Elon Musk's Rise to Trillionaire Status Amidst Controversy

Elon Musk’s ascent to becoming one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, while contributing to the deterioration of civil society, is a defining characteristic of our flawed century.

Images emerging from Belfast, a city in Northern Ireland infamous for its history of ethnic violence known as 'the Troubles,' were nothing short of horrific. The scenes of cars and homes ablaze, along with hordes of masked young men roaming the city streets, brought back painful memories for long-time residents.

A 71-year-old resident, Paul Sharkey, expressed his shock to the New York Times after witnessing a flaming van crash near his home on the outskirts of Belfast. 'I lost my teenage years to the Troubles,' he said. 'I thought moving out here I had gotten away from them — from the bombs and bullets, all the rest of it...'

Fortunately, no fatalities were reported during the couple of nights of riots that targeted Belfast’s Black and brown immigrant communities following the stabbing of a white man by a Sudanese migrant. However, the city was gripped by terror as volunteers rushed to rescue families from burning homes, immigrant addresses were posted online, and workers were afraid to go to work after a nurse was attacked.

What was equally appalling about this anti-immigrant pogrom in Belfast was the fact that its biggest cheerleader was not some street thug in a balaclava, but the richest person in the history of the planet, urging the rioters on from a posh hideaway on the other side of the Atlantic.

Tuesday morning, as news of the stabbing attack spread across the United Kingdom, Elon Musk took to X to amplify a post by UK far-right extremist leader Tommy Robinson, calling for white people to 'hit the streets' that night and protest what Robinson called 'yet another invader attack on our people.'

Musk’s tweet was hardly an isolated incident. In a flurry of X posts attacking immigration, he told his 240 million followers that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer 'hates white people' while sharing an image of the Black suspect, which simply said that 'millions must go.' When his diatribes started provoking a backlash, he wrote: 'Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their hometown is what’s making people angry, not social media!'

The nonprofit tech watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk’s posts about Belfast and racial politics in the U.K. were viewed an astonishing 64 million times. The center noted that the amplified posts from Robinson — banned from the pre-Musk Twitter for hate speech, but restored in 2023 — drew responses calling for lynching and other forms of violence.

It’s kind of bizarre that this then-billionaire, not too busy to hate, found the time for this, in a week where he had one job: to ensure the long-awaited stock offering of one of his major business ventures, SpaceX, launched on Friday without blowing up like some of its rockets.

Unfortunately for the star-crossed Musk, investors’ shock and revulsion over the entrepreneur’s vile posts caused ...

...no significant impact on his wealth, as Wall Street, from the biggest investment banks to starstruck small-time day traders, could not wait to throw their cash at SpaceX and its founder. They acted as if Musk the anti-immigrant hatemonger and Musk the tech visionary were two different human beings.

By the end of a tumultuous week, the tulip-mania demand for SpaceX stock, with the market valuing the money-losing company at a gobsmacking $2.1 trillion, made the already world’s richest person wealthier in a way that defies comprehension. The man who wanted to burn everything down on Tuesday became the planet’s first trillionaire on Friday.

The problem is which Elon Musk story to tell. Each narrative is more shocking than the next.

The saga that I’ve started to recount here, about a man whose wealth is now greater than the yearly gross domestic product of all but the 21 richest nations, who uses that power to urge poor white people to firebomb and assault their Black and brown neighbors, isn’t even the worst thing that Musk has done. Not by a longshot.

Musk and his destructive abuse of his massive X platform has given him the power to manipulate the struggling masses into attacking each other — instead of the small circle of people hoarding the world’s wealth, led by Musk himself.

It’s past time to look inside ourselves and ask one more question: Now that Musk has shown us who he really is, why do we continue to support him? Why do millions of investors pay so much for the magic beans of Tesla and now SpaceX to endorse the lead spreader of racist ideology — putting aside the fact his stock bubble will burst any day now?

Why do so many leading politicians across the United States and the U.K. — liberals as well as conservatives — and supposedly socially conscious corporations, among others, still use X to convey information, when its owner uses it to promote views that really aren’t any different from David Duke or the Ku Klux Klan?

That’s also a question for myself. In November 2024, when Trump was reelected with Musk’s support, I moved about 98% of my social-media posting over to Bluesky. But I didn’t close my X account, which still had 80,000 followers, because I wanted to keep posting my columns there so a few more folks might read them.

Today, I will make one last post on X — a link to this column, in the vain hope that the platform’s proprietor might see it, and that other folks will join me in quitting. Tonight, sometime before I sit down to watch Les Éléphants stomp Ecuador, I will delete my account for good.

We’ve all helped to create this monster, and we all can do our small part to slay the dragon. There are hopeful signs, led by the thousands who came out this weekend in Belfast and elsewhere in the U.K. to protest Musk-fueled hate. If we don’t act quickly and nonviolently to undo the massive policy failure of the world’s first trillionaire, the raging fires of Belfast are going to look like child’s play.