It Could Happen Here - How the State Created Elon Musk

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Mia and James discuss how the neoliberal state created the markets that made Elon Musk the richest man alive and how the structure of global capitalism ensured his rise. Sources: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sg0782h https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/tesla-clean-credits-trump https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/tesla-racked-up-greenhouse-emissions-credits-2023-other-automakers-lagged-2024-11-25/ https://www.aol.com/report-says-elon-musks-businesses-170042735.html? https://archive.is/QyXuK https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-28/wealthy-americans-fuel-half-of-us-economy-consumer-spendingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy to be here again. Yeah, I am, I don't know, I have mixed emotions about this one. So today we are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state of the last about 50 years created Elon Musk and how it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the fun part of this, which is that Tesla stock is down 25% in the last month. Yay. It's extremely funny. The protests are working. People are like lighting the cars on fire literally all over the world Like there was just a big rash in France the day we're recording this

The pressure is working. He's having a bad time 25% is just the start we can get the other 75% Yeah, and like for people who like I guess don't know the value of Tesla stock is directly tied to Elon Musk's net worth Like obviously he's diversified. He doesn't have all of his wealth in net stocks. But when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer. Yep. It's great. It's great. We love making Elon Musk poorer. Yeah. It's the one line we like to see. However, comma. So we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the American state

and about all of the people who he is Harmony in the lives is showing the people who are dead because of his actions Yeah, and I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how it came to be that You know at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto Marx famously wrote to the bourgeoisie produced their own grave diggers Yeah, and you know his his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific state seems to have produced their own gravediggers are partially in the form of Trump,

are partially in the form of Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story of how specifically this happens. And also I think what neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of, I think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines of the story of the extent to which, you know, Tesla and SpaceX were built by American subsidies,

but it's worth going into some of the more structural elements of how this happened and why. So one of the problems that we have here, and I say we have here because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates. Yeah, he says a lot of things he doesn't understand there. Yeah, and unfortunately he has inherited the greatest of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism, whatever you call his sort of ideology, is supposed to be. And he is just sort of a fascist.

But on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of the neoliberal thing about like, ah, you must like decrease the size of the state. You got to you got to eliminate all regulations. You have to keep keep decreasing the size of the state. Keep fire like, you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And again, this is, I think, largely what a lot of people think neoliberalism is.

Right. They think it's like, OK, neoliberalism is when the state gets smaller. And this has always been a fucking joke. Like through this entire neoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing. And this has always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to, you know, when 2008 happens, right?

Yeah. The economy, the entire economy collapses. And then out of the woodwork come all of these like Rand Paul sort of like quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like all of these, all of these sort of fascistitaries, but you know they can come out of the woodwork and say oh the reason that the 2008 Collapse happened was because there was too much government regulation And this is like sort of what Bitcoin is right it's like ah the evils of capitalism are happening because like not enough capitalism

Yeah, well it's cuz like they look like specifically like the evil and trench interest have taken over the state You don't have the power to access the things that they do which is obviously You know like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't But this sort of controlled opposition of if you put us in power will eliminate parts of the state We'll get rid of all this regulation that you can suddenly be in power This has always been a controlled opposition thing, you know And this is disappears into forms of libertarianism or like on the most extreme mentioned, narco capitalism. Yeah. And this is something that the Montpelier society, which is like the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all of like

their academics come from, they still have conferences, they've always had a problem with this, where there's always been a branch of an narco capitalist there who think the only thing that the state should do is enforce contracts or just that it shouldn't exist and everything should just be prepared. Yeah. And the neoliberals are like, okay, you guys are fucking ridiculous. And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe, and this is something that if you read more Hayek than just like the road to serfdom, right? That's like the stuff for public consumption.

If you read the stuff that you write for public consumption, if you read sort of like Ropeke, you read all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF, and you know, you go through all the different schools, what they actually believe, contrary to the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally emerge, and the state just like exists to control them. What they believe is that you have to use the state specifically to create markets, and you have to use the state specifically to create markets and you have

to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects who go to work, go home, buy things and do nothing else. And the product of this is the 1980s, right? It's the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which is the sort of carrot of this system with just the purest stick of the police baton and the prison system. Yeah, it's the end of like the post Second World War welfare state order, right, that we saw, certainly in in the US, but mostly in Europe, right? Yeah, yeah. But this and this is very important. This never actually decreased the size of

the state because what the state you know what, what it was, was a shifting of sort of recourse as an allocation away from like the state giving you things towards the state, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer and also insofar as it gives you things making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare policies still exist. Yeah, the state surveilling you both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons. Yeah, and this is always something that all of these people have supported, right? Now, the other important part for our purposes is the thing I said

earlier about the state creating markets. And that's kind of like an abstract thing, right? There are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets. And that's that's kind of like an abstract thing, right? There are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets. But this is something that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is, is a direct result of, you know, pure neoliberalism in action, which is the state stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and the way it interacts with the world. Yeah. And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now selling, selling off carbon credits. So they're also called regulatory credits in 2024.

