I: Introduction
A couple of weeks before I started writing this post, I came upon a short video posted on Twitter (I refuse to call that social media website by its moronic renaming!) on which Elon Musk was complaining about having to pay too much in taxes. Good God: who would imagine the richest man in the world, a centi-billionaire, upset about that? The super-rich would never go on campaigns to lower their taxes, would they?
Well, of course, such complaining is only to be expected of him and his ilk. But matters get worse when we encounter ordinary people defending these plutocrats, which I promptly found myself having to deal with after replying to the video by saying that people like Musk pay far too little in taxes, which of course they usually do–that’s how they became centi-billionaires in the first place.
Musk’s defender was someone who calls him- (or her-) self “chronically based” (“chronically bird-brained” is more like it). The person in question replied to my comment by saying that Musk pays “absurdly” high taxes, “in the billions.” I took a quick look at the defender’s Twitter page, which included, under the name, what probably shouldn’t be all that surprising–a Bible quote: “With man this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). Right-wingers are often fond of their feel-good Christian quotes.
I responded to all of this by pointing out the oft-noticed link between Bible-thumpers and billionaire-simping right-wingers, adding that this person ought to read this quote from Matthew–25:31-46, which shows a concern for the poor, something right-wingers routinely ignore.
Well, I suppose this person got a little upset by my reply. First, he or she wanted to know if I’m any better when it comes to caring about the poor (by not defending the super-rich, I’m already better without a need to do anything else!). Then, after citing a few more debatable statistics about the tax rates of the rich vs average-income Americans, which I consider neither here nor there, he or she claimed that higher taxes would just drive the super-rich out of the country, leaving the US government to default, since average-income Americans wouldn’t be able to carry the burden of such high taxes.
Let me deal with these objections one by one. There was no point in my saying any of the following in a reply on Twitter, since I’ve no need to prove myself to this nitwit (who probably wouldn’t listen to me, anyway), and my claims of charity couldn’t be verified independently, anyway. But suffice it to say, for years, I donated money monthly to World Vision to a boy in Nicaragua named José Eliel Angulo; and as a leftist, I constantly advocate for the poor. This right-winger said nothing of helping the poor; just billionaire-simping. I’ve already done leaps and bounds more, even with my modest charity as a chronically-underemployed worker (ever since covid), than he or she.
II: Musk’s Wealth and Taxes
Next, we should look at the claim that Musk pays an “absurdly” high amount in taxes, “in the billions.” Let’s start with some context: Musk‘s net worth, as of this writing in May 2026, is $788 billion, according to Forbes; his net worth was $800 billion in February 2026. In 2021, his net worth, again, according to Forbes, was $300 billion. His total in net worth billions rose by a billion yearly, if not almost monthly, from 2024 to 2026. Since November 2025, he’s been expecting a Tesla pay package of $1 trillion, if approved, over a period of ten years, if he meets specific goals.
Note that net worth is, of course, after taxes. In 2021, he had to pay about $11 billion in taxes (while Tesla paid none), yet his net worth had been $300 billion. Given his gargantuan wealth at the time already, I think he could handle a tax on 28.27% (311/11) of his wealth–it doesn’t seem all that “absurdly” high to me. It was also just one year. He paid no federal income taxes in 2018, by the way. From 2014-2018, he paid $455 million in taxes on $1.52 billion of income.
As much of his wealth is in stock rather than salary, his tax liabilities often arise only when he sells shares, allowing him to defer taxes. In 2026, he said he’d have to pay a combined federal and state income tax rate of around 45% when selling stock. Well, don’t sell the stock, then, Elon, if you hate taxes so much.
Incidentally, Tesla paid 0% in federal income taxes, in 2025, on $5.7 billion of US income. Indeed, in spite of high profits, Tesla has utilized tax breaks, resulting in a low effective tax rate in recent years.
