Let Them Eat A.I.

Musk, Trump, and the New Era of Big Tech Robber Barons

If you believe the words of the richest man in the world (you really shouldn't), money will be irrelevant in the year 2036 thanks to AI's rapid advancement as it redefines economic life and human civilization itself.

This prediction was recently made by Elon Musk after his AI conglomerate SpaceX went public on Wall Street, elevating the obnoxiously egomaniacal tech tyrant to the status of world’s first trillionaire. The record-breaking, overvalued initial public offering (IPO) put the total valuation of SpaceX at $1.75 trillion and sent investors scrambling to buy a piece of the company along with the anticipated explosive profits of its xAI division. Incredibly, the lead underwriter of the IPO, Goldman Sachs, believes SpaceX will achieve its mission to build data centers and “new trillion-dollar markets on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”

Musk's statement that “money won't matter” is the 2026 rendition of “Let them eat cake” — that epitome of opulent detachment and callousness widely, if erroneously, attributed to Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution.

No one earns a trillion dollars, or even a billion, for that matter. Alongside soaring costs of living, a dismal job market, and rising food insecurity for poor and working-class people in the U.S., today's class of billionaire tech overlords led by Musk inhabit an entirely different moral universe than the rest of humanity. How else can one hoard such massive wealth in the face of such tremendous hunger and suffering around the world without being haunted by unbearable guilt?

Musk's grotesque accumulation of unearned wealth is only possible within a hyper capitalist system that rewards raw theft and exploitation by bosses whose management and ownership produce no net positives for society. And it can only be justified behind dense walls of delusion that recast empathy as a human defect and greed as the highest virtue of the human condition. This perverse rationalization is the only means by which parasites like Musk can comfortably enjoy their vast fortunes without qualms.

Bots Over Bread

While there is growing concern about AI’s overvaluation and risk that the house of cards will eventually collapse, a significant portion of the U.S. economy is now tied to the AI boom, including massive spending on AI data centers.

“The U.S. economy has become so concentrated in a handful of giant AI corporations, so highly leveraged with AI-related debt, and so dependent on predictions about huge earnings flowing from AI in the foreseeable future, that the risks of a recession or even a crash are growing,” writes economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

Even Trump’s Treasury Department admits there is an AI bubble, according to a recently leaked report which points to similarities to the 1999 dotcom bubble. The report concludes that AI companies are even more “deeply entrenched” in the U.S. economy compared to internet companies ahead of the dotcom crash. That's particularly bad news now that the retirement savings of millions of Americans are tied to AI investments.

Alongside this massive AI spending, hunger is growing among poor and working-class Americans. More than a million children have lost SNAP food benefits since Congress passed Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill” a year ago. Between July 2025 and March 2026, more than four million Americans were removed from SNAP. At the same time, a new Government Accountability Office study found that three of the country's largest and most profitable employers — McDonald's, Walmart, and Amazon — employ a large segment of the low-wage workforce dependent on food stamps and Medicaid. And speaking of jobs, the U.S. economy shed about 1 million jobs last year in a trend that only promises to continue as AI technology displaces more workers.

Despite these increasing hardships for everyday Americans, the Trump regime and the ruling billionaire class always have money for AI — just as they always have money for imperialist war budgets and ICE terror against immigrant families.

For Big Tech CEOs like Musk, it certainly doesn't hurt having an equally sociopathic regime in Washington willing to facilitate and participate in the billionaires’ AI windfall. With Trump’s roughly $1 billion invested in his family’s crypto venture, the regime is using its power to soften regulations that would rein in corrupt cryptocurrency schemes along with the growing AI fortunes of his billionaire techno fascist partners. Trump, who also owns millions of dollars’ worth of stock in Big Tech, is pushing a national regulatory standard favored by AI titans that would preempt any state laws restricting AI’s expansion.

A number of Trump regime officials, along with Musk, were granted the privilege of selling off their SpaceX shares sooner than is typically the case with an IPO. This and other aspects of Musk's SpaceX ripoff have led many to liken it to a Ponzi scheme rigged in Musk's favor and with the tacit blessing of Trump's Securities and Exchange Commission.

Although Musk's trillionaire status proved temporary, he was subsequently challenged by a Nobel Prize-winning economist to pledge his $1 trillion fortune to charity by 2036, to which Musk vaguely offered, “I'm actually going to do something along these lines.” Given the techno fascist’s characteristic snark and sociopathy, “something along these lines” could mean a lot of things — like the “gift” of $1 trillion worth of AI infrastructure to humanity. It almost certainly doesn't mean Musk actually intends to donate any substantial portion of his unearthly wealth to charity unless it involves a significant payoff scheme in terms of tax deductions.

Historically, Musk is less interested in philanthropy than he is in avoiding taxes. His recent feud with Rep. Ro Khanna makes this pretty clear. Not only did Musk threaten to sue the congressman over his modest proposal to levy a one-time five percent wealth tax on him, Musk also called on the Department of Justice to arrest Khanna.

For a real-world villain who stokes anti-immigrant riots and whose shuttering of USAID has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in poor countries, a mere five percent wealth tax doesn't come close to settling Musk's enormous debt to society — to say nothing of the ongoing damage AI businesses like Musk's are doing to so many livelihoods and the planet itself.

Growing Resistance

Fortunately, the fightback against the AI oligarchy is strong and growing stronger. Awareness is building about how tech CEOs are appropriating human creativity, including scanning and shredding books for their AI machines.

“What we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent,” renowned author and activist Naomi Klein wrote back in 2023.

Growing awareness about the public costs of AI data centers has given way to growing resistance against them. Seventy percent of Americans oppose the expansion of these data centers, according to a Gallup poll conducted in May, as communities mobilize against the environmental impacts and noise levels produced by the ever-encroaching physical engines powering the AI boom.

A single large data center requires up to five million gallons of water per day. The immense quantity of water needed to keep data center servers from overheating has sparked local movements against data centers, which are disproportionately being built in areas already suffering drought conditions.

Together with ongoing worker organizing battles and legislative pushback calling for a moratorium on new AI data centers, these grassroots community efforts against data centers have the potential to slow down, if not dismantle, the gears that are consolidating scandalous amounts of wealth into the pockets of Big Tech robber barons. The growing threat that AI poses to jobs is rousing more workers to take collective action, helping to boost unionization rates in 2025 despite rigged labor laws and the Trump regime’s hostility to unions in general. That includes workers in the tech industry along with Amazon workers, nurses, and film industry workers.

While a new chorus calling for AI safety regulations has emerged in recent days following an OpenAI cyberattack and the certainty of more incidents of AI “going rogue,” the strongest means to beat back the AI threat is human organizing in communities and in workplaces.

Musk has the luxury of pretending that money won’t matter in ten years, as if that might somehow absolve him of the evil means by which he accumulated his riches. But the fact is that we as workers — in the U.S. and across the globe — do not have the luxury of waiting ten years to see what barren hellscape lies on the other side of capitalism’s final exploit against humanity.

The time to organize, resist, and fight for a better world is now!