Elon Musk’s Trillion-Dollar Obscenity!

As Africans, what does it mean for one man, however brilliant and innovative, to hold a trillion dollars while millions of children go to bed hungry?

To the millions of impoverished Africans, a trillion is no longer wealth. For them, even a million dollars is a number that’s purposefully designed to escape their comprehension.

Any society that applauds this level of primitive accumulation has agreed to stop thinking.

It galls deeply to watch as African media people joined in celebrating the obscene “news” that Elon Musk has become the world’s first Trillionaire.

Let’s consider the basic arithmetic, not as intellectual speculation, but as fact.

A trillion seconds yields roughly 31,200 years; that’s longer than our recorded civilization.

No human being, however wanton, could spend such a fortune in a single lifetime.

A trillion dollars is no longer money for living; it’s money for owning, for controlling the conditions under which other human beings live, work, and eat.

When a fortune crosses that threshold, it stops being a reward for effort; it’s grotesque obscenity. It has become something closer to oligarchic sovereignty, except that it’s unelected, unaccountable, and it’s not answerable to any parliamentary oversight.

Contrary to what the mainstream media genuflected, no single human being has ever, in the history of labor, produced a trillion dollars’ worth of value with his own hands, his own mind, his own ingenuity.

No one possibly could.
Examined closely, what the sycophantic MSN calls “genius” in people like Elon Musk is something far less romantic: the capture of public infrastructure, public research, public risk-taking, and public money, funneled quietly upward until it crystallizes into one private name on one stock certificate.

Contrary to what the groveling media sells us, Elon Musk’s rocket does not fly because his ingenious mind dreamed it. It flies because thousands of engineers, decades of government-funded science, and oceans of public subsidy made the dream possible. Tax loopholes, designed for the Plutocrats in the US, ensured that the profits were walked out the back door into a single pocket.

Western fawning media packaged and sold this theft of public funds to the Hoi poloi as innovation.

No, it is not; it’s a pure theft. And it’s one of the oldest tricks of empire, repackaged and trumpeted by rented vuvuzelas.

The question the media failed to ask is: what moral architecture permits this obscene accumulation of capital?

This obscene, upgraded, unbridled capitalism is the same architecture that once justified the existence of slave plantations and the overexploited mines.

It’s premised on the immoral logic that some human beings are worth infinitely more than others, that overconcentration of capital is a virtue, that the man who owns a lot is superior to the many who built the wealth.

Ubuntu, the philosophy of our ancestors, says the opposite. In its elegant simplicity, Ubuntu says: I am because we are. Ubuntu teaches that a person is not a fortress; a person is a knot in a net of relations, and to sever that knot in pursuit of unlimited private accumulation is to unmake the self as surely as it unmakes the community.

Unfortunately, we Africans have, in the words of Marcus Garvey, drunk too much of “civilization” and we are suffering from the effects of it.

Just watch how African media lapped up the story.

For us Africans, there is nothing to admire in a man who has made himself an island of gold in an ocean of need. We shouldn’t consider Elon Musk’s obscene accumulation as an achievement or something to cheer or emulate.

We should think of it as a kind of spiritual mutilation, photoshopped and dressed up for us in glossy magazine covers.

Any society that produces and celebrates the type of Elon Musk is a terribly sick one.

What is most galling is not the wealth Elon Musk accumulated in itself, but the media-generated theatrics around it. It nauseates greatly to read the breathless reverential commentary as though the correct response to obscene concentration of wealth is applause rather than alarm.

We are looking at wealth hoarding on a civilizational scale. Our grandmothers would have shamed such obscenity out of the compound, but now it wears a rocket-company logo and a stock ticker instead of a name we can shout across a village square in condemnation.

Notice how such Western myth sustains itself: we are told to believe that envy alone motivates our criticism, and that to question the fortune is to question the man’s right to exist.

This is a deliberate confusion of categories, and nothing could be further from the truth.

No one begrudges workers or businesspeople their rewards. Our objection is to the specific, historically recent invention of scale so vast it dissolves the very idea of a fair earning.

A society that cannot distinguish between earning and engulfing has lost the vocabulary it needs to protect its moral self.

No one contests that hard work be rewarded, or that invention be honored? What we should not do is conflate the modest, human-scale of just reward with the grotesque, ahistorical scale of trillion-dollar fortunes.

Between “comfortable” and “commands the resources of half a million lives” lies an entire moral universe, and it is that gap and not the man himself that deserves our fury and condemnation.

A people who cannot tell the difference between admiration and self-abasement will keep cheering their own diminishment, mistaking another man’s tower for their own horizon.

Africa does not need to worship new gods of obscene capital accumulation. We need to get our old wisdom back: the one that says: the measure of a society is not the size of the pocket of its richest man but the depth of its poorest child’s hunger.

How do people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump sleep untroubled at night seeing the number of homeless people on the streets of American cities?

Until we in Africa reserve our celebration for those who lift others, rather than those who exploit and oppress them, we are not admiring greatness.

We are applauding our own strangulation while calling it progress.

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com