Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire with SpaceX's IPO

[Kid Berwyn]

33. They need WSWS

Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire: The SpaceX IPO and the social physiognomy of oligarchy

by Joseph Kishore
World Socialist Web Site, June 13, 2026

Excerpt…

An oligarchy that has built its fortune on speculation and parasitism conducts a foreign policy of criminality and gangsterism. As SpaceX was being floated on the Nasdaq this week, US bombs were falling on Iran, with Trump, who earlier threatened that “a whole civilization will die,” proposing to seize the country’s oil fields and refineries and raising the prospect of using nuclear weapons. More than three decades of unending American war are passing over into the opening stages of global war.

SpaceX itself is bound to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies by billions of dollars in contracts. Its Starlink constellation is already woven into the communications of active war zones, from Ukraine to the Middle East. The very orbital infrastructure now capitalized at $2.1 trillion is, in substantial part, an instrument of American war.

At home, the oligarchy has its true representative in the Trump regime: a government of gangsters and grifters, openly contemptuous of legality, courts and constitutions. Musk himself spent the past eighteen months bankrolling the international far-right: endorsing Germany’s AfD, boosting the British fascist Tommy Robinson, waging war on Brazil’s courts on behalf of the Bolsonarists, and promoting the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory to 200 million followers on X, the platform he bought to convert into a haven for the far-right.

Every dollar handed to Musk and his fellow oligarchs is a charge laid against the working class, to be collected through a ferocious assault on its conditions of life—wage-cutting and mass layoffs, the gutting of healthcare, pensions and public education, the destruction of every social protection that stands between profit and the labor that produces it.

But this assault is generating growing opposition. The same process that has raised up an oligarchy of unprecedented wealth is driving the working class into struggle. Future historians will not find the social explosions coinciding with Musk’s orgy of wealth surprising. They will find them inevitable.

The fight against the oligarchy must be waged through the development of the class struggle, armed with a socialist and revolutionary program. From Bernie Sanders, forever pleading with the oligarchs to “pay their fair share,” to Lula’s proposed “billionaire tax” of two cents on the dollar, to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who greeted Musk’s new fortune on Friday with a call to “tax the rich”—all propose tinkering around the edges, minor reforms that they know will never be implemented.

The issue is the oligarchy itself, and its stranglehold over economic life. The banks and major corporations, and with them the immense productive forces the working class has created, must be expropriated, taken into public ownership and placed under the democratic control of the working class, to be developed not for the profit of a handful of parasites but to meet the needs of humanity. This is the only rational answer to a social order that heaps up trillions for a few while condemning billions to poverty and plunging the world toward dictatorship and war. The SpaceX IPO is the case for socialism.

Continues…

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/13/mcyu-j13.html