Special News Bulletin, 6.12.26

Lord Elon is now the world's first trillionaire.

There's a pattern of wealth inequality  → revolution  → authoritarian rule. Even the French Revolution became "Liberty! Fraternity! Equality! Or we'll chop off your friggin' head!" 

Keep your eyes open, gang. These idiot politicians running in the midterms DGAF about you. If you are counting on them to save you, you are crazy. 

Links:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/12/elon-musk-trillionaire-spacex.html

https://apnews.com/article/income-inequality-billionaires-davos-85baf23e9a2a7d4d94da5aca11f3ca5e

https://apnews.com/article/davos-2025-trump-wef-elon-musk-billionaires-ee121c56f6828021cb864de927383c7b

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-decades-federal-reserve/

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/15011991

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-half-americans-live-paycheck-212500934.html

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the recent news of Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire due to SpaceX's IPO, with a net worth of $1.05 trillion. Musk's wealth surpasses the combined net worths of the next five richest billionaires and is larger than the GDPs of Taiwan, Ireland, and Sweden. The speaker highlights the growing wealth disparity, citing Oxfam's prediction of five trillionaires in the next decade. They also reference historical economic crises, such as the French Revolution and Weimar Republic, to illustrate (though not encourage) the potential for societal unrest. The speaker urges listeners to stay aware and prepare for future economic challenges.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Elon Musk, trillionaire, SpaceX IPO, net worth, wealth inequality, K-shaped economy, Oxfam prediction, quadrillionaire, wealth disparity, economic hardship, hyperinflation, Weimar Republic, authoritarianism, financial plan, midterms.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. I will stop short of calling this an emergency broadcast. I'll just call it a special news bulletin. It's not time to panic or act like Chicken Little. I would just say it's time to get your eyes open. If you have been kind of floating through life lately on autopilot, it's time to wake up and pay attention. There was a teacher I had in high school who was also a football coach, and he was this burly, gruff kind of guy. And whenever it was time for the scuttlebutt to stop and all of the little side conversations, so we could have class, he would always say, "Eyes up, and that's how I feel, like "Eyes up, it's time to pay attention. Also, in the words of the great Martin Fry from ABC, I've seen the future. I can't afford it. To tell you the truth, sir, someone just bought it, larger than life and twice as ugly. If we have to live there, you'll have to drug me. And they've done a pretty good job of that, between actual pharmaceuticals and street narcotics and social media and apps, they have done a pretty good job of drugging us. In fact, today it is Friday, june 12. I'll try to get this onto the air quickly, so it goes out the same day. Earlier today, the news broke that Lord Elon has become the world's first trillionaire because SpaceX went public, and with the trading that happened on the stock market today, he hath officially become the world's first trillionaire. Now, the news is quick to tell us that he doesn't literally have $1 trillion in the bank somewhere or stashed away in gold bars. It's not liquid wealth, it's just his net worth. But I'm sort of like saying it's just his net worth. That's not a panacea, that's not a balm. It's not like, oh shit, that's his net worth. So that's totally fine. That's cool. He doesn't have that much money in a bank account anywhere, so thank God. What, what, the what? I'll read briefly from the news report on CNBC. Headline: Elon Musk becomes world's first trillionaire as SpaceX begins trading on the NASDAQ. Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire, with SpaceX opening on the NASDAQ at $150 a share. Friday, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla now has a stake in SpaceX worth worth more than $766 billion combined with his Tesla stake, which is worth 280 billion. Musk's net worth from both companies as of Friday is roughly $1.05 trillion The SpaceX IPO added more than 180 billion to Musk's fortune. He is now worth more than the next five richest billionaires in the world combined. His personal net worth is larger than the national GDP of Taiwan, Ireland, or Sweden, end quote, to give us a frame of reference, because it's really difficult for us to even fathom what that kind of wealth looks like. We hear the number and it's an abstract concept, so there have been some news outlets and bloggers that have broken down the math, they have made the math a math for us. If someone had in their possession $1 trillion they could spend $1 million of it a day, every day, for roughly 2740 years before running out of money. That assumes a, that they have it, it's liquid, it's in their possession. It also assumes that they're not doing anything to reinvest it. In other words, they're just spending it, they have it in a hoard, and they're not doing anything to make money on the money, they're simply spending it. Even so, they could do that every day for more than 2000 years, so more money than they could ever spend in a lifetime, and that assumes a $1 million a day habit of spending, and they would still have plenty of money to leave over for a charity, their family, whomever, that is staggering. In January of 2024 Oxfam went to Davos to the WEF and told the Richie Riches up there that the world could get its first trillionaire within the next decade, and I sat here and thought, first of all, that's ridiculous. Not, not that it would happen, but it's ridiculous to go and tell these rich assholes what's going to happen, because they already fucking know. I just sat here and talked about being there.