The selling of carbon credits was 43% of Tesla's net income. 43%. Yeah. So we should explain what a carbon credit is if people aren't familiar. Yeah. Well, actually it has numbers on this. Their numbers are that since 2014, 34% of the total profits of Tesla are from selling these carbon credits.

So the way the system works is that the EPA sets standards for how much is this like, you know, read the Axios thing too, but like the EPA set standards for how much like CO2 per mile all of the cars and trucks combined that a car company makes can can admit. And, you know, instead of doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going to be like a firm cap on these emissions. They're like, no, no, no, you know, this is what I say when I say they create a market. So if what happens if you go over the cap, isn't that like, you know, like people get hauled off the jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits.

And if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies. So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right? Their cars produce like zero, basically, like they don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line. Yeah. Yeah. Now, obviously, like, like where is you know you can ask the question Where is that electricity coming from but you know like but that's it doesn't that's it doesn't get factored into it Which is part of the sort of problem with trying to use the state like this to solve right? It doesn't look at life cycle. Yeah, yeah, just looks at driving the car emissions

You know this is the problem with trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem of climate change by creating A market and so Tesla makes and again this is the problem with trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem of climate change by creating a market. And so Tesla makes and again, this is this last year, this was 43% of its net income came not from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits. So what they're doing is making it so that other companies can produce more cars that are less fuel efficient, can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids. Yeah, it's why you couldn't get a plug-in hybrid EV pickup truck. Like, I think there may be plug-in hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no US manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup

truck like the F-150 Lightning that they have now, it's because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead. Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy, because instead of having all of the car companies just dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one car company that makes electric cars, and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of CO2 per miles, et cetera, et cetera. And the secondary problem,

and this is the problem that we're experiencing now is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of, in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of what a market is, right? When they explain it, it's like, ah, there's gonna be all this like competition in the market,

the competition is gonna create the best product. And what actually happens, and the neoliberals in their private doctrine understand this, is that when the state creates a market like this, what it's doing is handing like a person, like a single individual, a giant monopoly. Yeah. And that's what happens. And that monopoly is one Elon Musk, Yeah.

who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus. Mm-hmm. Because they've given him basically complete control over his... I mean, there are other EV-only companies, but they're minute, right? Rivian or something like that. And he's got this scarce resource that the entire automotive industry now needs. Yeah. And again, this is, you know, going back to the market creation part of this, none of this shit existed, right?

Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct neoliberal intervention into the market, which is what neoliberalism is. Right? It's the neoliberal state coming into create markets. And the product of it is Elon Musk. Yeah. It's a monopoly. Yeah. And when we come back from ads, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single guy and how and how else he's benefited from the state. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

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Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Blum was a professional con artist. So you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. Blum generally targeted people with money. And I was not alone.

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and their emotional wellbeing at soundedouttogether. well-being at soundedouttogether.org. That's soundedouttogether.org, brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. We are back. So the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how Tesla is built on this carbon credit trading. The other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The Washington Post, in probably the last expose they're ever going to do like this

now that Bezos has been like, we are free market capitalists like tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten. They totaled it. Well, I think I think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that. But they totaled it at thirty eight billion dollars. And that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very important because a bunch of what SpaceX does, SpaceX is, you know, most other company is a bunch of a bunch of contracts for classified like the deployment of spy satellites.

So it's definitely way more than that, right? Yeah. But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies, like in general, do not make money, right? They hemorrhage money for basically their entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts that can make them money and Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating shit after 2008 and You know WAPO talks about this they got a

465 million dollar low-interest loan for the Department of Energy in 2010 that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse Good thing there's nothing else to spend the money on in 2010. No one else needed low interest loans or anything. It was fine. No, no. There was no attempt to build like a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed. Yep. You know, nothing else was happening. I wasn't living in my car at that time.

It was fine for me. Yeah. Thank you, Obama. And so as this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to amass enough U.S. contracts, like U.S. government contracts, to like get you to sort of stability.

