Part 1: An Ed Zitron Shaped Hole

Journalist Ed Zitron has been blowing the whistle on the AI bubble for years with increasing exasperation. As the bubble continues to fail to burst he has started to resemble Vizzini – Wallace Shawn’s character from The Princess Bride – who evinces increasing levels of shocked incredulity each time his pursuer overcomes a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

“Inconceivable!” Vizzini repeats with mounting disbelief, and we laugh because we know the joke is on Vizzini. I have felt the same disbelief many times over the years. It is a sign of cognitive dissonance. A sign that like Vizzini you don’t really know what is going on. A sign that you are missing something.

In The Princess Bride Vizzini is deluded into thinking he lives in a world where reason is operative and the inside joke with the audience is that he is living in a literal fairytale. The same rule applies here. The more sober and serious-minded the analysis of the generative AI industry is the more that the picture seems to make no sense. This time the joke is on us. Everyone who isn’t palpably deluded knows by now that there is an AI bubble. Traditionally this only occurs at the time that a bubble bursts, but that isn’t happening. What gives?

We believe in a world where economics and politics are governed by rational forces, but fascism works on a different set of principles. It creates a brutal fairyland of hate and irrational selfishness that runs counter to self-preservation. It then forces everyone to live in this weird self-destroying world until the reality the fascists have “willed” into existence falls apart in some sort of downfall.

The punchline is coming, it has to land sometime, but why is it taking so long for the AI bubble to burst?

This isn’t just about AI. If our society was at all rational many key institutions – from neoliberal austerity, to greenhouse gas emissions, to the Palestine Genocide, to the growing wealth of billionaires – would cease under the combined self-interest of 99.99% of the people of Earth. This is the nature of the US empire. Mao declared it to be a paper tiger in 1946 – 80 years ago. The Korean War and the American War in Indochina confirmed his diagnosis for most people. Now after half a century more of supposed failures such as the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, every objective empirical metric shows a greater US global dominance than ever before. Even if this is the last gasp of a dying overextended empire, we still need to understand why we were so wrong for all that time. The resilience of the AI bubble is a petri-dish experiment that can teach us about much more.

To understand what is happening we need to zoom out, and then out more, and then out yet more, before zooming back in to understand the phenomenon. It is no coincidence that AI boosterism keeps finding itself entangled with the fascist politics of the US empire. This is about stealing wealth, but it is also about destroying wealth for relative gains. It is about maintaining control in an age where the pretence of democracy no longer serves the Western ruling class.

At base the AI bubble exists because venture capitalists and investors in stocks like Nvidia and Micron have poured an insane amount of money into a type of technology that is in Dr Olivier Jutel’s words “an economic dead end”.

In this post I am using the term “AI” to refer to the industry of generative “AI”, not the broader subject of artificial intelligence nor other technologies associated with the term. That is in part because of common usage, but also because I would otherwise be switching between talking about the “AI bubble” and talking about Large Language Models (LLMs) or generative AI. In reality it is all a misnomer as there is no intelligence involved in any real sense and this technology does not seem to provide a realistic path to reach true intelligence.

Ed Zitron makes a convincing case against the economics of AI. He brings receipts. In contrast, those who dispute his version of events tend to speak in generalities without numbers. For example he spoke for an hour with a more AI friendly host on a podcast called Newcomer and the best pushback the host could manage was entirely speculative.

Critics like Ash Ghaemi accuse Zitron of being obtuse about the nature of startups and the transformative capabilities of AI. But, as Cory Doctorow points out, in the last year $700 billion was spent on AI to generate just $50 billion revenue which is quantitatively different than other startups which make it qualitatively different. While other startups have subsidised usage to create new markets, in this instance the maths suggest that the increased costs that accompany increased usage are inherently uneconomical.

