Elon Musk gets $150 billion payday

Given the plethora of information now available to anyone taking a little effort, and possessed of the capacity to join the dots and reflect on that information, it is unacceptably naive – yet for reasons beyond my scope here dismally common – to think of Western states as democracies, imperfections notwithstanding. But to qualify as such, wouldn’t policy have to be accountable to public opinion rather than corporate lobbyists? To public opinion, moreover, which was not powerfully shaped, via lies both of omission and commission, by media ¹ owned – or, through the ‘market discipline’ of advertising and rich sponsor dependency, tamed – by deeply anti-democratic interests.

In short, by a ruling class.

As Noam Chomsky put it:

Media are large corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Now the question is: what pictures of the world would a rational person expect from this?

To which I added, in a post five years ago, that:

I can think of no more cogent argument for insisting that Western democracy is ninety-five percent bogus than that (a) democracy implies consent, (b) consent is meaningless if not informed, and (c) informed consent implies truly independent media. That last we do not have when they are “large corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations”.  ²

Nor would democracies in any meaningful sense of the word allow creditor elites to grow so powerful that no party aspiring to govern dare defy them. Here’s Chris Hedges. The context is the USA but his words need only minor adjustment to accurately describe the West at large:

Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.

Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

Let’s stop pretending America is a functioning democracy (lightly edited)

Or to put it in just fifty-five seconds of comedy gold:

Bear these realities – banished as they may be from mainstream discourse and polite society – in mind as we turn to a Socialist Equality Party whose WSWS website tells the story of how a Delaware court awarded on Friday a bumper payday for the world’s wealthiest man, a delightful chap of modest demeanour well on his way to distinction as history’s first trillionaire.

As ever with WSWS, the obligatory final paragraph is for the birds, ³ but I ask – as I so often do of late – that we don’t throw baby out with bathwater. This is what honest journalism looks like.

Musk’s wealth surges to $750 billion after court grants him $150 billion payday

On Friday, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that Tesla CEO Elon Musk should keep a 2018 pay package valued at $150 billion despite deliberately misleading shareholders and violating securities laws in obtaining it.

The ruling sent Musk’s wealth surging to $749 billion, putting him three-quarters of the way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. According to an estimate by Forbes, Musk’s net worth stood at $195 billion at the start of 2024, meaning that he has appropriated half a trillion dollars in just two years—a figure larger than the GDP of Vietnam, the Philippines or Malaysia.

The ruling marks yet another breakdown of legality in the US under the pressure of vast and soaring social inequality. None of the institutions of the state, whether legal or political, are capable of restraining the parasitic wealth and criminality of the financial oligarchy that Musk embodies.

“Was the richest person in the world overpaid?” This was the opening line of the January 2024 ruling by judge and Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, who voided Musk’s 2018 Tesla compensation package after finding that the billionaire had manipulated a compliant board stacked with close personal friends and business associates.

The process, McCormick wrote, was “deeply flawed.” The directors never negotiated, and material facts were hidden from shareholders. The judge observed that the 2018 plan “is the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets by multiple orders of magnitude—250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation plan.” McCormick rescinded the package in its entirety.

Musk launched a vicious campaign of denunciation against the judge, calling her on X, which he owns, “a radical far-left activist cosplaying as a judge.” The corporate media joined in, with the Wall Street Journal editorial board declaring, “How much Mr. Musk deserves to be paid isn’t for … the judge to decide.”

On Friday, the Delaware Supreme Court sided with Musk, completely ignoring his contempt of court and his insults against Judge McCormick.

Critically, the five-judge panel did not overturn McCormick’s findings of fact—that Musk and Tesla’s directors breached their fiduciary duties, that the board was improperly influenced, that shareholders were misled—all of which stands as the legal record.

Yet in overturning the remedy, the court concluded that “total rescission leaves Musk uncompensated for his time and efforts over a period of six years.” Musk was entitled to keep the proceeds, the justices ruled—even though the contract itself was the product of fiduciary breaches.

The court declared, “We reverse the Court of Chancery’s rescission remedy and award $1 in nominal damages.” The very dollar amount of the fine was intended to send a message aimed at legitimizing corporate criminality.

This is the logic of the dictatorship of the criminal oligarchy: Yes, the law was broken, but it would be unfair to deny the perpetrator of the fraud the proceeds of his efforts.

The decision comes just weeks after Tesla shareholders approved an even larger compensation package for Musk, potentially worth $1 trillion over the next decade. The scale of Musk’s compensation defies comprehension. At $100 billion per year under the new package, Musk would earn roughly $50 million per hour—a sum approximately three million times greater than the $18-per-hour starting wage at a Tesla factory.

This staggering transfer of wealth to a single individual takes place amid a social catastrophe for tens of millions of American workers, fueled by falling real wages and the worst series of mass layoffs since at least 2020.

A Politico poll conducted in November found that nearly two-thirds of Americans would struggle to pay an unexpected $1,000 expense or could not cover it at all.