And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten 18 billion dollars of contracts with NASA. And this is sort of a part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is different. Like this is just straight up they are using Tesla's rockets to do things. And this is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking this up is part of why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the space station right now. Because these things do not work. But there's there's been an enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know, this is one of the other sort of like great neoliberal things is that a lot of the a lot of the factories that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that are in the US are there because they get

unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from local states themselves. All of this brings us to, you know, one of the other really core aspects of sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should also mention, this is something Axios talks about, that like if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, his company would literally never make money. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This has been the case. I wrote about this like I think two years ago. Yeah. I remember writing about this before Elon Musk had gone full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what they are. They're a carbon credit company that makes cars.

Yeah. But even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars. Oh yeah. I got some tax credit information on electric cars. So it's now the time. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged sales? Yes, I do. Because I have been driving around San Diego and I have seen an obscene number of cyber trucks wrapped in people's business livery.

And it occurs to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck, nor do people who need a pickup truck for work buy Cybertrucks, because they suck at being trucks. And so I did some digging, and I discovered that the IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are rated

over 6,000 pounds gross vehicle weight. The gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the mass of the vehicle, if you drove it like off the dealer lot onto a scale. That's the maximum operating weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer. So like, it's your Tesla with, I mean, there are very funny videos of guys loading one bag of compas into the back of a Tesla and being, it's a great truck for truck stuff. The other really funny one is when they try to attach like a winch to it and try to use it to pull heavy things and the back of the truck comes off

cause it's just like made of like, it's like secured by like glue. Is it a unibody? Yeah, it might not be a body on frame. Like it might not be a proper truck. I actually don't know. No, I will look into that afterwards. I bet it's, I bet most of the electric

or like high mileage pickup trucks are not. So yeah, not a good truck actually. It's called section 179. Under section 179, a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating over 6,000 pounds, you can deduct up to 31,000 in the first year, rather than deducting the depreciation of the capital good over time. So instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that you purchased your business over time and not paying tax on that amount, you can not pay tax on 31,000 in the first year of your vehicle if it's over 6,000 pounds.

There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've got a Maybach or something really fucking heavy. So that would even cover the Model X, right? Tesla Model X has a GBWR above that. With a truck, there are exemptions for work vehicles and they have to have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment that is six feet or more in length. So the cyber truck just happened to have a six foot bed. Yeah. So you can deduct a hundred percent of value in the first year of what I understand for these vehicles, which have a six foot bed. Um, at least this was the case when I was looking, I became aware of the exact

nature of this when I went on the cyber truck owners club forum and looked what what tax deducted people were doing. Right. And then I, then I worked back from there and it does seem that people are doing this. I think it might be changing. So you can only deduct a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so.

I'm not an accountant. This is not, this is not accounting advice. On top of that, Mia mentioned the IRS commercial clean vehicle credit, right? That's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would discount the amount of your income that you pay tax on versus the credit, which is just rate credit. So potentially the person could deduct the cost of the cyber truck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cyber truck right to prove it's a business vehicle.

And then if you're wrapping it, from what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use that is business. I guess this could be like the equivalent of a fringes on the flag tax theory. People claiming that when they're driving their their cyber truck to go to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business so it's a business use. I don't understand how viable that is as a claim, but... Well, you know, but part of this is like, it's very easy. Like, especially right now when the IRS is being gutted, like, it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit. Mm-hmm. People are not getting audited. Yeah. Yeah. So they can take a 7,500 commercial vehicle,

clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much. And like, you would struggle to persuade me that that is not why a lot of people are buying cyber trucks, right? Like it's got the weight rating, it's got the bed size, like, it's a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily, like not all trucks have six foot beds now. I will never buy a new truck because I can't find a truck that has a decent seating arrangement and larger than six foot bed and four by four and doesn't cost more than I earn in a year. But it's quite a niche overlap of trucks that apply. And for a truck with a six foot bed and a 6,000 pound gross vehicle weight rating, the Cybertruck is pretty small and it fits

with people who don't actually need a work truck, but can nonetheless take advantage of the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today. Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like Tesla, you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of the like best selling car manufacturers, right? And part of it is from this, but also, you know, and this is this is the other aspect of this, it's worth noting, there's a very good Bloomberg article out today by Amanda Moll that talks about how

50% of all American consumer spending is now by people in the top 10% of the income bracket. So people make $250,000 a year or more. And that means increasingly that everything in the top 10% of the income bracket. So people make $250,000 a year or more. And that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects the sort of like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who all also want to buy this for their sort of like cultural grudges and to like to own the libs and like show how much of a fucking man they are.

