Elon Musk and Wasteful Spending
The move to buy Twitter, which came hot on the heels of his acquiring a 9.2% stake in the business at the beginning of the month, is pretty much what we might expect from Musk. Since becoming the world's richest man while, apparently, sofa surfing up and down the Californian coast, Musk has demonstrated that obscene riches offer no protection against buffoonery. It's actually appropriate that he, more so than the "serious" Jeff Bezos, is the global face of the capitalist class. The wealth that is concentrating in the infinitesimally small number of billionaires is, in conventional terms, more than enough to solve hunger and homelessness, fund Covid vaccinations for the global south, and drive an agricultural revolution in sub-Saharan Africa. I'm sure you can think of many other problems. Why then does Musk, with his $260bn fortune and the rest of his parasite class refuse to do anything about it? Are they especially cruel and hard hearted?
Maybe, maybe not. Marx noted that capitalists are personifications of capital. That doesn't mean they are walking piles of money but are the condensation of an exploitative social relation. Why, for example, is Musk very happy to bang the free speech drum - except for his own workforce? To ask the question is to answer it. But Musk personifies more than his automotive interest and the "classical" extraction of surplus value Tesla operates. A great deal of his interests are tied up in "unconventional" projects, such as the Tesla Semi - an electrically powered truck far less economical than existing diesel-powered machines. There's the Hyperloop, which he conned Las Vegas into letting him build beneath their city. This vision of the future consists of a single lane tunnel one can drive a car around. There's no service tunnel, and the number of the cars on the "track" at any one time are few and far between. A mass transit system with neither the mass nor the transit - a far cry from the 1,124mph pods they're supposed to accommodate.
Other boondoggles include wanting to build a roller coaster in one of his factories, a Bond villain-style lair in an extinct volcano, and a viable space tourism business for his super rich cronies. Amidst the nonsense are projects that might have genuine future use, such as the investments in battery technology, the starlink satellites, and the space infrastructure efforts, even if they're justified in terms of his Mars city fantasies. The point is that, despite some diamonds in the rough, what characterises a lot of Musk's interests is wasteful spending. In his recent sofa-surfer interview he said he didn't live a showy billionaire lifestyle, except for his private plane to get him around. The creation of useless infrastructure beneath Sin City, the carbon emissions from the hundreds of SpaceX launches - including launching a Roadster into orbit around the sun, suggests he has a certain blind spot when it comes to his super wealthy footprint.
But wasteful spending is useful spending from the standpoint of capital. It works as a certain form of trickle down by keeping people in jobs to service their desires. See, for example, the debates around the permanent arms economy during the Cold War and the extent to which this spending settled labour markets and provided multiplier effects for ancillary industries. But more importantly, it's not in capital's interest for it to be invested in stopping world hunger, for example. Doing so would put a floor under global living standards, which in turn would strengthen the hand of labour the world over. That wouldn't appear to make much of a difference to Musk and his high end tech interests, but the flip side of battery and electric vehicle production is resource extraction. Which depends on mining, often by low waged workers in the global south, and workers forced into dangerous and cramped conditions by the threat of economic necessity. At a stroke, the guarantee of safe food, drinking water, and accommodation would up the price of their labour power. Very much not in Musk's interests. But it doesn't have to be direct. Any sort of welfare programme that adds to the collective economic clout of the wage earning class upsets the balance of power between it and capital. It's why people like Musk do nothing to alleviate the lot of the impoverished. Why philanthropists like MacKenzie Scott gives to charity as opposed to organisations building collective capacity and political consciousness, and why here in the UK our billionaire chancellor dispenses loans instead of energy price relief. Wasteful spending buttresses ruling class power. Useful spending undermines it.
Which brings us back to the personality of Musk himself. As the wasteful spender par excellence, his tomfoolery matches his "function". Slapping down tens of billions for a social media platform whose results will never match its valuation typifies his class at this time. With galloping inequality, a raging pandemic, an energy crisis, and the climate change threat demanding resources and answers, the masters of this planet will trash this planet and its people for the most frivolous ends. It's not because they're evil, it's because it's in their interests. And this is going to carry on until we put a stop to them.
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