And there’s a ruthless economic calculus here: Because Tesla is far ahead of its counterparts on electric vehicles (or at least was), it can give up subsidies, which will have the effect of crippling its competition. But there is also a concrete reason: Kamala Harris’s proposed tax on billionaires.

Political scientist Adam Bonica provides a convincing argument along these lines. Musk’s behavior is even more curious when you take into account how much better Democratic administrations are for billionaires than Republican ones over the last 40 years. The reason is Democrats have presided over growing economies, which boost the stock market, while Republican ones—because they always, always screw everything up—typically lead to recessions if not financial crises.

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