These elites are king makers, they know what's coming. It's not a surprise to them. There's no organization that needs to show up and say, hey. The world could get its first trillionaire in the next 10 years. Wink, they already know that. And, secondly, it's just staggering to think about the gap between people who are struggling to make ends meet and all the inflation that's gone through the economy that's not coming back out again, by the way, and somebody having so much money that they could spend a million dollars a day, every day, for the rest of their life and still not run out. Now, let's fast forward to January of 2025 Oxfam goes back to Davos to the Weffers and says, well, actually, last year we were forecasting that only one trillionaire would rise in the next decade. We've had to revise our prediction to say that at least five trillionaires will crop up over the next decade. So right now today, Lord Elon is king shit of Dick Mountain. He's the only one, but Oxfam is already telling you at WEF what's getting ready to happen. He won't be the only one, and probably he won't be the only one for very long. If I had to hazard a guess, and then it will become passe. Right now he gets to sit up if he wants to and say I'm a trillionaire, you billionaires. Well, how lovely, how cute for you. But I'm the king, I'm the big deal, I'm the head cheese. When other people join him, it's not quite so prestigious anymore. And here's my prediction, I would say, within the next, I'm going to give myself a longer time span than I think is is necessary, but after this, we, I think, we would just have to see a quadrillionaire, and my prediction would be within the next 20 years, we'll get quadrillionaires. I don't see any way around it, and, and I would, I'm hedging there, I really think it will probably be, we've already had the first trillionaire ahead of schedule. I would not at all be surprised to see a quadrillionaire, probably within the next decade. So, Oxfam could really revise their ideas, and instead of saying, 'Oh, shit, now we're going to have five trillionaires at least in the next decade, you know, I think that the pursuit then becomes to be the first quadrillionaire, and then quintillionaire, and sextillionaire, and so on. We need to think back to what Gordon Gekko says in Wall Street, because Bud Fox is confronting him about screwing people over, and he's like, "There is no such thing as enough, it's a zero sum game, somebody wins and somebody loses. There is no enough, because Bud is like, how many yachts can you water ski behind, how many homes can you own, how many fine art paintings can you buy, and hang up somewhere. And Gordon tells him very plainly, there is no such thing as enough, and I promise you, that's what's going to happen here. It's not like the Richie Riches are going to stop at being a trillionaire and say, "Oh shit, my God, I have enough. Even if I spent like a drunken sailor for the rest of my life, I'd still have plenty. The pursuit keeps going. Before this ever even happened, back in January of this year, CBS News reported wealth inequality in America just hit its widest gap in more than three decades. I talked about this several times, numerous times on the Causey Consulting podcast, which is one of my daytime broadcasts about the idea of a K-shaped economy, where people who are suffering just continue to slide further and further down, while the richy riches continue to get pushed further and further up. Now that you're starting to see trillionaire in the discussion, it's going to get worse, not better, and that's one of the main reasons why I'm on the air. It's to tell you to wake up if you haven't been awake. Wake up. We're in the midterms, and every blasted day it's one ad after another. Where I live, our governor's race is hotly contested, and goddamn every day, every minute, every ad break, and you can't even get away from it on streaming.