Yeah. And so you already, you have that initial incentive and like show how like much of a fucking man they are Yeah, you know and and so you already you have that initial incentive And then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like definitely this is like Designed with a shit in mind Yeah Without a doubt and it becomes like you say it becomes like a status good and it becomes like a culture war signifier Yeah, in addition to all those things I guess people also like I've noticed so there's been a lot of backlash against people who own Teslas.

If you go on the front, the day we're recording, the top article on the front page of Reddit on the third article, Reddit, the top post is someone who's been putting pictures that say sell your car. It's got a picture of Musk, Zeke, Hyling on people's Teslas in Boston. Yep, yep, yep. Shout out to that person. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism

created Musk and where it's going. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all-new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi.

And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Hmm, pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived, investigative hookups. Mama always used to say,

God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And, as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff, my bra. Listen to The Hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

["The Hookup Theme"] This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series, Cancellation Island, stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently canceled. In the future, we will all be canceled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like Bad Touch Football, Anti-Racism Spin Class, and mandatory Ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the cancel

to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing. Karyn, where have you brought us? Cancellation Island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation Island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Why would you do that to me when I thought we were friends? We are friends. Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Blum was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. Bloom generally targeted people with money. And I was not alone.

He took over 100 people for over $15 million. One of the victims was his own grandmother. I was married to David for almost 10 years. It was insane. I was barely functioning. And I just had this realization that he will not stop until he kills me. Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy. Charge David Blum!

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the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. We are back. Now, I think this all, I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent. I don't think you've heard what James has said before because I've seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk on a fundamental level is also a product of the endless bubble economy

that we've all been living in for decades now. It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Keynesianism. So regular Keynesianism, right, is about, you know, having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation. Also, you know, also like the military too, right? Like, let's not sort of like, sugarcoat it, but it's about using a bunch of state money to like, make there be jobs and using this to sort of, I don't know, the way they call it is like countercyclical spending.

But it's like, they want to use the state to spend money to make there be jobs and to put money into the economy and to put goods into the economy to counteract economic downturns. Asset Keynesianism is still the state expending a bunch of resources, right? But it's the state expending those resources, both bureaucratically in terms of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures, and specifically also very much in terms of the Federal Reserve's interest rates, specifically to increase the price of stocks. And also, you know, and the reason he calls it assets, right, because it's not just stocks, right. It's also things like real estate.

It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think it's going to be worth more later. I have talked about this a lot on this show. This has been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it in The 80s as after the US sort of like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy To the Plaza Accords by by the end of this fucking administration Everyone who listened to the show will be able to explain what the Plaza Accords in the reverse Plaza Accords are when we stop It won't happen here after that because you'll all understand and you'll stop it.

It can no longer happen here. You'll know. You'll know the origin of the economy. Yes. So again, the Plaza Accords, the US forces all of these countries to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollar. This makes American manufacturing more competitive. It nukes all of their manufacturing. These countries need to find another place to develop their economy. their economy, right? And the thing that the solution Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up this blows up in the 90s. This is this is a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse stuff is from this and then the US is forced to do the reverse closet courts in the

90s. This is Bill Clinton and you know, sort of annihilate American manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest like proper Japanese manufacturing to keep their economy from completely imploding. Japan was the number two economy in the world at that point. But again, this means that the US has now been doing this. There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts, where to try to stop a market collapse, that was obviously coming when the tech bubble blew up, Greenspan kept cutting the interest rates over and over again,

trying to keep the bubble from collapsing and just making it bigger, and then eventually it blew up. This is what 2008 is, was, you know, we did a whole bubble. I mean, there's another bubble and collapse in between there. But like, you know, and this is what we've been doing for the last two decades, like since 2008, we've been creating this giant tech bubble. And this tech bubble shit and this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock.

It's just, you know, people who've been given a whole a whole bunch of access to cheap credit and by and by people I mean like not really you and me like a bunch of unbelievably rich people have access to like incredibly cheap loans and they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is a sort of cyclical thing that just continuously increases the value of the company and it's not just sort of like banks and investors a lot of money that goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds. From a whole bunch of different countries and also like a huge number of American states. Like your teachers' pensions are all tied up in this because pension reform, the way

that we sort of like lost the pension as a normal thing was that it was converted to 401Ks and the people who still have like regular state pensions All of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market and it puts a billions of dollars in into Tesla every year Yeah, and so this is also another aspect This is this is the broader structural level on which on which US macroeconomic policy Was designed to create a bunch of companies like Tesla and then us sort of like micro policy, the micro creation of markets to tax credits and you know all of these government contracts they've been given to do like everything from like fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit, right? And like the US is like contracting out Starlite now, I mean like all of this stuff, right?