Furthermore, ever since Trump‘s second term, the super-rich have seen huge increases in their wealth, up roughly $1.5 trillion in 2025, about 22%, from $6.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion. Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg made up about a quarter of the total gains. Much of these gains were, of course, because of Trump’s tax cuts to the rich. A study last year showed that, in spite of the super-rich paying an overall larger share of taxes than ordinary Americans, the former pay a lower tax rate than the latter. The super-rich are not paying their fair share.
Ultimately, though, who pays how much in taxes is neither here nor there when you consider how everyone ends up after the taxes are paid. Oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, et al are still obscenely wealthy, while millions of working-class Americans are struggling to make ends meet. We all know where far too much of that tax revenue goes–to the military, to Israel, to the US/NATO proxy war against Russia (using Ukraine as a stick with which to hit Putin), and the like, in disproportion to how much should go there…if any of it. Far too little of that money is going out to help the poor.
And the rich won’t leave the US if taxed more…they own the country! They simply won’t pay. We cannot legislate them out of their wealth. That’s why I advocate forcible expropriation (via socialist revolution), and not taxation, anyway.
A huge part of the reason that so many of the super-rich (the tech-bros in particular, like Musk et al) are supporting Trump in his second term is surely because of those delicious tax cuts his administration has given them. When Musk is in a video talking about how ‘awfully high’ taxes are in the US, what he’s really trying to say is that he simply wants to get them even lower than they currently are.
Musk currently has ambitions of being the world’s first trillionaire, as Tesla’s pay package, mentioned above, may make him. We have a word to describe such ambitions: GREED.
This leads me to take a proper look now at the psychology of the super-rich.
III: Billionaires Are Different from the Rest of Us
Yes, the title of this section is ridiculously obvious in its truth, but I need to state it in reaction to something that chronically bird-brained said in one of his or her comments Apparently, the rich are the same as the rest of us and ought to be treated the same as us.
lol wut?
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that acquiring huge amounts of wealth changes you psychologically, and in a profound way. You become more selfish, acquisitive, narcissistic, entitled, and you lose much in empathy for others. It’s easy to see why people like Musk want even lower taxes than they currently have to pay.
Several years ago, I wrote an article on how those benefitting from capitalism tend to exhibit narcissistic personality traits. Many of the super-rich are so devoid of empathy and basic decency that they can be reasonably called sociopathic.
Consider how Jeff Bezos’s company, Amazon, has pressured their workers to deliver products so quickly that, lacking time to go to the bathroom, they have to piss in bottles as they’re driving to deliver! Then there’s Musk himself, who in response to 2019’s fascist takeover of the Bolivian government (with its accompanying violence to those Bolivians opposed to the new right-wing government) and the left-wing protests against it, he said, “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!”
Finally, there’s that billionaire psychopath Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, whose AI is currently used to help the IDF kill Palestinians and Lebanese, and which will also be used in data centres for mass surveillance of everybody. He’s spoken bluntly of the ‘superiority’ of Western civilization and the need to defend it, necessitating scaring our ‘enemies’ so we can “on occasion kill them.” Such notions are in Palantir’s 22-point manifesto. And Palantir co-founder/Trump supporter Peter Thiel speaks out against democracy.
We all have dark, selfish thoughts deep down: Freud‘s id, and Jung’s Shadow. What distinguishes us from the super-rich is that they can afford to fulfill their darkest desires. That’s why billionaires shouldn’t exist. This is just common sense.
Those guilty of the disgusting and highly disturbing Epstein crimes weren’t and aren’t necessarily billionaires, but they’re certainly rich enough to have partaken. They, who raped and sexually exploited underage girls, among other atrocities, clearly regard common people as mere toys to be played around with, mere meat, not as human beings.
This sort of wickedness is why people like me are opposed to the whole idea of being born into a lower class, a middle class, or an upper class. One tends to stay where one is: those at the bottom generally cannot escape poverty, those in the middle are driven to work like slaves out of a fear of falling to the bottom, and those at the top, never learning what it’s like to struggle to live, go through life entitled, thinking they should be able to have anything they want and never be held accountable for any wrongdoing.