You try to get away from it, and you can go to Netflix or to be and see the same fucking ads, and they're all the same. I licked the orange man's butt hole. I stood with the Orange Man when nobody else did. Everybody else is a phony MAGA patriot, but I'm the real deal, and I'm like, please just stop, just make it stop. I feel like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, where they pry his eyes open. It's like, I don't care about this, and I don't want to see it. It's ridiculous. I will, of course, in the write-up for this episode, drop a link to the CBS News article that I mentioned, and if you go to the side panel, there's a video from the first 100 days of the Orange Man's administration, and they asked the question, Is he ushering in a new Gilded Age, and they show pictures of people like Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg. These people attended the Orange Man's inauguration. Do you think that that's a coincidence? He's bought and paid for. He has to be. I stand by that assessment. If you didn't hear my last episode about being there, please go back and check that out, because it is important people that think these politicians are mavericks, and it doesn't even have to be the orange man. It can be these people running in the midterms that all want to have a competition on who can lick his butt the hardest. They don't care about you. They're not going to do anything to help you out, not really. If they were planning to do anything to help you out, they wouldn't be up there. It wouldn't be allowed to happen. I understand if that sounds terribly cynical and awful. I'm giving you the truth as I see it. I think we would be wise to go back and revisit the storming of the Bastille, which occurred on July 14, 1789 not because I'm telling you to do that, I'm not. We all saw what happened on Janet six. Don't, don't do that. Do not do that. I cannot be emphatic enough. Don't do that. Do not wind up in jail. Don't try to go out in a blaze of glory. Don't do something stupid to get yourself thrown in jail or killed, just don't do it. One of the reasons why that happened was because France was suffering from severe economic hardship, not the monarchs, but the people. There had been heavy financing of the American Revolution, because the French wanted to stick it to the English, and there had also been, perhaps even more important than that, decades of tax evasion by the wealthy. We tend to think that this is something new, that the idea that the top 1% don't pay their fair share in taxes, and that's some big new revelation. It isn't. It's like a tale as old as time. How can I find the loopholes? How can I figure out the best way to not pay my fair share and make somebody else do it? There have been a nationwide famine and poor harvesting that caused the price of bread, just basic bread, which, let's face it, is quite a staple, to skyrocket at its peak. The poorest workers had to spend up to 80% of their income just to eat. This, as one would imagine, caused widespread unrest and food riots, the Bastille became in part a symbol of absolutism, a symbol of wealth, a symbol of power, and the peasant class said, 'fuck this shit, man, they've had enough, but think about that, 80% of your income is dedicated just to food, I think we would also do well to remember what happened in the Weimar Republic. Hyper inflation peaked in November of 1923 with prices doubling roughly every three and a half to four days, and a monthly inflation rate of 29,500% This was triggered by the massive debts that Germany had from World War One, crippling reparation payments dictated by the Treaty of Versailles, and the printing of limitless fiat money. Doesn't that sound familiar? Like, how, how could there even be a fucking trillionaire anyway? How have we made this much goddamn money for it to even happen?