For these reasons the assertion that AI will be “transformational” is a mirage because it is based on being able to achieve amazing things without the staff and organisation that would normally be required. This can be done, but to be transformational it would have to be economically viable and the indications are that it is not. The CEO of Palo Alto networks has said that the cost of “tokens” (a measure of compute and a basis for billing AI customers) will have to drop by 90% in the next two years to enable widespread enterprise usage. Nobody is really yet putting to the test whether ordinary consumers will want to pay the cost for their token usage, but I think we all know that the answer is generally going to be no. The economically viable use cases for AI are going to be far too constrained to justify the boosterism.

By now we have probably all seen the AI slop images that look fine at first glimpse but on further examination turn out to be bad and weird, and on more examination turn out to be very bad and very weird. The slop is a synecdoche – it is a part which embodies and stands for the whole. Many laypeople grasp this. They know instinctively that the industry is the slop because it is almost self-evident if you are not “educated” enough to be caught up in the hype. In fact, the hype itself is slop.

Zitron may be a PR guy and it could be that his main concern is self-promotion. I personally doubt that, but even it that is true he is succeeding because there is a massive Ed Zitron shaped hole in the discourse. Having watched and listened to him an almost unhealthy amount I will admit that his unbridled approach eventually comes to feel a little bit Spinal Tap-ish. Yet his consistent turned-up-to-11 approach has not led to any loss of credibility. His earlier dire predictions have so far failed to eventuate, yet he keeps gaining traction. He is now platformed on the most mainstream legacy media. More and more evidence supports his reasoning, but the bubble still fails to pop.

So what was Zitron missing? He assumed that once someone declares for all to hear that the Emperor has no clothes that there will be a paradigm shift. He thought that the insupportable will lose support simply because no sane person can support it. Sadly sanity has little grip on the dealings of late-stage Western liberal politics. Little by little the United States has abolished sanity on a global scale in a process that began long before the first silicon chip was made.

The recent public listing and Initial Public Offering of Elon Musk’s SpaceX is a case in point. It is insane and dangerous and gobsmackingly corrupt, but to understand why it is accepted so blithely we have to understand that a whole ecosystem of scamming and corruption has been built to make such monstrosities viable.

For a while it looked as if the wheels were starting to come off the Space-X scam. The stock dropped below the opening retail price of the IPO. Of course the company has raised $86 billion from investors already, but despite having about $100 billion in liquid assets (against about $30 billion in debt) it is still trying to flog off another $20 billion in bonds. What that means is that it is asking people to loan it money for a fixed rate of return for set periods between 5 and 30 years but, and this is key, they can sell those bonds if they get worried about whether the company is still going to be around in 30 years, or 5 years for that matter.

The news of a bond issue caused a wobble that actually caused a general slump in tech stock prices, and when you see this happening you think “here we go, the bubble is going to burst now that people realise that they don’t want the hot potato”. But once again it didn’t happen. SpaceX stock rallied. Inconceivable! It has since continued to slide and now sells at $136 – just above what institutional investors could buy at for the IPO, but 14% down on the opening price for retail investors.

There has also been a rally in the wider tech industry particularly around computer memory chip manufacturers like Micron. The geniuses of the stock market have finally noticed what every 14 year-old gamer could have told them a year ago, which is that there is currently a lot of money to be made selling RAM.

Stock market investors seem completely stupid and/or deranged to suddenly go chasing after these new jangling keys like brainless kittens. The RAM is only this profitable because it is a necessary component for the data centre expansion which is the most fucked up part of the whole insane AI bubble, as I will discuss later. Yet as the screaming wreck of Western civilisation hurtles in flames towards the ground the madness has a certain logic. In an increasingly Helleresque world being rational becomes quite an irrational response. As long as everyone else is living in the delusion then why not bank on a stock that may not be commercially justifiable, but has serious political backing in both high and low places. Now that SpaceX stock is relatively stable then it makes a certain amount of sense to gamble on the potential of massive returns if it actually does take off, or offload to some dead-ender fanatic from Elon Musk’s personal cult if things start to pancake-shaped (they already started off as pear-shaped and there is only one way to go from there).

SpaceX is being given a big helping hand in this by being pumped by Wall St professionals. It was recommended by 18 out of 19 analysts last week and institutions have set price targets ranging from Goldman Sachs at $205 a share to Morgan Stanley at $300. This means that they think this as yet unprofitable company is worth between 139 and 203 times its current annual revenue.

