Client journalists defend Musk becoming a trillionaire

Elon Musk — the seig-heiling owner of X — has become the world’s first trillionaire. As we’ll explain, he’s achieved this by leveraging his power, influence and shamelessness to prove that capitalism is every bit as rotten as we said it is.

However, if you ask one of the many thoughtless establishment journalists out there how he became so wealthy, they’ll tell you ‘Elon gets lots of money because he makes rockets good‘.

Amid all the predictable seething jealousy and bitter resentment to this news, I’d like to congratulate @elonmusk on an astounding achievement. He’s got there by being the most driven, creative, hard-working and ambitious business genius in history. Salut, Elon! 👏👏 pic.twitter.com/MmrygoJfwc

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) June 13, 2026

In turn, we’d like to congratulate Piers Morgan for fitting Musk’s entire boot in his mouth.

He got here by being the most hard-working suck-up in the entire Western media.

Salut, Piers! 👏👏

Musk games the market

First, we should explain how Elon Musk became a trillionaire.

Musk’s wealth just exploded because he’s taken SpaceX from a private company to a public one. By SpaceX, we mean the three companies that make up SpaceX, which are:

• SpaceX: The intergalactic company famous for its exploding rockets (what they call “rapid unscheduled disassemblies“)
• StarLink: The satellite internet company
• Grok AI: The AI model which is mostly localised to X (and which notoriously spent several weeks producing revenge porn and child sexual abuse material before government’s demanded Musk stop it)

Of the three companies:

• SpaceX is not profitable.
• StarLink is profitable.
• Grok AI is really not profitable.

SpaceX could be profitable in the future, as long as we keep finding new reasons to send thousands of rockets into space. StarLink could remain profitable, but the market for satellite internet is limited to customers who:

• Can’t access broadband
• Can pay for fancy satellite internet

Grok AI will probably never be profitable. OpenAI and Anthropic are both doing better than Grok, and it looks like they have no realistic path towards profitability either. The problem is AI costs so much to run that when you charge companies an honest price (instead of subsidising the cost with billionaire investor money) they abandon the product.

NEW: Uber is reportedly capping employee use of AI vibe-coding tools at $1,500 per month after blowing through its AI budget.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) June 2, 2026

Musk and his company losses

Right, so SpaceX is not what you’d call a profitable company. In fact, it made a $4.9 billion loss last year. But despite this, when it went public, it achieved a valuation of $2 trillion.

This is the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) of all time. On paper, it means SpaceX is more valuable than most companies which actually make money. If you’re confused that isn’t because you’re not getting it; it’s because it doesn’t make sense. It also gets worse.

To be fair to Musk, he does have a plan to make his company profitable, and that plan is data centres in space. The problem is that these data centres would almost certainly be more expensive than the terrestrial ones. They may also be physically impossible to build at scale.

Think physics before you believe in the SpaceX lies. Each data center averages 10 million pounds of servers, imagine halling multiple data centers into space.
Data centers use millions of gallons of water for cooling. Vacuum of space is terrible for cooling. https://t.co/8Hy3shaby1 pic.twitter.com/tsQQAjvkDk

— MrsDoubtFire🇺🇲 (@MrsDoubtFireSF) June 12, 2026

Who could have guessed it would be less cost-effective to build something in space? Good lord.

And this isn’t the first time Musk has promised the impossible. There’s a site that tracks his broken promises called elonmusk.today. Examples include:

• 1,645 days since Elon Musk said he would take carbon out of the air and use it for rocket fuel
• 1,939 days since Elon Musk promised Starlink customers their speed would double by the end of 2021
• 2,166 days since Elon Musk said that people who get brain surgery from him could pay for it with augmented brain powers
• 2,327 days since Elon Musk advised consumers that Teslas can safely function as a boat for short periods of time
• 2,611 days since Elon Musk said there will be a million fully autonomous Tesla robotaxis in a year
• 2,714 days since Elon Musk said the new Roadster will use rocket technology that will allow it to fly
• 2,824 days since Elon Musk said SpaceX would probably build a base on Mars by 2028

Why does Musk make such wild claims? Almost certainly because doing so draws attention away from the fact that his companies have been mostly unprofitable, and because the pie-in-the-sky promises cause the value of his companies to rise.

How does this keep happening?

As you can see, it’s both quantifiable and widely understood that Musk’s companies are valued way above their actual — you know — value.

So why do investors keep falling for it?

Simply incredible. Elon has mastered the art of creating valuable companies that don’t actually make money. https://t.co/HYJrHduvoJ

— D (@_Unknown_D_) June 12, 2026

There are two things to bear in mind: the first is why wouldn’t they keep falling for it? In the short term, their stocks become more valuable. In the long term, well, nobody is thinking about the long term.

The other thing to be aware of is that a lot of this stuff is now algorithmic.

For example, the Chosun Daily reported:

Algorithmic trading programs that use automated pre-set trading instructions to execute orders have recently been blamed for the sharp fluctuations in global stock markets. While algorithmic trading programs offer the advantage of buying and selling assets without human intervention, they also have the drawback of triggering massive sell-offs whenever the set conditions are met, increasing market volatility.

This works in the opposite direction too. What this means is that when Musk promises the world’s first self-driving flying car, the algorithms auto-buy Tesla stock. As Chosun Daily added:

Investment bank Goldman Sachs estimated that algorithmic trading accounted for about 60% to 70% of all trades in the U.S. in 2016. Experts believe this figure has now risen to 70% to 80%.

