The Self-Serving Derangement of the Rich

Today on TAP: Why Elon Musk can’t handle the truth

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Earlier this month, Paul Krugman called out Elon Musk for his allegations that the government was cooking the books on unemployment and inflation. Unemployment near an all-time low? Surely, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was lying to boost President Biden’s re-election prospects, Musk alleged.

Whence this conspiracy-minded paranoia in Muskville, Krugman wondered. Why can’t our economic overlords handle the truth?

In fact, there’s a distinguished pedigree of CEOs denying reality when it doesn’t conform to their political predilections. During President Obama’s second term, none other than Jack Welch, retired General Electric CEO and the model CEO (so said his fellow CEOs) of the 1980s and ’90s, said he thought BLS was fabricating a lower unemployment rate than actually existed.

More from Harold Meyerson

Herewith, then, a theory on the roots of this particular CEO resistance to reality. What Welch and Musk have particularly in common is their record of record firings. Within a couple of years at the helm of GE, Welch had discharged more than 100,000 of the venerable company’s employees, and gleefully publicized that downsizing as part of his plan to boost profits. For his part, Musk has all but dismantled Twitter and sacked thousands of its workers, which was notable even in the midst of a wave of tech-sector firings, chiefly because Twitter’s functionality declined in tandem with its discharges.

If they’ve fired so many workers, how can the broader economy be prospering? And worse yet, prospering under Democratic administrations that promote such nonsense as unionization, higher wages, and even higher taxes on the rich? In a properly ordered universe, that’s an impossibility that requires fudging the numbers to paint a picture of low unemployment.

Musk is not alone in his susceptibility to conspiracy theories that purportedly unlock mysteries. A number of his fellow tech magnates are backing the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr., purveyor of venerable antisemitic and anti-science hate tropes. As The Wall Street Journal has reported, such tech titans as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and PayPal co-founder David Sachs have raised funds for Kennedy, and Musk has hosted him—famously or infamously, take your pick—on a Twitter discussion.

It should come as no surprise that any number of America’s wealthiest businessmen have worldviews that combine greed with deranged paranoia. Henry Ford—Musk’s great antecedent—was the nation’s foremost antisemite back in the day, so much so that he was regarded with reverence by Adolf Hitler. Musk still has a way to go to reach such a Fordian peak, but he’s an industrious fellow and I wouldn’t rule it out.

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