Terminal Capitalism: How SpaceX Is Depraving America
“Mass insanity in a casino” is just the beginning. We deserve better.
To Deprave
deprave (verb): to make morally bad or evil; vitiate; corrupt.
While we usually use the passive adjective depraved to describe someone particularly perverse and evil, to deprave is also a verb, and there is no more perfect word to describe what Donald Trump—and Elon Musk—are deliberately doing to the United States. They are depraving America—making it “morally bad,” making it actually evil.
This is not a broad generalization about the American people. It is, however, a broad generalization about the systems in which those people operate. The sooner we accept that the institutions governing American life have been grossly distorted to serve an entirely different, more malignant purpose than intended, the more effectively we can manage the consequences.
The full spectrum of foundational systems upon which democracy relies are being depraved, including the federal government, the financial system, the media, and the military. This week, all four collaborated to help launch the world’s first trillionaire, a new category of financial obscenity that feels like a kind of verdict.
The Bargain
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and have spent my life buying into the bargain that capitalism and democracy were engaged in a kind of balancing act that needed adjusting from time to time. The government’s role was supposedly to ensure that competition was healthy but liberty was not infringed.
But during the Reagan years, the K-shaped economy was born, where the wealth from productivity gains became increasingly funneled to a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. Elon Musk seems to be a kind of final boss for the trickle-down brand of capitalism that obliterated the basic promise that labor and money would bear some relationship.
With Musk successfully taking SpaceX public in the most spectacularly fraudulent IPO in stock market history, at a valuation of over $2 trillion, the economy has been wrenched completely from its connection to the objective world—with the full cooperation of the financial system.
Mass Insanity in a Casino
As a sign of just how terrible this is for the market, I posted some simple arithmetic showing how distorted the price of SpaceX stock is—and of all the people in the world, Reagan’s Russ Vought, former OMB Director from 1981-1985, David Stockman, quote-tweeted me with an elaboration of his own.
Stockman calls SpaceX “mass insanity in a casino” and correctly values SpaceX at less than 5% of its current price.
When I am in total agreement with Reagan’s budget director about anything at all, it is a sign that something very drastic has happened.
If it were just a stock market bubble, or one company being overvalued, we could go through the normal process of absorbing a market dislocation. But the depravity of this company—and the way it has been pushed down America’s throats—makes it much more than a financial risk. It is an existential risk to the bedrock values of the country.
Fourteen Rockets
Friday morning, minutes after he officially became a trillionaire, Elon Musk quoted-tweeted the lead banker on his IPO, Goldman Sachs, with 14 rocket emojis.
Elon Musk repeatedly uses 14 emojis as a stand-in for the “14 words”—a white supremacist slogan by Nazi terrorist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
This signal came after Musk spent the bulk of the week promoting violent British fascist Tommy Robinson’s open effort to start a race war in Europe after a gruesome attempted murder in Ireland. While the riots were happening, Robinson—née Stephen Christopher Yaxley—was in Moscow at a conference with Elon Musk’s racist father Errol.
For the entire financial system—banks, VCs, private equity, the stock market—to bend over backwards to accommodate one man’s science fiction fantasies is dangerous enough. But when that man is a genocidal racist with a kill count heading to the millions, it doesn’t sound like a symptom. It sounds like a death rattle.
Whipsaw
Musk’s IPO came a day after Donald Trump whipsawed the stock market by committing a war crime in Iran by targeting civilian water towers, and then suddenly deciding “the war in Iran is over” to begin a hasty “peace deal.” This gave the market a huge lift right before closing—and right before Musk’s stock started trading.
This sequence was blatantly abusing the full power of the federal government, including our military, to support Trump’s top donor’s obscene stock price.
Peter Thiel, whose Founder’s Fund profited $50 billion from the SpaceX IPO, famously wrote in 2009:
“I… no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible… Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
I think what we’re seeing with SpaceX, and the other massive AI company IPOs that will follow it, is a kind of proof of Thiel’s thesis but in the inverse.
It appears we are seeing the failure of a long experiment in attempting to merge two fundamentally opposing systems: capitalism and liberal democracy. The bargain I grew up believing would give my kids and grandkids a chance to succeed is no longer operable—if it ever really was.
MONETIZE HOPE
This breach of systemic trust was illustrated in a conversation with Musk on Wednesday hosted by “Singularity University” grifter Peter Diamandis—wearing the shockingly appropriate t-shirt “MONETIZE HOPE.”
Musk is asked how humans fit into his plans for the future:
“And I do think we’ll have universal income. We’ll basically just issue money to people… AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans… I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. So just as you’re becoming-- It’s probably something like an Iain Banks Culture sort of future. And I think the AI down the road will really not use human currency.”
This is the utopian side of Musk’s neo-Nazi ideology—a hybrid of his grandfather’s fascist technocratic beliefs about eliminating money as a way to concentrate power, and socialist science fiction about AI creating super-abundance.
“The Culture” in Iain M. Banks’s science fiction series describes a spacefaring transhumanist post-scarcity society in which humans have evolved into a kind of pet species for superintelligent AIs that run giant spaceships. People in the Culture can change sexes, do all the mind-altering drugs they want, and even add parts like wings. They are connected directly to AI through brain chips.
To Musk, the way to solve the world’s problems is to “just issue money to people”—but only when money is already essentially worthless, and he has purged everyone he deems inferior.
Terminal Capitalism
This weekend, Donald Trump is holding a birthday party for himself, with a UFC fight that only people with a subscription to Paramount Plus can see, on the grounds of the White House. The fight is sponsored by numerous companies, including the former enemy beer of MAGA, Bud Light.
Of course, Donald Trump bought stock in the parent company of UFC before the fight was announced. And Paramount is owned by David Ellison—who, on the same day as Musk’s IPO, had his $111 billion acquisition of Time Warner approved by Trump’s DOJ, after successfully destroying CBS and 60 Minutes for Trump.
We are witnessing the wholesale destruction of the mythology that held our economy together, that our financial institutions would provide guardrails, that our government would regulate dangerous industries, and that massive fraud would be prevented or punished. Instead we have seen each system—financial, regulatory, and criminal justice—completely inverted and weaponized to defraud the very people they are supposed to serve.
This has led me to a harsh conclusion: I no longer believe capitalism and freedom are compatible—at least in the current formulation. This doesn’t mean I have figured out the answer, but I think the evidence is in. We need something better. We deserve something better than this depravity.
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If freedom means Anarchy for the rich, it’s never been compatible with the rule of law. Liberty is often considered consent to be governed by law and not tyrants.
All Thiel is saying is freedom for him is not compatible with rules or with liberty for others. If others have agency, he is not free to do whatever he wants, and that perturbs him, so he prefers a system where only he has agency.
Philosophically, this isn’t that deep. However, it is an anti-social perspective that has no place in civilized society under any political structure post genghis Kahn.
In the Middle Ages Thiel’s so nostalgic for he would have been wrapped in wet tarps and slowly burned at the stake doe his sexual preferences. There’s nothing intellectually honest about “philosophy” promulgated by fascists. It’s all a means to an end, which is individual dominance. Taking it seriously and reading it too deeply is largely folly.
I must confess that I, an English major and compulsive grammarian, did not know that deprave was a verb. Always amazed by how much I learn from your writing, Jim. Thanks again!