Is literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah. But there is a third, even deeper level in which we can look at how these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced. And they're produced by just the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers. And I think people tend to think about Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tesla workers all over the world.

There's a huge gigafactory in Xinjiang. You know, there's factories all over China. And, you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit. They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions. And at the end of the day, they get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day. Yeah. And that's before we consider like ingredient parts to Teslas, right?

Like the lithium, you know, that we just addressed, for instance, in our episode on Congo. Yeah. Like there are parts for your Tesla that come out of this country where there has been a war for as long as most of us has been alive. Really very little effort has gone into improving conditions for people there. Certainly for workers, they're doing jobs that are essential to like our economy. Until like Mia and my 401k line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world.

Yeah. And you know, this is something that's something our standard of living is based off of. But at the end of the day, right, Elon Musk's, all of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the state's monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value that they create Now unfortunately all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last 50 years, right? This attempt to sort of like depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like

Non-politics where you'd voting for two parties are like literally even more the same than they are now on politics where you're voting for two parties that are like literally even more the same than they are now. This attempt to do things like solve climate change to these to these promotion of carbon markets and create this sort of like stable like capitalist hegemony forever has ultimately been self-defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail because the functioning of the capitalist system and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked has concentrated Like the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one guy who was a nazi

And then these people use their wealth to accumulate political power and seize control of the state dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them And you can't solve this problem with regulation were meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem with regulation. Because again, eventually they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power and eliminate the regulations. You can't even solve this problem just by killing them. I see people talk about like the killing of billionaires in China as like an example of this and like a that's all political factional infighting stuff and B they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease like the Chinese worker so that they never have to fucking

Watch the PLA get ran out of Shanghai again Yeah, but the thing is even if somehow you use the state to just kill them, right? It doesn't work because capitalism will just produce more of these people if you actually want to stop this if you want to stop this Elon Musk from destroying the entire country and Quite possibly ending all life on Earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons until there's simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop someone from accidentally sending one off, you are going to have to destroy them completely. The permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire,

the power of the dictator must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot, as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals and supply chains to produce everything we need to survive. It must belong to us. We create their wealth. The only way to save this world is to take it back. If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant. Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast that is lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too. They

must cease to rule. They must cease to exist, not as individuals, but as a class. And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first place. That is the tax that we have in front of us. The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state which is the most like one of the most powerful apparatuses of oppression that has ever been built. Our advantage is that that apparatus of oppression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk who are and I cannot emphasize this enough

Maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's After his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the revolution's podcast concluded To be the great idiots of history Who who but who by their their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision at every single moment are what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world that is good, then nothing else is.

Yeah, we have the one great stroke of good fortune we have, right, is that all power has been concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are addicted to diet coke and being mad at their children. Yep, and they, you know, we have already seen they don't understand how this apparatus works, right? They fired the nuke police by accident. Yeah. So... Like, it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of the means of coercive violence.

Yeah. When we started, mate, you spoke about controlled opposition, right? And the idea that, like, the great debate of our time is how much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcho-capitalism we should have. They are drinking the Kool-Aid that got them in power. That is the one thing going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical. Yeah. And the second advantage that we have is that they have said about systematically

alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base. They are pissing off the military They are pissing off the intelligence services They are going through and they are like systematically pissing off the farm states And you know like the farmers obviously do not have that like don't fucking matter But they're picking they're pissing off the agro businesses They are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of the of the of the country scientific resources They're going through they're like fucking with the Social Security administration they're individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on earth who matter and

people who like us under this system aren't supposed to matter until we fucking do something about it and You know the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do. And by pulling apart his base of support and by putting together coalitions of some of these people and not all of them, some of them, some of them, you just need to divide and conquer by getting them out from backing him. Right. Like the whole thing with with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that people just mostly stayed home. Yeah. And that was how they won. Like that is largely what we need. We need these people to stay home.

But these people can and will, if we have anything to say about it, be fucking driven home. And hopefully we can bury both the gravediggers and the people whose graves they were digging in the same spot in the dustbin of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all-new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. What's the way to find a missing person?

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