Such an entitled attitude is easily seen in people like Trump, who’ll “grab ’em by the pussy,” and never release the Epstein files, in which his name is mentioned tens of thousands of times. Billionaires are people who can buy a home, a private plane, cars, etc. quite fast and easily, as compared with how the rest of us would struggle, scrimp, and save to afford any one of those things. One billion is a thousand millions: people need to use their imaginations and think about what one can do with that much money. If a million dollars were seconds, they would add up to a little over 11.5 days. If a billion dollars were seconds, they would add up to about 31.7 years; and if a trillion dollars (Musk’s current ambition) were seconds, they would add up to about 31,710 years. I hope these calculations help the skeptics understand why we call such amounts of money obscene levels of wealth.
No, billionaires are not the same as the rest of us. We aren’t even in the same league as they are.
Some may try to defend billionaires by referring to their acts of ‘philanthropy.’ Their ‘charitable’ acts, however, require closer scrutiny. Only a small amount of that money actually goes to helping the poor; when donations are given to schools, for example, they usually go to elite ones. A lot of the motive behind the giving is for tax breaks and an improved public image. Most importantly, this ‘charity’ only serves to justify keeping the class system as it is instead of properly addressing the real root causes of poverty–those of capitalism.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may have done a lot to reduce the problem of polio, but that was far from the biggest problem of the local people, to give one example. That foundation is also not all that noble in its agenda: among other things, Gates’s ‘giving’ allowed his net worth to go up every year since 2009 to $72 billion as of 2014. It’s currently at $102-108 billion. Some charity.
If expropriated, billionaires’ wealth could help end world hunger, build schools and hospitals in the Third World–ones that are fully equipped and with well-trained staff–it could provide affordable if not free housing for everyone, and could be used to clean up the planet. All their combined wealth is around $16 to $20 trillion: don’t tell me it couldn’t at least make huge strides at achieving, if not completely achieve, the above goals.
Instead of even trying to achieve those oh, so worthy goals, however, what kinds of things do the super-rich do with their wealth, besides hoarding it in offshore bank accounts to avoid taxes (i.e., the Panama and Paradise Papers), to pushing for even more tax breaks, lobbying for Israel, etc.? Well, in the case of Musk, Bezos, and Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, they go into private space exploration! What do we need that for, when we have NASA?
What good are fantasies about colonizing space when we won’t even solve the ecological problems of this planet? Even if we achieve the technological miracle of science fiction’s terraforming, isn’t it true that we’ll just mess up the environment out there on those planets, too, sooner or later?
The motives of these three private space explorers is obvious: it isn’t out of altruism: it’s just a glorification of their already bloated egos. No, billionaires are not the same as the rest of us. They are, in fact, monstrosities.
IV: Billionaires Buy Power and Kill Democracy
The idiotic dogma of the market fundamentalists is that with minimal-to-no government intervention in the economy, the “free market” as a ‘natural,’ ‘organic,’ and ‘self-regulating’ way of doing things will set everything right. Lower taxes, deregulate business practices, and businessmen’s “rational egoism” will motivate them to produce the best quality goods to satisfy customer demand, resulting in a healthy economy with lots of jobs for everyone. Wealth will “trickle down” to the poor, and everyone will be happy.
The last fifty-or-so years have shown that the truth is anything but the nonsense described above. When taxes are lowered and the economy is deregulated to maximize profits, far from resulting in the right-wing libertarian’s “free market” utopia, millionaires become billionaires and their private property balloons, requiring the super-rich to protect it all the more through the very state that they claim they want to minimize. Hence all the rich’s lobbying of American politicians through super PACs, resulting in legislation to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Hence the proliferation of militarized police. And hence, when markets dry up here and need to be developed abroad, the need to export capital to other countries, fueling imperialism and war.