Prior to the First World War, the German mark was tied to the gold standard, and it was traded at an exchange rate of about four marks to one US dollar, but by the height of this hyperinflation crisis in late 1923 the exchange rate had skyrocketed to a staggering 4.2 trillion German marks to one US dollar. So the purchasing power of the money evaporated so quickly that workers were demanding to be paid twice a day, so they could immediately go shopping and try to get basic necessities before that money became worthless, and we know what happened after the Weimar Republic, we know the kind of authoritarianism the. Line of nationalism that was birthed from the ruins of that, for that matter, we can think back again to the French Revolution, and how it gives rise to someone like Robespierre, liberty, egality, fraternity, or will cut your fucking head off. So, there are several points here. It feels like a big ball of yarn with a lot of tangled threads, and I'm doing my best to untangle them, but for one thing, we have significant wealth disparity, the poor getting poorer, people struggling, a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck. An article that was published on Yahoo Finance earlier this year reports that 57% of American adults say they are living paycheck to paycheck, 72% of Generation Z, and 65% of millennials say they fit into this category. I would also wonder how much fiat currency has to be printed for someone to even become a trillionaire anyway. Why is there that much goddamn money floating around? But in a way, I've already answered that question on this podcast before. Back in August of last year, I published the episode three days at Camp David because I had read the book by Jeffrey Garton three days at Camp David, how a secret meeting in 1971 transformed the global economy, and that book profiles the day that the power brokers met and President Nixon abruptly changed the monetary rules from which nations had traded with one another for 20 the past 25 years, from World War Two onward, the US was the wealthiest, most productive, and most stable of the competing economies in the world, because of the gold standard, and Nixon said, "We don't have to tie our currency to the gold standard anymore, it's now fiat currency that's backed by nothing. We like to imagine that we're Uncle Sam, we're in the Western world, the bill will never come due, but what if it does? Another point that I wish to make about all of this is that you'll notice a theme, there comes this big economic explosion, whether it's the peasant class storming the Bastille and the French Revolution occurring, or whether it's the Weimar Republic collapsing, giving way to Nazism, the theme then becomes people get fed the fuck up and say we're tired of this shit, but then authoritarianism happens. In my mind, we're already in authoritarianism light. I plan to do an episode at some point to really ask the question, what's what's up with these data centers? Are they really powering AI? Is it really part of some kind of AI arms race between the US and China, or is there some other purpose for them? There's a conspiracy theory going around that they're detention camps. I don't actually think that. I think probably closer to the mark is the idea that they're being put forth for mass surveillance. I don't think that these big tech companies, particularly an organization like Palantir has exactly been shy about the idea of surveillance. I mean, Minority Report is getting closer and closer to the truth all the time. So, if you're out here thinking that some richy-rich tycoon actually cares about you, they don't, or the politicians, or somebody running for the midterms that's making all kinds of sky pie in the sky promises. Oh, they really care about me. No, they don't. They don't. I hate to burst your bubble if you've been thinking that, but wake up, please. I saw a meme the other day where somebody had written, Republicans lie to you and steal your money, Democrats lie to you and steal your money, but gayer, and I laughed out loud, because that's it.

The left is more willing to pander to say that they care about working-class people, and they want the top 1% to pay their fair share, and they care about the disenfranchised and the minorities, and they're not bigots. But all roads lead to the same place. It's like the cartoon of the cow outside the slaughterhouse. Do you want to go in the left door or the right door? The right door may have a star spangled banner hanging in front of it, and the left door may have a rainbow flag hanging in front of it, but either way, you're going in that slaughterhouse and getting your throat cut. The end result is exactly the same. We've had someone now that has eclipsed all previous records to become a trillionaire, that is crazy. It's, and when you stop and think about it, it's absolutely crazy. It's even crazier in my mind to assume that some. Politician is going to help you remember Obama, hope and change, the audacity of hope. What a great title. It pisses me off that he took that title, because it's a great title, and yet he was a fucking continuation of Cheney Rumsfeld, because it wasn't really Bush Cheney, I've said that 100 times. I'll keep saying it for the newcomers. It was Cheney Rumsfeld, which is not to say that they were actually making any decisions in isolation. They weren't. The power brokers still controlled them, but even so, Bush was just a sock puppet. Remember, he's been like, he was just a buffoon. He was out in public as a buffoon. He choked on a pretzel, and it was like good for America. No, no thinking person really thought that he was in charge of any damn thing. He was a goof. I always say on all of my podcasts, I don't give you advice, I don't tell you what to do. You have to be a responsible adult and decide for yourself what's best for you and your family. The point that I want to make is keep your eyes open. This is most certainly a K-shaped economy, and I don't see it getting any better. It is going to be really, really good for the people at the top of the food chain and really shitty for everybody else. I'm not telling you to go and storm the Bastille. We don't need another Janet six. It wouldn't fucking change anything for the better, anyway. So, don't go out there and get your ass thrown in jail or the graveyard. Just be aware, keep your eyes open, and if you haven't already, make some kind of a financial plan for your family. If the shit really hits the fan, what would I do? I'm not telling you that we're getting ready to be living in the road where you're going to be walking around with zombie cannibals, just think about as things progress in this direction, what you might do to take care of yourself and to survive. I won't even say stay a little bit crazy this time around, I'll just say stay aware, and I'll see you in the next episode.