Politics of democracy: Questions provoked by Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire

Daily Maverick recently published an article, “Elon Musk’s ascendancy exposes democracy’s frailties” by Natale Labia. For Labia, the threat to democracy lies in trillionaire Musk’s wealth making him, “by any measure, the most consequential private citizen on the planet”.

These measures of wealth, held by a single person, include:

• Holding more wealth than the poorest 46% of the world’s total population (3.8 billion);
• Buying a middle-sized country;
• Equalling 72% of all South African tax collected since 1997;
• Holding wealth more than twice the size of South Africa’s economy;
• Growing his wealth by $1-million per minute in 2025; and
• Taking 2,740 years spending $1-billion a day to spend $1-trillion.

Such wealth, along with making Musk an “unfireable” single point of failure, couldn’t have been achieved without the direct assistance of others. Assistance such as: the suspended enforcement of legislation, a compliant Securities and Exchange Commission and a tax-favourable state.

A multitude of questions arise from all the above. They begin with the political support on which Musk’s $1-trillion wealth was fundamentally dependent. Oxfam said his wealth was symptomatic of the extreme concentration of wealth and decades of “pro-billionaire politics that have allowed the ultra-rich to write economic rules in their favour”. No explanation, however, is offered for this political permissiveness. Similarly, while noting that Musk’s fortune was “fuelled by an era of regressive public policy choices”, Nabil Ahmed, senior director of economic justice at Oxfam America, implicitly accepts as normal that “decisions rigged by a tiny few to fuel their fortunes …[are] overwhelmingly supported by political leaders”.

In a similar vein he notes: “A trillion dollars in the hands of one man is incompatible not only with an affordable economy, but also with a healthy democracy. Economic inequality begets political inequality, and ordinary people bear the brunt while billionaires continue to write the rules for their own benefit.”

What Ahmed presents as an aberration of his democracy, I see as democracy’s natural state.

In Henry Giroux’s words, French economist Thomas Piketty makes clear in his highly influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century, people are taught to view the grotesque imbalance and staggering levels of inequality and power as natural, inevitable, and even desirable. At work here is a politics that normalises economic injustice.

What follows is my elaboration of this understanding of this politics of democracy.

Democracy for sale

This elaboration starts with acceptance of the normality – even if unjust – of a “tiny few” “writing rules for their own benefit” that, crucially, will be “overwhelmingly supported by political leaders”. Yet, in democracies, these rules – antithetical to the broader public interest – are endorsed by the same political leaders elected by the people to whom they are supposedly accountable. This is why increasingly few people even register to vote and why so few of the registered electorate are motivated to participate. This, however, doesn’t prevent the electoral victors from claiming a “democratic mandate”, even though, as in Britain’s 2024 election, the Labour Party’s “landslide” victory rested on a vote of only 34%. The “new” South Africa provides a tragic case of this exodus from democracy.

Further unpacking the persisting paradox of a democracy in which the elected leaders ignore the needs of most of the people who voted for them is not for this article. Recall, however, that rule by consent is the second sentence in the US Declaration of Independence, which celebrated its 250th anniversary on 4 July.

The much narrower focus here are the questions raised by the compliant political leaders. Above all, why do politicians accept a role apparently subservient to the wielders of economic power? As unlikely as it might seem, both the mainstream and dominant Marxian answers are the same: politicians are mainly brokers paid by business.

Hence the aptly titled British newsletter, Democracy for Sale, “dedicated to revealing how dark money and hidden influence threaten democracy”. Hence, too, the legislation in various self-styled democracies – including South Africa – restricting the financial contributions/gifts to political parties or individual politicians and requiring such contributions to be made public.

Both understandings are premised on the separation between the economy – the rich – and the political – the “pro-billionaire” politicians. Many Marxists extend this division into what for them is a fundamental analytical division between formal capitalists – the owners of the means of production – and the formal holders of political authority, principally the government and senior people in the various organs of the state, such as the civil service, state-owned enterprises, the judiciary and the army.

Whether mainstream or Marxian, it is a division in which the giant corporations, or, simply, business interests, rule. In both cases, senior politicians are either bought off or are readily amenable to the corporate lobbyists who often outnumber them in international forums.

This, for instance, is said to be why the political leaders – the sole members of UN organs dedicated to addressing climate change – pay little more than lip service to what they accept is the increasingly voluminous and alarming scientific and empirical evidence. This is the standard explanation for why the emission of greenhouse gas – the direct cause of climate change – has escaped international and enforceable control, despite more than 30 years of UN intervention against climate change.

It is true that some political leaders – Donald Trump being the current standout one – have been bought by business interests. It is similarly true that some politicians are duped by capitals’ paid hucksters. But the symbiotic relationship between the givers and the takers is not as simple as presented. Money alone does not win elections.

What is simultaneously needed is neither underplaying nor exaggerating the importance of the economic relationship. This means recognising the active political role in what is an indivisible organism of two dynamically interacting parts.

An alternative explanation

Stability is essential for societies to be able to reproduce themselves for extended periods. This is true of all societies everywhere and for all time. The “new” South Africa has been reproducing itself since 1994, despite most people’s orphaned expectations and the brutal realities of being the world’s most unequal society, with almost 50% of our working-age population being unemployed and more than half the working population earning less than a living wage.

The needed social stability comes, I suggest, from society being an integrated organism. Dissecting this wholeness is possible for analytic purposes only, and then provided that each particular sector or sub-sector never forgets its connections with the organic whole. This epistemological approach to recognising everything does not mean total knowledge of even anything.