As I explained here years ago, the “free market” doesn’t result in “small government”; it results in huge government (i.e., the bloated military-industrial complex). As Tupac once said, “They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.” When right-wing libertarians talk about “small government,” what they really mean is cutting social programs; spending absurdly high amounts on the military, though, as if there were no tomorrow, is perfectly acceptable to them. Their notions of being “frugal” and not wasteful with government money is pure hypocrisy. It’s not “small government”; it’s capitalist government.
This is why the US has a multi-trillion-dollar deficit because of such things as military spending that’s through the roof, resulting in a “need” to raise the debt ceiling, yet there are all these cuts in education and the like. Landlords have raised rents, resulting in a rise in homelessness to an epidemic level, exacerbated recently by the inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs and his needless war of aggression on Iran (spiking oil and gas prices).
Tariffs, of course, are taxes on imported goods. While Trump has lowered taxes on the super-rich, hence the backing of his reelection campaign by Musk et al, the poor are being burdened with the taxes of these tariffs, and the poor in the US are already having difficulty making ends meet as it is. All of these injustices are the result of allowing the super-rich to have too much political influence, making them get richer and richer, while the rest of us get poorer and poorer.
Real democracy means giving power to the common people, not this sham we see of voting for whoever the oligarchs allow us to vote for every four or so years, and yet the pro-rich, anti-poor policies continue unchecked. In these ways, we can see how, in buying political power, the billionaires are killing democracy.
Any candidate offering a real alternative to the system gets marginalized. Scant media attention is ever given to the Green Party, for example, and even the modest social-democrat reforms proposed by Bernie Sanders, AOC, etc., are stopped before they can even be seriously considered. Sanders can be counted on to bow down and endorse yet another corporate whore of the Democratic Party during the lead-up to any election because he is just a sheep-dog for the left. He and AOC, in spite of the lip service they pay to criticizing Israel, are Zionists: any American politician who wants to have a successful career must be firmly Zionist, as Israel has always been crucial in helping protect the interests of Western imperialism.
This is all why, outside of revolution and expropriating all of the billionaires, the poor will never have a hope of improving their lot. The super-rich will never pay their fair share in taxes, and they’ll continue to lobby for even lower taxes. They do this because they own the country. They are killing, if they haven’t yet already fully killed, democracy.
The fact that Trump recently visited China accompanied by oligarchs like Musk and Jensen Huang of Nvidia is telling. Trump is one of these oligarchs, and he serves the oligarchs, who truly rule the US. They are caving into China because they know that China, home to many of the coveted rare earth minerals and other natural resources essential to propping up American industries like AI, etc., has the upper hand.
The link between billionaires and AI leads me to my next point.
V: Billionaires Want to Surveil Us
Along with the idea that today’s US government is a big, capitalist one is the fact that this state is getting increasingly fascistic and totalitarian. As I discussed in this article, what is feared of communism is here in capitalism: attacks on freedom and democracy–touched on in the previous section, but I go into more detail in this other article; cults of personality (i.e., Trump), police brutality, concentration camps, and mass murder (again, see my article for details); and finally, surveillance, which is what I want to get into here now.
As the working class gets more and more frustrated and desperate, they will start lashing out and thinking about revolution. The super-rich, naturally, are getting nervous about that, as we can see from such things as Luigi‘s shooting of the health insurance billionaire, the burning down of warehouses, and Sam Altman’s house being hit with a Molotov cocktail.
The tech bros among the billionaires have been setting up AI data centres in places all over the US, which apart from using up needed water and energy are also being used to collect data and info on everyone. So anyone who, as the AI finds out from all of this personal information, is in any way involved in organizing resistance to the capitalist, imperialist system, who is agitating and educating (as I try to do here), and/or is planning anything of a revolutionary nature has thus made him- or herself a target. Big Business is watching you.
