I'd argue that keeping Musk wealthy is contrary to the interests of most Americans.
His wealth is what enabled SpaceX to exist.
Musk's Neuralink now has enabled a paralized man who could not communicate to operate a computer with his mind and thereby communicate with the world.
Neuralink existed for years before Musk. If it weren't him, the researchers would have continued with other investors or govt grants (Trump gutting the NIH recently notwithstanding).
Compare this paltry evidence of benefit with the massive damage being done by the Musk-directed DOGE group, and it's clear billionaires being able to use their money to buy influence over govt is a net negative for US citizens.
Starlink. The one that connected the N Carolina hurricane victims when FEMA failed, and then again in Los Angeles.
NASA can now launch missions at 10% of the cost, due to SpaceX.
> Neuralink existed for years before Musk.
According to Google: "Neuralink, an invasive BCI company with a short-term goal of treating various neurological disorders such as quadriplegia, was founded by Elon Musk in 2016 with the intention of creating another “layer” to the brain to complement the functions of existing layers like the limbic system and the cortex."
It's now working on restoring sight to the blind. What a monster Musk is!
BTW, the value of his companies is what investors value it at. Surely they think they are worth it.
The US will shortly be in a doom loop of spending, which will have far worse effects.
A funny thing about SpaceX: I used to work around the space coast in Florida, and the scuttlebutt there was how often the employees had to work around Musk.
Apparently he would breeze in, make uninformed suggestions, and the employees developed processes to limit his damage.
Go outside, touch some grass, and contemplate that Musk is just a dude with a lot of money, not some singular genius or the savior of humanity. Once you do that, you can ask yourself if he's even the best billionaire to be running these companies.
I generally agree with Musk's politics but I wouldn't want all billionaires to share his politics because that would be dangerous. Unfortunately those on the left do not seem to understand this; they keep trying to force total consensus. Which is the biggest evil, total consensus is more evil than any idea you could come up with.
Most ideologies are distractions to get people upset over specific unimportant ideas so that they don't get upset over the massive evil, creeping ideology; the ideology of "total consensus over important ideas."
Full consensus is evil incarnate, no matter the specifics. Its stickiness; inability to adapt to reality is what makes it evil. Without opposition, there is no room for independent thought.
I generally agree with Musk's politics
And what is your definition of consensus? If everyone strikes a compromise, is that evil ? If majority strike a consensus, is that not consensus; that is, does it have to be total in order to be called consensus?
Is majority a consensus? Of course people agitate for getting full victory
The guy paves the way towards totalitarianism, but please, tell me about we should have people like him because it prevents totalitarianism.
Children are dying in Africa as a direct result of his actions right now.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/14/g-s1-...
US is clearly not the only country.
I guess other aid agencies are already busy with their existing programs and can't easily step in when the country with the biggest GDP stop suddenly.
Edit: See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...
Americans consistently overestimate how much is USA helping others.
From my prospective everyone hates America, but weirdly wants to migrate here at he same time. (Except for the online minority who threaten to leave but never do)
But they just cut it off from one day to the next in a place with challenging logistics, ensuring that some of the world's poorest people are likely to die so the world's wealthiest man can muck around in politics as a hobby.
But this is part of the reason I am quite happy with USAID being ended. The goal of effective charity should be to make itself obsolete. We can see both that that was entirely possible here, but also in no meaningful way pursued at all. They could have spent those years and millions of dollars funding the infrastructure and other pipelines necessary make sure people were aware of and could easily access these state (or other private charity) clinics. Instead they just acted as a dependency creating drug distributor. In one case having a guy literally just handing out drugs, at his discretion, at a truck stop.
The United States is approaching 37 trillion dollars of debt. There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.
If you see someone drowning in the river, and you stand by and are a good swimmer, is it not your responsibility to help?
> There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.
US Foreign Aid was a trivial amount of money buying much soft power around the globe. China for comparison has almost double the foreign aid amount the US had, relative to GNI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...
It seems like they actually plan on cutting it, so I don't think your argument has any weight.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
Politicians which are drastically cutting foreign aid usually doesn't increase it locally because they do not agree with the whole concept.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
And if $240 million is trivial, they can just send it to me instead.
International trade agreements and political over-engineering of the global order are to blame.
This is false dichotomy. Our only options are not either a single consensus, or a balance between good and evil. We can have a balance of reasonably good intentions, too.
So when there’s broad agreement that something is a good idea like, I don’t know, making sure the water is drinkable, your reaction to that is it’s “evil incarnate”?
The elite mainly follow Trump now - find one who is willing to stand up to him and Musk. That would be contrarian - courageous, in fact.
I had a think for a while about the least bad billionaire, and I'm going to go with Taylor Swift. The worst thing she does is have an astronomical personal carbon footprint, which is true of all billionaires.