Accountability For Kleptocrats
On Sunday, Kara Swisher wrote that Elon Musk effectively gained control of the U.S. government for the price of getting Trump back into power, obviously the biggest participation in the takeover by the tech elite. “For tech leaders at this moment, the digital world they rule has become not enough. Leaders, in fact, is the wrong word to use now. Titans is more like it, as many have cozied up to Trump in order to dominate this world as we enter the next Cambrian explosion in technology, with the development of advanced AI.
She blames, in part, “the wholesale capture of our current information systems by tech moguls, and their willful carelessness and sometimes-filthy-thumb-on-scale malevolence in managing it” for the fact that a small plurality of voters put Trump back in office. “When combined with a lack of empathy and enormous financial self-interest…it is basically a familiar trope: greed (of the few) over need (of the many)… It is these characters who want to reign like kings not just over tech, but over everything everywhere, and all at once. To update the old Facebook maxim of ‘Move fast and break things’: Move fast and crush everyone. This was bad enough as a business axiom, but when it’s applied to the entire apparatus of our democracy, it’s terrifying.”
She pointed especially to Bezos, Zuckerberg and, of course, Musk as exemplars for whom “the acquisition of wealth, the hoarding of power, and endless self-aggrandizement have become the goal... After years of mocking Trump, Musk changed drastically during COVID and became ever more manic and cruel, as he swung hard right down conspiracy highway… Under a Biden administration— and then, after he stepped down as nominee, a Harris administration— Musk would have received the usual scrutiny of his businesses. He must have known that under Trump, if he ponied up time and money, and, most especially, if he deployed Twitter to power Trump’s propaganda machine, an unfettered billionaire’s paradise awaited him. Soon enough, besides funding a PAC and taking over Trump’s ground game in swing states, Musk was showing off his stomach while bizarrely jumping up and down on a variety of stages across the nation… As inane as he looked, it was the best investment of time and money of Musk’s life, even if it meant cosplaying as a beta to Trump’s alpha. It’s paid off: His net worth has nearly doubled after Trump’s victory— it sits at $348 billion today— with billions more possible as he remakes the government in his image. Soon after Trump’s victory, the president announced the formation of the jokingly titled Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE to be run by Musk. Initially, a number of people theorized that this unelected commission was a clever way for Trump to sideline the billionaire who had helped to take him over the line to victory… [But T]ens of thousands of Americans in government roles have already been fired by Elon’s tech toadies. Musk has gotten rid of regulators who just happen to oversee his businesses, in agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and USAID. While Trump has recently made noises about reining in Musk’s power, he also said that if Cabinet members don’t shrink their own agencies, ‘Elon will do the cutting.’ And, anyway, Musk has a long track record of doing whatever he wants.”
What is happening is shocking, in a way. But if anyone is not surprised, it’s tech reporters who saw, over the past decade, what these people were becoming. Musk’s behavior is emblematic of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms. They denigrate media, science, activism and culture, and spend their time bellyaching about the “woke-mind virus” and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Those programs, despite their occasional annoyances, were directionally correct. [T]he opposite of woke is asleep; the opposite of DEI is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. That’s just the way an increasing number of techies want it and, with Trump and Musk at the wheel, the goal toward which they are now reengineering our country.
Before the stakes got even higher, there was a warning about what was happening as AI expanded. With trillions of dollars there for the taking, investments are being made by the same small coterie of companies and people that now controls the entire federal government. So are the important decisions about safety and more, which should be made by an independent and fair government and its citizens.
There are no laws regulating almost any of it, though the Biden administration gave it a shrugging try for a little bit. A bummer, right? But not unexpected if you have been paying even the slightest amount of attention.
“The ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy,” wrote philosopher Paul Virilio. “This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is, then, imperative to develop a democratic technological culture.” This seems vanishingly unlikely today.
… And there they are, thus, everywhere we look, running everything, a fate that Paul Virilio predicted in a 1994 interview with the now-defunct technology journal CTHEORY, when he worried that “virtuality will destroy reality.” That is precisely what is happening 30 years later, although it is much worse than I think we are prepared to acknowledge, even now as Musk presides over Oval Office press conferences and White House Cabinet meetings as Trump’s enforcer and sees himself as a kind of global superhero.
I wouldn’t count on Bannon to save us from this Batman villain, though Tyler Pager and Maggie Haberman poked around in that arena over the weekend. “Bannon,” they wrote, “who has characterized Musk as an interloper, a ‘parasitic illegal immigrant’ and a ‘truly evil person,’ suggested the world’s richest man was weighing Trump down. ‘I don’t want to say an anchor or lodestone,’ Bannon said on Friday of Musk on his show War Room, which is watched closely by a number of Trump allies, as well as the president himself. “‘It’s not that yet, but it’s trending— that is starting to affect everybody.’ The longstanding animus between Bannon and Musk encapsulates a key tension at the heart of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. It pits those like Bannon, who want Trump to carry out a more fully populist agenda, against ultrawealthy interests, epitomized by Musk, who occupy key positions in the president’s orbit.”
Bannon is talking about running for president (of the United Sttes) in 2028. Musk, having been born in Africa, can’t, something Trump has pointedly mentioned a number of times.
History shows that when economic inequality and oppression reach extreme levels, revolutions tend to bring violent reckonings. Antoine Lavoisier, a kind of Musk-like figure of the Ancien Régime was guillotined in 1794. A Russian version of Musk, Nikolay Vtorov, was assassinated during the Bolshevik purge of the Russian elite. Liu Wencai, a famously ruthless landlord and businessman, was killed in 1949 when Mao’s forces redistributed land. Habib Elghanian was executed by firing squad as part of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. These men were, more or less, the Elon Musk of their day and their exploitation of the masses was met with brutal retribution.
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) stands as a stark reminder that when the rich and powerful push exploitation to its limits, retribution can be swift and unforgiving. Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue and the most profitable colony in the French empire, thrived on the brutal oppression of enslaved Africans, who made up 90% of the population. Forced to endure backbreaking labor, rampant torture and a system so cruel that it was often cheaper to import new slaves than to allow them to survive and reproduce, the enslaved people eventually reached a breaking point. When they rose up, led by Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, they did not simply demand reform— they burned plantations, executed their masters, and dismantled the entire colonial economy that had thrived on their suffering. Many white landowners and their families were killed in retaliatory massacres. Entire communities of colonists were wiped out. The violence of their retribution was not an unprovoked act of savagery but the inevitable response to a system that had dehumanized them for generations. Funny how it isn’t taught in schools much.
Figures like Musk, who amass obscene wealth while treating workers as disposable, would do well to study this history. For years, Musk has fought labor unions, ignored safety concerns, and subjected employees to grueling conditions— all while portraying himself as a visionary untouchable by the consequences of his actions. But history teaches us that no one is untouchable. Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ 1804 purge of the French ruling class in Haiti was a final act of justice against those who believed their power would last forever. Today’s billionaire class may believe they are insulated from accountability, but when the masses reach their breaking point, their reckoning— like that of the French planters in Saint-Domingue— could be total and inescapable.
Haiti’s Revolution, which should be celebrated as a foundational moment for human rights and democracy, is almost entirely glossed over in history courses. And Haiti is just dismissed as a “failed state” today— without acknowledging the centuries of economic sabotage and foreign intervention that made that failure almost inevitable. It’s no wonder this history gets buried. If more people studied the Haitian Revolution, which defeated France, Spain and Britain on the battlefield, they might start asking why modern elites fear radical change just as much as the old ones did.
