On the Money

On one hand, you have remarkably negative Trump poll numbers and a groundswell movement for change. On the other hand, you’ve got Elon Musk. And that other hand has a deep pocket. The Philly Inquirer with an obvious and clearly stated look at the bigger meaning of this election. The people vs. Elon Musk. “This is a culmination of the pernicious combination of the country’s increasingly extreme concentration of wealth and a half-century of U.S. Supreme Court rulings unleashing those riches on our politics. These twin troubles perpetuate each other: The superrich spend more and more to elect a government that, in turn, does more and more to make them richer. And the cycle repeats.” (Modern American politics comes down to hoping that your billionaires spend more than their billionaires.)

+ Of course, financial power is only one of Musk’s levers of influence. Simon Shuster and Isaac Stanley-Becker in The Atlantic (Gift Article): How Elon Musk Turned on Ukraine. “In a series of posts on X over the weekend, he admitted to causing last week’s outages, and he lashed out at those who call for greater military aid to Ukraine. ‘I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict,’ Musk wrote. ‘May you burn in hell.'” (With Musk as arguably the most powerful person in the world, we just might.)