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The sad fate of American business icons [1]
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Date: 2025-09-06
“In pre-war Italy and Germany practical businessmen acted in an entirely “logical” manner when they encouraged a Fascist and a Nazi movement in order to stop communism. But in doing so, these practical and logical people promoted their own liquidation.”
Eric Hoffer, THE TRUE BELIEVER
While the final resolution (will that ever happen?) of the feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk remains uncertain, we can conclude that the breakup between these two ill-matched “partners” was inevitable. Delusional, bloated egos such as these cannot long cooperate, and there is room only for one at the top. History is repeating itself. Capitalists in Italy and Germany (also Britain, France and the U.S.A.) backed Mussolini and Hitler, who shared their violent aversion to communism. The ruling classes wrongly believed that with their contributions, they could control the demagogues and their masses of angry followers. Musk’s expulsion from Trump’s loving circle is simply a rerun of what happens when democracies turn into autocracies.
We know that wealthy people have more than they could ever need, yet they must have more. Greed is an addiction, and since addicts are never satisfied, they make unwise decisions in pursuit of their drug of choice. They lose human qualities like kindness, empathy and compassion. They neglect their families. Does anyone want to trade places with Trump’s or Musk’s offspring? Drug addicts and greed addicts are perceived and treated differently by the public. Alcoholics and junkies are subjects of pity, contempt, or both. Many go to jail. They may be coaxed, even coerced, into getting help to overcome their obsessions. Not so for wealthy addicts to money and power, who are allowed to rule everyone on the planet. Wealthy people have always ruled others because they can buy subordination.
We all need food, clothing, and shelter, and to live in a relatively calm society. People who control these human necessities are positioned auspiciously to get their demands met by people in need. We all surrender much of ourselves to get some of what sick, greedy, rich folks have in excess. But does control of basic human needs entitle these people to run everyone’s lives? Most of us feel that trading our time and energy is more than enough. But psychically, greed addicts need much more than work from their subjects. They need to control peoples’ bodies, minds and spirits. And as power combines with money, addicts will never get enough.
While they need and demand subservience from the lower classes, addicts to wealth and power must compete with each other for—more. At the logical conclusion of all this competition, only one person can reach the summit, which fully explains the tiff between these “icons” of modern Western civilization. Who will win? Though only two people are directly concerned, the rest of the world is negatively involved, no matter who wins. The actual tragedy is that the American voters have allowed sick people to replace our democracy with authoritarianism. Even more tragic on a personal level, those of us who can think for ourselves are now committing thoughtcrime.
The breakup between the richest man and the most powerful man on the planet follows the fascist playbook literally. Members of the upper class, loathing democracy because it requires at least some redistribution of wealth and power to keep functioning, are always on the lookout for a strongman to forcefully protect their interests. In Donald Trump, they have found a dictator who is actually one of them. They eagerly helped him gain power, under the delusion that with their support, they could control him. But since Trump regained the presidency, upper crust Americans, like their predecessors in Italy and Germany, are learning that Trump does not intend to share his power—not even with them. Like his mentor, Vladimir Putin, Trump has shown America’s plutocrats that if they know what is good for them, they had better obey him. By the time of Trump’s second inauguration, most plutocrats had gotten aboard.
The nauseating inauguration spectacle of Bezos and Zuckerberg, groveling to Trump, reminds us that addicts have no self-respect. They will do whatever they must to get “more.” Trump, who has authority over the sources of wealth in this country, can help or hamper everyone’s ability to get, and keep, more wealth. Men wealthy enough to be completely independent let Trump bully them, then bowed and bent the knee. Perhaps Musk thought he was immune to Trump’s bullying, because he had so faithfully, generously, and conspicuously backed Trump’s presidential campaign. He shared the stage with Trump while they illegally dismantled the federal government, to allow people of their ilk the “freedom” to own everything. Musk apparently thought himself an equal partner, having forgotten that in a dictatorship, two equal partners make one too many.
Once Musk started trashing the federal government in Trump’s name, the American people woke up to remember how much they like government services. Even in a democracy as deathly ill as ours; as much as the government has always been a subject of anger or jokes; Americans know that we still depend on the government to provide the minimum of services and social cohesion that a modern society needs. Though we Americans have always enjoyed posing as rugged individualists, we really inhabit a complex society requiring considerable regulation (concerning how we treat each other) to function. We can debate how much and what forms of regulation we need, but complete absence of government is chaos—which we all fear, and dictators promise to cure. When protests against government’s dismantling took off, neither Trump nor Musk wanted the blame—leading to the bromance breakup.
Trump’s wealthy toadies are probably betting on outliving him. Trump has the charisma to keep the cult loyal, and (if he lives long enough) to get Congress, the courts, the military and the bureaucracy, along with a critical mass of voters, firmly in line. Trump will have served his purpose, when the plutocrats can inherit an ironclad dictatorship. The plutocrats plan to set a more compliant and predictable king on the throne—someone as clearheaded as they imagine themselves to be. The flaw in their theory is that if they really were the sages they believe they are, they would remember that autocrats do not share power. They would have seen through Trump from the start, and backed someone who was not a demagogue. Even under Democratic presidents, wealthy people do quite well, but they still have to share some of the wealth everyone else produces. Addicts, we recall, are terminally selfish. Addiction to “more” has clouded their wisdom, causing them to set in power an unpredictably dangerous sociopath, who is beyond their control.
Those of us who qualify as common people must heed the warning: we are living in de-facto oligarchy, ruled by people who are unable and unwilling to concern themselves, even remotely, about our interests. The oligarchy is in the process of locking fascism into permanence. Those in power are ready to lock us up—mentally, and if need be, physically. All those masked, unidentified storm troopers, currently grabbing foreigners off the streets, will be coming for you and me next. Our common goal is to wake up the American people, and convince them to vote out the oligarchy. Protests get attention and build momentum, but only votes count. From inside a political prison, whoever wins a spat between two mentally ill, rich con artists makes no difference at all.
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