Note that at least one of these oligarchs, Larry Fink, billionaire CEO of BlackRock, has vocally expressed his concern about “domestic terrorism” in the event of a possible civilian use of drones to strike these data centers, an act of resistance against the growing totalitarian capitalist state. Note also that Fink was one of the oligarchs who went with Trump, Musk, Huang, et al to China. And note further that BlackRock, along with Vanguard and State Street, is one of those giant, multinational investment companies that own and control just about every business on the planet.
These billionaires are becoming truly scary people. Taxing them more doesn’t even begin to address the need to rein them in. Why do you think Musk brazenly did a Nazi salute on TV at the time of Trump’s inauguration? Was he just being foolish or ‘socially awkward’? Doing such a thing thirty years ago would have been political suicide. Now, at worst, Musk has received something of a public shaming (like most of the Epstein criminals), but there haven’t been any real harsh consequences to his life and career. He did the salute because he knew that with the ascent of Trump, fascism has arrived fully formed in the US, and Musk figures there’s nothing any of us at the bottom can do about it.
This helplessness of ours brings me to my next point.
VI: Genocide as Suppression of Resistance
The “terrorism” of Hamas and Hezbollah should be understood as resistance against the ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism, occupation, and oppression of the Palestinians. The UN has acknowledged that armed resistance against an occupying force is legitimate self-defense. To the extent that the events of October 7th, 2023 were the acts of Hamas, as opposed to the Hannibal Directive, we can see those events as part of that resistance; for as those of us who have read the history know, this conflict didn’t start on Oct. 7.
While the Zionists have made life for the Palestinians an unending hell ever since the foundation of Israel in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of those in Gaza and the West Bank has been particularly shocking to watch on live-streamed video and photos since Oct. 7. Bodies buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings all over Gaza, children having lost limbs and their bodies torn apart, traumatized survivors everywhere, people dying of starvation, a lack of housing and medical care…all because the IDF looks on the victims with a Hitler hate.
Now of course, the international reaction from ordinary people like me to all of these horrors has been one of sheer outrage, but apart from protesting and attempts to bring food and medical relief to the victims, we cannot stop the Israelis, the great majority of whom support Netanyahu and his thugs in their non-stop murder, which has now extended itself to southern Lebanon. The people in power who really could have stopped Israel–such as, first, Biden and Harris, and now, the Trump administration–have done nothing. They have all been perfectly content to allow the killing to continue. Again, as with Sanders and AOC, they may pay lip service to how awful the violence is, but they’ll do nothing of consequence to stop the violence.
Note that this support of Israel is not limited to the United States government. The former prime minister of my country, Justin Trudeau, proudly called himself a Zionist while this killing was going on; like so many others, he was more concerned with “antisemitism” (never mind that many Jews are anti-Zionists, and many non-Jews are Zionists). Similarly, you can find video of German police beating the shit out of pro-Palestine protestors, who include women.
The Middle East is geostrategically very important to the US and the rest of the Western Empire, as I went into here...all that oil! It’s extremely vital to the imperialists to have an ally–Israel–to kick ass in the region, as then-senator Biden said in a speech back in 1986 (not with my choice of words, of course, but the same idea).
Therefore, not even protests against Israeli brutality against the Palestinians–and now against Lebanese–is acceptable to the Western powers-that-be…to say nothing of a military intervention from those powers to stop the Zionist slaughter. And so the accusation of “antisemitism” is such a convenient excuse for those powerful people to use to stifle the protests (and so it’s important that we protestors not fall into the trap of generalizing about “the Jews” when we protest the evils of Zionism…such generalizing only gives those powerful people more ammunition against us).
When we consider how Israel–apart from a public shaming–is continuing their persecution of the Palestinians with impunity, we must also consider another, even scarier idea: the ongoing genocide of Gaza, the West Bank, and now southern Lebanon is clearly a template for how all resistance–anywhere in the world–will be dealt with.
