Billionaires’ Greed, War and Destruction
Billionaires who paid $$$$$$ for a front-row seat at Trump’s inauguration
The obscenity of billionaires fomenting war and destroying our world
Oxfam’s annual survey of global inequality reveals that the number of billionaires reached 3000 during the year 2025. Billionaires also drive the climate crisis: the super-rich are key to climate change, responsible for a million times more carbon than the average person. In their 2023 report Oxfam estimated that American billionaires were now 33% richer that before the pandemic, and their corporate profits were causing 50% of the U.S. inflation. In the 5 years since 2020, their collective wealth has increased by 81% or $8.2 trillion - enough to eliminate world poverty 26 times over. Oxfam calculates that a billionaire tax between 2% and 5% would allow the U.N. to eliminate world poverty. The rest of us would support this tax enthusiastically. Even in the U.S.A.
A lot of this wealth comes from war. The Pentagon has given contracts (and huge profits) to Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos and others for their AI and their space exploration projects, all in the spirit of Trump’s new Ministry of War (which Congress still calls the Department of Defense). There was even discrimination against Anthropic (which describes itself as an “AI safety and research company”) because its CEO Dr Amodie refused to give the Pentagon rights to use its Claude AI algorithms for spying on American citizens (which would be illegal under US law). People in the Pentagon prefer to work with billionaires whose scruples are swept aside by $$$$ and waive oversight rights.
So self-guided AI weapons are what we need to expect from the USA in the future. Humans may not even be able to stop them firing to destroy ….. well, I wonder what these autonomous lethal weapons will destroy? Maybe Congress? Maybe the White House? It will happen by mistake, of course: some medium-level sergeant in the Pentagon will instruct AI to destroy a building called the White House in (say) Cuba or North Korea, and instead the AI will choose The White House in Washington D.C. 140 children died from a rogue missile in Teheran, guided by human control …… AI has no children, so it will not even care when a mistake is made.
I am unable to predict whether AI will bring more benefits than horrors to mankind (and especially to women, who may become – once again – the victims of male megalomania). The fanatical drive for “efficiency” sidesteps human agency and “the happiness of the greatest number” in a frenetic urge by already-very-wealthy men TO MAKE MORE MONEY …… and thereby to accumulate more power. Billionaires live in their own bubble, divorced from normal people. Their sense of happiness is distorted. What they want and “need” may totally destroy the rest of us.
Elon Musk is an example of billionaire power and greed gone wrong. He is a genius in his own very specific, autistic and limited way; but Elon cannot be trusted to make the rest of us happy. He thinks creating babies by implanting his sperm inside multiple women is a “benefit” because he is unable to envisage the need of those small children for love, protection, happiness and an education in good human values. Elon does not have any love to give. Nor does he have a value system beyond $$$$$. Elon Musk, the racist South African who has been photographed proudly making Nazi salutes, is not a man who can teach any of us about good human values.