The same survey found that more than one-quarter of Americans—27 percent—had skipped a medical checkup due to cost within the past two years. Nearly one in four—23 percent—reported skipping prescription medication doses because they could not afford them. More than half of respondents said they worry about being able to afford an unexpected healthcare cost.

The expense that Americans said they struggled most to afford was groceries.

The housing crisis has reached such severity that 29 percent of those surveyed said they worry about becoming homeless within the next five years. More than one-quarter reported that within the past five years, they had stayed in a place not intended for long-term habitation—such as a vehicle or a friend’s couch—because of housing costs.

These figures mirror the findings of the World Inequality Report, published December 10, which found that the richest 10 percent of individuals globally now control three-quarters of all wealth, while the bottom 50 percent—4 billion human beings—possess just 2 percent. Within the US, the bottom half of the population owns less than 5 percent of total wealth.

Tesla embodies the speculative mania gripping the American stock market. On December 16, the company’s stock closed at an all-time high of $489.88. There is an inverse relationship between Tesla’s share price and its sales. US sales are on track to fall 9 percent this year, and fourth-quarter sales have plunged 22 percent compared to the same period last year—yet its share price hit a new record this week.

Musk is the representative figure of an entire social layer—the financial oligarchy that has accumulated unprecedented wealth over the past four decades and now dominates every aspect of American political life. The courts defend Musk because to challenge his fortune is to challenge the legitimacy of the system that produced it.

Since the November 2024 election, the 10 richest men in America have seen their combined wealth increase by $779 billion. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin saw their fortunes grow by $111 billion and $102 billion respectively, while Oracle’s Larry Ellison added $59 billion.

The Delaware ruling arrives as President Donald Trump—himself a billionaire who assembled the leading figures of this oligarchy at his January inauguration—has consolidated executive power to an unprecedented degree. The Trump administration is, in the most direct sense, a government of the oligarchy, by the oligarchy and for the oligarchy.

The New York Times observed this week that Trump has established “a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency,” and noted that “nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch.”

This observation embodies the fact that the political forms of American society are being brought into alignment with its social reality. The return to monarchical, aristocratic modes of rule is not an aberration—it is the political form in alignment with a society in which wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a tiny oligarchy to a degree not seen since the age of kings.

The Democratic Party offers no opposition to this transformation. It has accepted Trump’s authority, collaborated with his attacks on immigrants and provided the votes for his cabinet of billionaires. The Democrats represent a different faction of the same ruling class, and they will not challenge the social interests that both parties serve.

The massive consolidation of wealth in the hands of the financial oligarchy is the social basis of the drive toward dictatorship. Inequality this extreme cannot be maintained through democratic means—there is immense popular opposition to a social order in which one man accumulates $500 billion in two years while tens of millions skip meals and medical care. The ruling class knows this, and responds by dismantling the democratic structures that might serve as a check—however minuscule—on its power.

The Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling demonstrates that the struggle against social inequality cannot proceed through the courts or the Democratic Party or any institution of the capitalist state, which have been completely subordinated to the predations of the financial oligarchy.

The solution lies not in appeals to the courts but in the independent political mobilization of the working class. The vast fortunes accumulated by Musk and his fellow oligarchs must be expropriated, and the commanding heights of the economy—the banks, corporations and major industries—placed under public ownership and democratic control. Only through such a transformation can the productive resources of modern society be directed toward meeting human needs rather than enriching a handful of billionaires while millions struggle to afford food, housing and medical care.

* * *

1. For brevity and simplicity I focus here on the malignant role of media owned or tamed by powerful interests. But in shaping ‘common sense’ and ‘non extremist’ worldviews which just happen to serve those interests very well indeed, a raft of cultural industries – such as education, religion, arts and entertainment – play diverse, often sophisticated and at times seemingly contrarian roles to the same end. The subject of ideology, including but not confined to the vexed question of ‘why turkeys vote for Xmas’, is complex and barely touched on in posts like this from January 2024.
2. Corporate media are not the only means by which profoundly non democratic power is exercised. Indeed, as per footnote 1, they are not even the only means by which public opinion is shaped in the interests of the same. But even viewed in isolation, the systemic corruption of media suffices to give the lie to the West as meaningfully democratic.
3. At start of this year, in a post setting out the grounds for one of my rare differences with blogger Caitlin Johnstone, I wrote:

   The far left’s refusal to distinguish on the one hand China’s state-monitored industrial capitalism, its big banks firmly outside the private sector; on the other the usurping of state control by the West’s oligarchs, leads it to dismiss China as a progressive force. Rather, crying plague on China and the West both, it embraces (or pays lip service to) a fantasy of violently overthrowing capitalisms armed to the teeth, versed in all the dark arts, and wielding tools of surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of the 20th century totalitarianisms. This, moreover, in a West whose export of industry has eroded the very socialising conditions – an exploitation experienced en masse in the dark Satanic mills of Marx’s day – which led him to see the proletariat as the only force with both the means and the motive to take humanity into socialism.