Consider the current situation in Cuba. The island has already suffered an economic embargo since 1960 for committing the unforgivable sin of kicking out the capitalists on New Year’s Day, 1959, and embracing Marxism-Leninism. Now, the Trump administration has been cutting off Cuba’s acess to vital materials for its people’s survival–no fuel or oil, widespread blackouts, difficulty in securing the financing and logistics to import basic food, medicine, and agricultural inputs. There are even Cuban fears of a US military invasion. If the American government is allowed to have its way in these acts of aggression, this will mean yet another genocide.
So what’s happening in Palestine, southern Lebanon, and Cuba is adding up to a dangerous set of precedents. Genocide will be the punishment for resistance against capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. Imperialism has always been violent, cruel, and bloodthirsty, but not on such a brazen level. And who do these imperialists ultimately serve? The capitalist class, at the top of whom are the billionaires…which leads me to my next point.
VII: The Rich Fuel Imperialism
In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin explained how the interlacing of bank and industrial capital, creating a financial oligarchy, has financial capital generate profits from the exploitation colonialism inherent in imperialism. Note that these imperialist wars and coups d’état are not just “government stuff.” The bourgeois government merely manages the affairs of the capitalist class. In other words, it’s really the rich who fuel imperialism.
Consider again Musk’s tweet in response to protests over Áñez‘s far-right takeover in Bolivia in 2019: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” He said the quiet part out loud here: it was his coveting of Bolivian lithium (and that of other oligarchs–including those among Western carmakers and investors [including U.S. firms], and various private technology corporations) that motivated at least some of them to aid in the right-wing coup and removal of Evo Morales from power.
Then there’s the real motive behind the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife: not that nonsense about arresting him on bogus charges of drug trafficking, but to steal Venezuelan oil, which is what Trump has been doing (making his claim that it was Venezuela that was stealing from the US pure projection). The US government and the capitalists it serves have been coveting that oil for years, since Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.
On top of all of this, the Big Three asset managers–BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (note the extent of their influence on corporate America)–have substantial investments in the defence sector, including Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. We don’t know exact numbers here, but estimates suggest the Big Three’s combined holdings could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. These defence contractors are profiting from wars like the one in Iran.
While oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet don’t hold significant direct public stock portfolios in legacy defence contractors like Lockheed-Martin or RTX, Musk’s Starlink, for example, has been used to help Ukraine in the US/NATO proxy war on Russia; Starlink has also been used to help Israel. Amazon, under Bezos, secured a massive contract (Project Nimbus) to provide cloud services for the Israeli government and military. Gates’s Microsoft has a notable cybersecurity and technology footprint in Israel. Buffett, a strong supporter of the Israeli economy, is heavily invested in Israeli businesses like Iscar. The fact that the super-wealthy have, in one way or another, been involved in imperialism and Zionism is all the more reason to be opposed to the very existence of billionaires.
VIII: Conclusion
All of the above reasons should demonstrate that there is no sound reason to regard billionaires as anything like the rest of us, or that we should treat them as we would anyone else…except that they should be reduced in wealth to that of the average citizen, at least. Billionaires need to be much more than merely taxed heavily: they should be expropriated–they should not exist as such. Reduce them to the status of multi-millionaires at the very most…and that is already being very generous to them. (I would, incidentally, extend this reduction to Chinese billionaires, too. Fair is fair.)
Another thing worthy of mention–though I won’t go into detail about it here, since I already did so in section III of this article–is the undue influence of the super-rich on the media. You can go to the link for the details.
Of course, forcible expropriation of the super-rich is easier said than done. In fact, with AI surveillance data centres keeping tabs on all of us, militarized police and ICE ready to beat the shit out of us, as well as those scary robot dogs, etc., the achievement of the needed expropriation seems bordering on impossible. Still, we can’t just sit on our hands and wail in despair. Things will continue to get worse if we let them. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Elsewhere, there is hope in the decline of the American empire and de-dollarization. As Rosa Luxemburg once said, “Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.” Let’s find comfort in those thoughts.
Infinite Ocean 