Elon Rearden?

Robber barons. Kleptocrats. Plutocrats. Oligarchs.

These and similar terms are used, often loosely and somewhat inaccurately, to describe very wealthy people in our society. Most of whom are presumed to use their wealth for selfish and society-harming purposes.

The terms used to be reserved for a relative few who actually exhibited such behaviors, but these days, with the war on billionaires in full swing, the presumptions of ill intent and bad behavior have become the default over on the Left toward anyone who has amassed enough wealth to get noticed.

Take note, especially, of the new phrase “tech baron.” As Dennis the anarcho-syndicalist retorted when King Arthur called him a “bloody peasant,” “oh, what a giveaway.”

This isn’t a newfangled attitude. The wealthy have always been viewed with suspicion. Yes, indeed, a good number have engaged in unscrupulous behaviors on their way up, and some of them used their wealth for unscrupulous ends after they got to the top.

Some, but not all. Not every millionaire or centi-millionaire or billionaire is a scumbag.

Unfortunately, it’s understandable that we might think so.

I do not refer to the natural human tendency toward envy. I’ve covered that many times on the blog. Today, I refer to the prevalence of rich-guy-as-villain in fiction, both conventional and speculative. While there are books that follow in the vein of Atlas Shrugged that offer us a billionaire-as-freedom-loving-hero, the prevailing trope is that the rich guy is the bad guy bending society to his selfish (and negative-sum) ends, often in nefarious fashion.

Simply put, we have been conditioned to seeing the billionaire cast as the villain. Especially when he is not bending the knee to the socialistic impulses of the Best-and-Brightest who demand he cede his wealth to them or their proxies so they can use it to reshape society as they deem best. That such has never actually worked in history doesn’t matter. A billionaire is a Bad Person until he pays penance, no matter that the products that made him a billionaire brought enormous benefit to you, me, and the rest of the members of our society - and the world.

I bring this up because I caught an interesting idea while surfing social media between sets at the gym. Someone, and I apologize to that person for not saving his or her name, pointed out that Musk’s purchase of Twitter may be an even bigger blow for liberty than we imagine.

As I type this, fourteen first-world nations (their governments, more accurately) are working double-time to coerce various social media platforms to prevent minors from accessing them. This “for the children!” censorship campaign not only removes authority from parents, it establishes mechanisms by which governments can more broadly censor the modern “public square” that is the Internet.

That fourteen nations are enacting remarkably similar laws at virtually the same time raises some rather sinister questions about who their leaders are actually serving and listening to. The voters? Or each other?

A couple years ago, JD Vance scolded the leaders of Old Europe about their illiberal, anti-free-speech proclivities. They sniffed, disdainfully, as Europeans always do when uppity Americans dare forget their proper place in the social pecking order. Vance was absolutely right, of course. We need no more proof than the 12,000 arrests that occur in the UK each year for mean tweets and other forms of hurt feelings.

We, of course, have more proof. German politicians must have looked across the Channel and said to themselves “what a great idea!”

It may very well be that this latest effort to impose controls on social media platforms can be back-traced, domino-style, by Musk taking the Left’s favorite playtoy - Twitter - away from them. The de-facto monopoly that the Left had for years was suddenly busted, and they were Not Amused. Their usual disdain for monopolies is, of course, nowhere to be found when the monopoly is theirs (see: education, mainstream media and entertainment, corporate culture, the arts), and Twitter was no exception.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Left held reign-of-terror power over just about everyone who wanted to work and live in “modern times.” If you wanted an on-line presence, if you wanted to have a career that was more than a wage job for a small, middle-of-nowhere employer, if you wanted to have a 21st century life, you had to maintain some awareness of the cancel mob. A mob that made its home on Twitter. Make a “wrong” comment on social media, get recorded saying a “wrong” thing anywhere, and if a social justice warrior (SJW) decided to put you in the crosshairs, your life could be ruined.

Google suggests that Cancel Culture peaked in 2020. That sounds about right. A few “uncancellables,” such as J. K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle, stood up for free speech around then. While their conspicuous integrity was vital, the real wrecking ball was Musk’s 2022 Twitter acquisition. The revelations of censorship, collusion with the government, and other unscrupulousnesses further sapped the power of the SJWs and knocked the woke industry on its heels. Trump’s 2024 victory was the final nail in that coffin.

You may have noticed that the Left isn’t making the same noises it used to about oppression and wokeness and the alphabet soup of identity groups. Sure, some of it is still there, but it’s on the same back burner as the climate crisis. Both have gone stale, and are no longer useful tools in their perpetual quest for power.

Now, the villains are billionaires themselves. Or, at least the ones that aren’t on their team. I haven’t heard a peep of condemnation of George Soros, who has been spending lavishly for decades to tip the political scales. Or Michael Bloomberg or Tom Steyer or Reid Hoffman or Melinda Gates, who all spend big in favor of Team Blue.

I titled this piece with a nod to Ayn Rand’s Hank Rearden, one of the heroes of Atlas Shrugged. While I do not seek to beatify Elon Musk, or suggest he lacks flaws, I will forever consider him a hero for the audacious move of grossly overpaying for Twitter. In doing so, he single-handedly vanquished a deeply disturbing period in modern American history, and gave liberty lovers a much, much needed victory in a fight against a dangerous, insidious, and relentless enemy.

Now, he is a trillionaire, with ambitions to match. He is a trillionaire because a great big mess of people with money decided to buy shares of the company, SpaceX, he offered. In doing so, they established a price for all the shares of that company, including the 46% that Musk owns.

This doesn’t mean he has a trillion dollars in the bank, no matter what the memes flying all over the internet suggest. It also doesn’t mean that the likes of Elizabeth Warren can simply dip their ladles into his pool of wealth without repercussion or harm.

A quick aside: As I just saw asked on the Internet, the government has spent $80T in the years Warren has been a Senator. Why should we believe that taxing Musk’s wealth will be the thing that finally brings about her dreamt-of utopian state?

The SpaceX IPO raised $85B. Prior to the IPO, the company had $16B in cash and $29B in long-term debt. Socialists’ fantasies about liquidating and redistributing Musk’s wealth are pure ignorance.

If just anyone could have done what Musk did, investors would not have thrown tens of billions at his company. People who claim otherwise aren’t exactly burying us with real-world examples to back such assertions.

The real villains are the politicians who point the finger of blame at the wealthy in the private sector while they continue to spend more of our money, accrue more power to themselves, erode more of our rights, and make our lives ever-more difficult. While I repeat that Musk is a real, flawed, person rather than an archetype, deserving of his share of criticisms, if we are to look for present-day villains - real world Wesley Mouch types - we should look in the marble halls of Washington, DC and the other seats of government power rather than at innovators and economy-growers.