06 Jun Us and Them
The other night, while searching for an old piece on Kurt Vonnegut, I stumbled upon something else, something that I’d long forgotten but which turns out to be relevant in light of the events of the last couple of days. As I’m sure none of you remember, just over five years ago, Elon Musk – formerly President Trump’s bestie – boldly stepped into the void and did something heroic, right at the height of the COVID pandemic. And you don’t have to take my word that Musk was heroic. He was actually called that by the next Democratic President of the United States:
Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. and an outspoken skeptic of the severity of the coronavirus outbreak, donated more than 1,000 ventilators to officials in Los Angeles to meet demand as the pandemic becomes more severe.
The billionaire said in a tweet he helped acquire 1,255 of the machines from China last week and arranged them to be air-shipped to Los Angeles. He thanked Tesla staff and customs officials in China and Los Angeles for assistance.
“Elon Musk: how about this? I told you a few days ago he was likely to have 1,000 ventilators this week,” California Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters in a briefing Monday. “They arrived in Los Angeles and Elon Musk is already working with the hospital association and others to get those ventilators out in real time. It’s an heroic effort.”
Heroic indeed.
Well….except for one minor detail:
On March 23, Gov. Gavin Newsom made a dramatic announcement: Tesla founder Elon Musk was donating over 1,000 ventilators to California.
It seemed like miraculous news at a moment when the state was desperately searching for ventilators to help save critical coronavirus patients. But was it true.
Newsom’s office now says Musk was supposed to deliver the ventilators directly to hospitals. So far, however, the governor’s office says no California hospital has received them.
It’s also not clear whether Musk actually has any ventilators to give. A report by the Financial Times’ Alphaville column revealed that Musk had purchased Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure (BPAP) machines, which he then plastered with Tesla stickers and shipped to New York.
LOL. I mean…
As Musk and Trump continue to “fight” with one another (and I use those scare quotes advisedly), I think it’s important to remember that this is who Elon Musk is. He’s not a civically minded hero who wants what’s best for the country. He’s not a hero of any sort. He’s just a guy, a guy who wants what’s best for him—and who happens to have kerbillions of dollars to ensure that he gets it. He’s not necessarily a “bad” person, but nor is he the “good guy” in the spat with Trump.
Unfortunately, neither is Trump.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Trump is a bad guy (or the bad guy) either. This isn’t about bad guys and good guys. It is, however, about them and us, the ruling class and the country class.
Way back when, during the pandemic, when Elon was promising ventilators that he never delivered, and Trump was shutting down the country and desperately urging pharmaceutical companies to put everything else aside to focus on creating a vaccine for that horrible plague, I argued that the whole business would exacerbate both of the faults in American politics: the fault between the Right and the Left and the fault between them and us. In the five years since, it seems that most of the focus has been on the former of these two faults and the way it continues to widen. That’s all well and good, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean that the other fault hasn’t also widened. It has, maybe even more so than the one between the parties.
And to that end, as a reminder, I’m going to quote something else from five years ago, the introduction to The Dictatorship of Woke Capital:
On March 24, 2020, the United States government, which Lincoln famously called “the last, best hope of Earth,” officially launched a “partnership” with BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest money management firm. With the economy suddenly in shambles, crushed under the weight of the global coronavirus pandemic and associated “social distancing” measures, the Federal Reserve desperately needed help navigating uncharted territory and administering and managing its brand-new corporate bond programs. And in its hour of need, the Jerome Powell–led Fed turned to Larry Fink and BlackRock.
It was an interesting, if unsurprising, choice for the Fed. With more than $7 trillion in assets at the time, BlackRock was already the undisputed king of the financial services world. More to the point, over the several previous months, it had also become one of the world’s largest and most powerful advocates of what Fink called “a fundamental reshaping of finance.” If anyone could help the Fed and help the nation, then it would seem that Larry Fink was the man.
The interesting thing is that Fink made his declaration on “reshaping” finance several weeks before he was tapped by the Fed and before he met with President Donald Trump, who later called him one of “the smartest people” we, the nation, have working to fix all our problems. Even before the coronavirus cratered the stock market and the American economy, Fink was already busy finding ways to fix that which he saw as broken, which included a great deal more than the fallout from a mere virus. Fink planned to “reshape” finance not just to save the country, but to save the world as well.
My point here is to remind you that everything they did during the pandemic was for them, not us. According to a Los Angeles Times report at the time, between March 24, the date noted above, and “early April” – a span of two weeks or so – Elon Musk not only recovered the billions he’d lost, but added more than $10 billion to his net worth. Thanks to the federal government’s largesse. Thanks to Donald Trump. Thanks to us, the taxpayers.
Today, of course, Musk and Trump are fighting about the “fiscal responsibility” of the Big Beautiful Bill, or so they’d have us believe. Neither one seems to care much about the decade-and-a-half of fiscal and monetary profligacy that brought us to this point. And why should they? That’s irrelevant to them. It’s all water under the bridge, really. Those 15 years were good for them, even if they’ve left us in a helluva mess.
At some point, when all the bickering about men in women’s sports and DEI has subsided somewhat, the members of the country class may recognize that they have, at the ruling class’s behest, been fighting with one another over values while completely ignoring their shared interests.
If that happens, maybe Elon Musk and Donald Trump – as well as the rest of the ruling class – will realize that they shouldn’t have been so obvious about what they were doing and whose interests they were really pursuing. Or at least we can hope.
