Friends,
Elon Musk (worth $271 billion) and Jeff Bezos (worth $262 billion) — the richest and second-richest people on the planet — are now showing America why it’s dangerous to have great wealth concentrated in so few hands.
In August 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million. On Friday, just as the Post was preparing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Bezos stopped the paper from doing so.
Partly as a result, the Post has already lost 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its subscriber base.
In October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billon, turned it into X, and became its biggest user, with 202 million followers.
Musk has endorsed Trump — and weaponized the platform into a supporter of Trump, smeared Harris, and amplified rumors and conspiracy theories.
Independent analysts such as Edison Research said in March that X’s usage in the United States dropped 30 percent since last year. Fidelity this month estimated that X’s value has plunged by about 80 percent since Musk’s takeover.
Why have these two oligarchs been willing to take actions that cause so many of their customers to jump ship? What’s the connection between Bezos’s preventing the Post from endorsing Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump?
Here’s a hint:
Just hours after Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Harris, executives of Blue Origin, Bezos’s private rocket company, met with Trump in Austin.
Although Blue Origin is running far behind Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos is the most likely serious challenger to Musk’s dominance in space because of his personal fortune and his billions of dollars in government contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense.
For years, Bezos has focused on beating Musk for the multibillion-dollar contracts to launch payloads and rockets. “Elon’s real superpower is getting government money,” Bezos said in 2016, according to the Post. “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”
Musk’s company appears so far ahead in the competition that it won a contract to rescue astronauts stuck at the International Space Station.
But that could change. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been looking to unload their own joint-venture rocket company, United Launch Alliance (ULA), which has billions of dollars in government contracts, extensive infrastructure, and an experienced team.
Bezos’s Blue Origin is reportedly the favorite to take over ULA. Even the head of the U.S. Space Force’s purchases seems to be pushing for the two rocket companies to merge, telling an industry audience that “they need to scale” in order to meet an aggressive launch schedule.
ULA is still a major force in the space industry, competing for dozens of launches over the next four years, which can bring in billions more revenue. Combining with Blue Origin would make a lot of sense. The Wall Street Journal reports that Blue Origin has already submitted a bid to buy ULA.
If that’s the goal, Bezos’s biggest obstacle would be Trump, should Trump get back in the White House.
Trump has been out to get Bezos since 2017, when Trump first started blaming Bezos for poor coverage in The Washington Post — a grievance that has hurt Blue Origin.
In April 2019, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff alerted Blue Origin officials to Bezos’s poor reputation in the White House, telling them that they have a “Washington Post problem.”
Trump also said he wanted to “screw Amazon” out of a $10 billion deal to provide cloud computing to the Pentagon, according to a memoir by his Defense Secretary James Mattis. (It’s since been reported that Oracle, led by Larry Ellison — Trump donor, Musk mentor, and Oracle founder, who ranks just behind Musk and Bezos as the third-richest person in America with an estimated $211.2 billion in wealth — had sought to sabotage the deal.)
So Bezos has been courting Trump. After Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet during an attempted assassination at a July campaign rally, prompting a Musk endorsement of the former president, Bezos called Trump to say how impressed he was that the candidate had raised his fist after coming under fire, according to a person familiar with that conversation.
Soon after Trump formally secured the Republican nomination, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy phoned Trump, introducing himself and outlining the company’s plans for the future. The call concluded with Trump suggesting that the company cut a large check for his presidential efforts, according to two people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount the private discussion. Trump told Jassy that he was going to win the election and that Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.
In this sense, then, both Bezos’s refusal to allow The Washington Post to endorse Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump can be seen as moves in a proxy war for dominance in government contracting of spaceflight, where the ultimate prize will be hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars — thereby distending the fortunes of either Bezos or Musk.
But the casualty in this war is American democracy, for which neither Bezos nor Musk apparently has a scintilla of concern.
America is now in its second Gilded Age, in which a handful of supremely wealthy men are determining the nation’s future. We must not let them. Bezos should never have been able to purchase The Washington Post in the first place; his conflicting business interests should have prevented it.
Nor should Musk have been able to buy Twitter. Antitrust laws should have been used to break Twitter up, or the platform should be deemed a public utility.
Both Bezos and Musk are poster boys for the importance of a wealth tax, which must be enacted to prevent the grotesque accumulations of wealth that have allowed them to wield such extraordinary power.
When the smoke clears from this rancorous presidential campaign and Kamala Harris is president, she must rescue democracy from these and other oligarchs.
As the eminent jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said near the end of America’s first Gilded Age, “America has a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.”
Trump: Promises vs. Reality
• Promised to cut the deficit but added $8 trillion to it.
• Promised to build a wall; completed only 458 miles out of 2,000, mostly repairs.
• Promised Mexico would pay for the wall; they didn’t.
• Promised a new healthcare plan; it never existed.
• Promised a middle-class tax cut; primarily cut taxes for the rich, leaving the middle class to bear the burden.
• Promised not to play golf; made 250 visits to his own golf clubs, costing taxpayers $150 million.
• Promised to increase economic growth by 4%; didn’t achieve it, President Biden did.
• Promised an infrastructure plan; had none, President Biden signed a massive one.
• Promised to hire “the best people”; fired 3/4 of them, then labeled them the worst.
• Promised to reduce prescription drug prices; didn’t happen, President Biden did.
• Promised to win the trade war with China; it cost about a quarter million jobs.
• Promised corporate tax cuts would benefit workers; corporations used the money to buy back stocks instead.
• Promised to revive the coal industry; more coal jobs were lost during his presidency
• Promise Michigan one single auto plant will not close, 5 production plants closed in 2018.
• Promise he would help create jobs in the auto industry, 3500 jobs lost in 2018.
*Promised to take us out of Afghanistan, but instead Trump pulled out 17,000 troops and left a shell of 3,000 troops to protect everybody he left behind.
He didn’t care about how many Americans could die.
He also made a deal with the Taliban and released 5,000 Isis terrorist out of prison.
He did it on purpose to leave Biden a mess in Afghanistan to clean up.
There is only one question before us: Would you rather have a Fascist Dementia Addled Supreme Narcissistic Moron whose Father Also Had Dementia running this country or the Daughter of Two University Professors?
From Robert Reich’s lips to Kamala Harris’ and her AG’s ears! Thanks Robert for a very well written, easy to understand explanation of the our current “gilded age” and what needs to be done to end it!