Detachment from the societal whole might mean an impotent acceptance of what would otherwise be unacceptable. The division of the world into “winners” and “losers”, such that not being a recognised winner immediately consigns everyone else to losers, is but an example of such resigned acceptance.

Societal stability and coherence wouldn’t be possible without the power of the “winners”. This power is provided by the unity of the organic link between the economic and political spheres. The societal division of labour between these two organically shaped spheres creates this unity for the life of societal stability and coherence.

South Africa provides a perfect case study of the necessity of organic interchanges between the economic and political spheres. The South Africa birthed in 1994 wouldn’t have survived infancy if the owners of capital had no political power and the owners of political power had no economic power. The accoutrements of such economic power begin with related wealth and extend to accessories such as status, elite neighbourhoods, along with social and educational privileges.

Some of the big capitalists had the experience and insight to know that a sustainable, societal stability needed more than just a loose, albeit sympathetic, partnership with political power. The relationship needed the closeness that could be provided only by an organic one. Making this all the more urgent was the alarming possibility of an ANC, “marinaded in Marxism”, being the most likely victor in any universal suffrage-based election.

These big capitalists, accordingly, took it upon themselves to create the organic unity of the holders of both economic and political power. Long before President Thabo Mbeki began proselytising for what he called a “black bourgeoisie” – subsequently made more politically acceptable with terms such as BEE and “Transformation” – the big capitalists had already done so with key leaders of the ANC, including Nelson Mandela. This capitalist-led transformation, beginning in the mid-1980s and ending with the period of the first Parliament of the “new” South Africa, are detailed by Peter du Toit’s The ANC Billionaires: Big Capital’s Gambit and the Rise of the Few. “Marinaded in Marxism” comes from this book.

The organic bonds between the economic and political sections of a capitalist society make apposite calling these two sections capitalism’s ruling class. This ruling class is further strengthened everywhere by the now normalised swinging door between the two sections. Business magnates becoming politicians and politicians becoming leading businesspeople is now accepted as the way of the world. President Cyril Ramaphosa, the billionaire, is the South African example of this normality.

Such is the power of ensuring unity that political leaders do not, for instance, have to be paid not to tax the rich. No matter how compelling such (restrained) taxation would benefit everyone else, worldwide or in South Africa, it never happens.

The organic oneness of the ruling class does not mean the absence of difference. Sharp differences are not infrequent but, like the tensions within most families, they seldom result in rupture. The different orientations, for instance, between the Republican and Democratic parties in the US, or the Conservative and Labour ones in Britain, even when discernible, are fundamentally framed by a shared commitment to protecting and enabling the reproduction of capitalism.

Similar differences are found within the owners of capital.

Differences are also to be found within a particular political party. Prior to South Africa’s 2024 national election there was a civil war between the capital-created African bourgeoisie and the corruption-created African bourgeoisie. This intra-bourgeois civil war contributed to the ANC now having to be part of a ruling coalition. But it’s a coalition committed to capitalism.

Despite its organic durability, capitalism comes with its own inherent contradictions, many of which characterise the contemporary world and are all too well known in South Africa. Development of this theme is for another occasion.

Political leaders as salespeople for their national economies

Attention for now, as a further development of the standard organic unity between the economic and political spheres, is on the role unique to those exercising political power. These political leaders have the dual role of also being business leaders. When explicitly addressing the triple spectre of poverty, unemployment and inequality, Ramaphosa unavoidably thinks of “the economy”. As President, this means his spontaneous thinking of the South African economy. That it happens to be a capitalist one is probably something he seldom recognises consciously, if ever. It simply being “the economy” is his default understanding.

This means two things:

• Being a salesperson for South African exports needed for securing existing jobs, creating new ones, and for government revenue; and
• The imperative of attracting the foreign investment needed for reversing the triple realities of poverty, unemployment and inequality via the magic of neoliberal growth, now updated to being “inclusive” growth. This promotion of “our” (structurally unchanged) economy is particularly pertinent in self-styled democracies preceding scheduled elections.

“Elon Musk and the Politics of Trillionaire Fascism” by the previously quoted Henry Giroux provides an essentially similar analysis as the above, but with rare eloquence. Like:

“To understand Musk’s appeal… requires examining the spectacle through which his power is organised and legitimised …[to make] wealth appear as genius.

His “wealth is inseparable from the politics it enables. Wealth at this scale is not simply economic. It is political, cultural, and pedagogical… Musk’s rise is not a triumph of individual initiative or entrepreneurial genius. It is the product of a social order in which public resources, state subsidies, collective labour and technological infrastructures are privatised and redirected toward the enrichment of a tiny oligarchic elite.”

Hence:

“Musk is not the real issue. He is the symptom. The gravest danger is not Musk himself but the culture that celebrates him… He is the avatar of a techno-fascist order… one capable of shaping consciousness on a planetary scale. In this sense, Musk is not simply the world’s richest man. He is among the most powerful public pedagogues of the twenty-first century, educating millions.”

Accepting this analysis adds to the burden of those seeking fundamental change. As though challenging the power of capital isn’t difficult enough, it additionally means, during normal times, recognising the elected leaders as an organic part of the societal problem, not the solution.

Speaking truth to power is superfluous. The politically powerful already know the truth. Their truth, as members of the ruling class, not of the ruled. The truth of the majority is being condemned to unemployment and poverty. This truth extends even to those who are privileged by employment. They are nevertheless the 55% working for acknowledged poverty wages.

Rather than being a threat to democracy, as Labia sees Musk, Musk reflects, reproduces and changes the realities of his society. This makes Musk the nightmare of the logic of what we know as democracy: the rule of the few, by the few, in the electorally sanctioned name of the many. DM

This article is co-published with Amandla.