Jun 21 JDN 2461213

I’m calling it now: We officially live in the dystopian cyberpunk future. We’re not headed that way; it’s not on the horizon. It is here, now. The United States is a cyberpunk dystopia, exactly as we were warned it would become. Maybe there is still hope for the rest of the world.

After all, it’s 2026, and the narcissistic owner of a corporation that is involved in space travel, social media, and artificial intelligence just became a literal trillionaire.(Not to mention that this man was given unprecedented, clearly unconstitutional, control over our government’s finances and used it to sentence millions of children to death.)

I haven’t been writing blog posts as often for the last few weeks, mainly because the future feels so bleak that I can no longer tell the difference between the reality of this cyberpunk dystopia and my own crushing depression. I don’t want to add any more bleakness to the world than it already has, and I don’t even know if anything I write (or anything I do) even really matters anymore. The Fourth of July this year doesn’t feel like a birthday; it feels like a funeral.

But I couldn’t let this one go, so here we are: This man now owns 1 TRILLION DOLLARS in assets.

I want you to understand just how insane an amount of money that is. I want you to understand that no just society could ever remotely allow something like this to happen as long as there is a single child unfed or unhoused. I want you to understand that the time to reverse course on our society’s inequality was five orders of magnitude ago.

How much is 1 trillion dollars?

If you made a comfortable salary of $110,000 per year (more than most American families make), and you saved it all, spending nothing (or, equivalently, spent only the interest on your savings), it would take you nine million years to save up $1 trillion. Humans have not existed for that long. Even australopithecines hadn’t evolved yet. Nine million years ago, our ancestors were chimpanzees.

If you made $1 per second—that’s $86,500, more than most individual Americans make in a year, every single day—and likewise only spent the interest, you’d take 31,000 years to save up $1 trillion—longer than human civilization has existed. You could have started saving when the Great Pyramid was a twinkle in its architect’s eye, and you’d only have saved up 15% of the total.

If he wanted to, Elon Musk could personally end world hunger. And don’t tell me he couldn’t really do that because his wealth is tied up in stocks: UNICEF happily accepts donations in stock.

(As I understand it, SEC rules prevent Musk from selling or giving away his shares for a year after the IPO, so he couldn’t technically give away a trillion dollars today. But he could do it a year from now—and how likely do you think it is that he will?)

Did he earn this wealth?

HE COULDN’T POSSIBLY HAVE.

That is my point. No human being, no matter how great their contribution to the world, could ever possibly have earned this much wealth—and Elon Musk isn’t even on my top-100 list of greatest contributions by human beings; mostly they’d be scientists and humanitarians, but even quite a few science fiction authors and comedians should be ranked well above Elon Musk. In fact, his net contribution to humanity is pretty clearly negative. He is not the worst human to have ever lived (there’s a lot of competition for that spot, unfortunately; Stalin, maybe? Or some ancient mass murderer most people haven’t heard of?), but he is on that list, actually—or did you forget about those millions of children he sentenced to death?

He does not work a million times harder than you. He is not a million times smarter than you. He has not contributed to the world a million times more than you have. But I’m willing to bet he has a million times as much wealth as you do—because if he doesn’t, you’d have to be a millionaire, and I doubt most of my readers are millionaires.

This is the world we live in now. The dystopia is here.

Welcome to Cyberpunk.