Brace yourselves. Many Bothans died to bring us this leaked audition video from a woman hoping to bear Elon’s 53rd child.
— vantazach (@vantazach.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 10:06 AM
This is what our slavish devotion to assuming that more capitalism always makes things better has led us to. This is you. This is me. This is all of us. We did this. Only America could create a car company propped up entirely on the assumption that it’s not a car company, driven by a steadfast belief in a rocket man building rockets that keep exploding. Tesla has become so over-valued on hopium alone that it created the wealthiest human in history who purchased the most powerful government ever for the low price of a quarter billion dollars. Quite literally buying Elon’s lies created the vast majority of his wealth he is using against us now.
Elon Musk has been promising full self-driving cars every year for a decade now, and he has failed to produce them by the deadline he has set for himself each year (though he probably will now that he can loosen regulations on his robotaxi fleet in Austin). Despite that objective reality annually repeating itself, it is still taken as an article of faith among the Elon country singing and stock buying world that this lie is why Tesla is so valuable and why it will continue to grow in value into the infinite future. Elon even knows this is at the heart of the Tesla confidence game, as he said himself that “without full-self driving” Tesla is worth “basically zero.”
It doesn’t have full self-driving! He can’t figure it out in a way that doesn’t kill people! The Department of Transportation alleged it shuts off right before a crash, conveniently shielding the software from liability for it! Why is this company worth almost a trillion dollars?!
Because, well, ZIRP, but also, we, as Americans, have lost our damn minds, that’s why. I am including myself in this charge. I used to be a capitalist before I was lucky enough to get a job that gave me time to sit and think about what I really think (in short, the fire your boss agenda is superior to the technocratic abundance agenda). I believed stupid shit and helped create the myth of Elon Musk too.
A trillion-dollar car company doesn’t get invented out of thin air in a country that’s tethered closely to reality. America’s hyper-capitalistic and individualistic ideology is what Elon Musk has exploited en route to becoming perhaps America’s greatest con man of all time, surpassing even that of his top employee, Donald Trump. A century ago, we learned the hard way about the consequences of indulging the excesses of capital, and after rebuilding a more egalitarian society out of the rubble, it looks like we may need to relearn those lessons again to honor its depressing centennial anniversary. The New Deal of the 1930s was the greatest triumph for liberal democracy since the advent of America’s extremely flawed Constitution, and the Great Society of the 1960s was a worthy sequel that set the stage for the next generation of Democrats to build the country we have claimed to be, but never lived up to.
Instead, a feckless generation of craven and corrupt cowards let the bourgeois backlash to the New Deal take root in the liberal party, and neoliberalism became the order of the day beginning with the Jimmy Carter administration pivoting away from the Great Society. Gone were the liberal ideals of protecting our most vulnerable from the excesses of the market, and finding ways to unchain the market became en vogue in Washington where everyone got rich in the decades to come. Jimmy Carter was not Ronald Reagan, but he certainly wasn’t Lyndon B. Johnson either, and by the time we got to Bill “the era of big government is over” Clinton, all hope for any liberal governance in America like the generation before it had been abandoned, as the party that passed the New Deal began to strip it away to help seed the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. The market won the battle over the backlash to the New Deal, and the second Trump administration is the achievement of the century-long goal of capital to overturn that progress. The ground became fertile for the Musks and Trumps to assert that their fraud and government handout-driven businesses made them world-renowned experts because the wise market said so, and they were awarded godlike power for those lies.
The Very Serious People in charge of our politics tell us that the market is the wisest arbiter of all, and the collective belief that our sole salvation lies in the market is at the core of the rot in our politics. In the world that America’s elite have deliberately created, having the most money in America is akin to achieving the high score in the only game that matters. Our politics is narrowed between the party who wants to let capitalists do whatever they want and one who wants to let capitalists do most of what they want. Our politics is wholly focused on the priorities of capital as other side of the fundamental market equation—labor—never is invited to the discussion because it was deliberately erased from it half a century ago. There is a direct line between the erosion of union power in America and a red-haired lady standing on a Cybertruck singing “he’s got a master plan for our lives, let’s occupy Mars.” We are fucking delusional, and we have been for a very long time, by plutocratic design.
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