We may not live in the Matrix, but we definitely live in a matrix.

Client media

Now that we’ve explained what the establishment media is mostly ignoring, we can gawp at some of the wretched client journalists who are defending Musk’s ‘success’.

Andrew Neil led the charge on this front, asking “What difference does it make?” if one man’s wealth is higher than the GDP of most countries.

This is one case where the public can see with their own eyes that this shit sucks. They don’t have to be told the Nazi zillionaire is bad for them and for the species, and no amount of behaving like a cunt on the internet is going to change that. pic.twitter.com/DGBXf48zpF

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) June 13, 2026

Imagine the worst person you know, and then imagine that they had more money to play around with than Israel spends in a year. Obviously, this would not end well.

And we’ve  seen what Musk uses his wealth to achieve.

The influence campaign didn’t stop there either, as the Canary reported, and many pointed out:

With his inordinate wealth he is bolstering the far right in my country – who support austerity politics, tax cuts for the wealthy, oppose public investment, brexit and aims to deport people which will cause major disturbances to our public services.

This directly affects my… https://t.co/PCL9l9yP0k

— JimmyTheGiant (@jimthegiant) June 12, 2026

He used his wealth to buy a whole ass social media platform to start a race war https://t.co/14l8nI5MDI

— NJ (@NoJusticeMTG) June 12, 2026

Musk also uses X to boost his ideological bedfellows (which include Nazis).

It is however the only social media that pays politicians and journalists based on whether they agree with his reactionary views, not whether people like their content. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Unaccounted. https://t.co/o7AsW8gCTV

— Alonso Gurmendi (@Alonso_GD) June 13, 2026

Human haemorrhoid, Neil, also did the meme:

Of course Andrew is now doing the meme 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/Ew4ulxgdJH

— NFT Hibou 🇵🇸 (@NFT_Hibou) June 13, 2026

Columnist and ex-prime minister, Boris Johnson, got in on the action too.

'Ego-driven lust' drives capitalism says Boris Johnson, who knows zilch about business, never understood it as a journalist, as a Mayor or as PM. He is simply wrong – in media ego sometimes does come first; BUT in business school, in boardrooms, in rooms where it happens, ego is… pic.twitter.com/oINZ7VwCGr

— David Yelland (@davidyelland) June 13, 2026

This is fine, if you’re idea of success is a series of obscenely overvalued companies that rely on government handouts while failing to deliver on most of their promises.

It’s not for nothing that Chinese electric vehicles are now more advanced and cheaper than Teslas. Those companies also benefit from state money, but said money is directed into research and development — not into inflating the ego of the world’s most insecure nerd.

Julia Hartley-Brewer had this to say:

Why don't you set up a business making rockets, electric cars and AI, Lewis? It's obviously so easy to do, anyone can do it. 🤷🏻‍♀️ https://t.co/7XRtcHT5lB

— Julia Hartley-Brewer (@JuliaHB1) June 12, 2026

The problem? Musk has never designed or built any of his products. He just profited from those who did.

This literally shows workers doing all the work lol https://t.co/VsnzAA9ZmK

— polen (@polen_ball) June 14, 2026

We also don’t have to go back that far to see an example of space travel being pursued for the sake of exploration over ego.

“Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built.”

Hey Bill, who got man to the moon? Was it the government or the private sector? https://t.co/mrBYaXZ4vC

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) June 13, 2026

Okay, so the space race did happen to boost America’s ego, but you get the point.

Perhaps the worst defence was this:

Elon literally owns this site, so every time he uses it, with his 240m followers, he is working. https://t.co/I2qelyZ8L7

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) June 13, 2026

The great IPO swindle

There’s another way Musk has used his great wealth to disadvantage the broader public that we’ve not covered yet.

SpaceX isn’t just being listed on various stock exchanges; it’s being fast-tracked. What this means is that various stock-buying schemes like 401(k) retirement plans will automatically buy SpaceX stock.

Usually, a company has to be publicly available for a year to demonstrate its value is legitimate. SpaceX, however, will wait a mere five days in some instances.

SHOCKER: S&P 500 will NOT fast track SpaceX. So it will take AT LEAST a year, probably more. This is wild considering every other big boy index is 5-15 days. This could create significant return dispersion bt 'passive' indexes. Choose wisely. https://t.co/EG7R5IfX0u

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) June 4, 2026

In other words, Musk has used his influence to ensure as many ordinary people as possible buy shares in his unprofitable business. If the business remains unprofitable, these same ordinary people who will lose out.

Top to bottom misery

The other thing to note about Musk having so much money is that it doesn’t even make him happy.

Hasan Piker noted:

Elon Musk is a fucking failure and yet in spite of his failures, because he happened to be at the right place at the right time, he has failed upwards with his endless wealth. He’s a horrible person, an unbelievably insecure person, and yet he’s the richest person on the planet. We know he doesn’t fucking work hard because he Tweets all the goddamn time.

We live in a society that is based on wealth accumulation, and yet the man who’s accumulated more than anyone is the most miserable person on the planet.

Maybe it’s time to rethink this capitalism malarkey?

Featured image via Spencer Platt/ Hoda Davaine / Hollie Adams/ Getty Images