There are signs that retail are not quite as stupid as these people would like, and it is likely that this is in fact the bursting of the bubble because the logic of making money from speculating will break down if heavily exposed investors, such as executives and venture capitalists, cannot offload onto suckers. SpaceX has the added layer of assurance because they have a cadre of Elon Musk loyalists out there, but I think that the amount of money that the gamergate geek-meathead community has to invest may fall far short of bailing them out.

SpaceX has shown their hand a little bit in its discussion of the role of retail investors. Institutional investors were able to buy shares at $135 each but retail investors had to pay $150 if they bought at opening price. SpaceX kept a huge chunk of its IPO (allocating 30%) for retail investors and partnered with platforms like RobinHood so that very small investors could buy stock. They made sure that institutional investors knew this. They sought to exclude investors with a history of flipping stocks quickly after listing, but signalled clearly to institutional investors that retail demand would provide security and an easy opportunity for quick profit-taking.

Reading between the lines the talk of retail being the “backbone” of the IPO and of “leveraging” Elon Musk’s influence can be read very cynically as telling the institutional investors that they don’t need diligence over the company because Musk’s cult of personality is the real safety net and the real opportunity. It is a vampire feast on the lifeblood of Musk’s entranced minions, and there are plenty to go around.

One of the nastiest aspects of the Space-X IPO is that the NASDAQ rewrote the rulebook so that an unprofitable newly listed stock would go into their NASDAQ 100 index which meant that index funds (including lots of retirement funds) would automatically buy the stock.

Looked at from a commercial perspective SpaceX looks a lot more like a pile of dogshit than people are willing to admit. The IPO has made Elon Musk a trillionaire largely because it has valued SpaceX at a market capitalisation of over 2 trillion (at time of writing). It’s revenue last year was less than 1% of that at $18.67 billion and it had negative earnings, making a loss of nearly $5 billion last year and a lost of over $4 billion in the first quarter of this year.

On the face of it if I had a business that had a revenue of $100,000 and was running at a $10,000 loss you would probably not pay me $500,000 to own 5% of the business, but that is roughly proportionate to the SpaceX IPO (or it would be if you had to sign a contract waiving your right to take me to court, and your 5% stake gave you only 0.5% voting rights in the running of the business which are some of the conditions of the Class A SpaceX shares that were made public. And if you add to that the fact that because you bought 5% I now officially have an asset recognised as being worth $10,000,000 by all the institutions and can raise cheap loans on that basis which I can use to earn money elsewhere).

SpaceX is not alone in its anomalously large market cap because Tesla is also weirdly overblown. On paper it is worth $1.4 trillion but has revenue of only $95 billion; declining sales as well as profits that dropped by 45% to $3.8 billion in 2025. As of writing the world’s biggest car manufacturer Toyota has a market cap of $197 billion (about 14% of Tesla’s) but a 2025 revenue of $337 billion and a profit of $33 billion. Since 2012 Toyota has released 34 new vehicle models and Tesla has released 6.

SpaceX and Tesla are in all important respects meme stocks except in that they have institutional backing and Musk has serious political power in a (now openly) corrupt system. In a real market-based economic system Musk would have long since failed himself to obscurity, but late-stage capitalism demonstrates what we should have all known long before – markets are never “free” and capitalism is not a system, it is an ideology used to conceal the unjust and undemocratic exercise of oligarchic power.

Ordinary people have mostly turned against Musk since his 2024 Trump endorsement and his Nazi salute in early 2025. He is constantly underwater in approval ratings. He is among the most disliked public figures in the US, which is saying something given the stiff competition, and the fact that he is probably more disliked in other countries. If we lived in a sane world this would be disastrous for the commercial viability of his businesses. After flashing his complete naked fascism in our faces Musk has been dancing an ugly striptease. He devotes a huge amount of effort to using X The Everything App to promote racism with the only fig leaf being that rather than saying the thing outright he subtweets it with a “hmmm, interesting” quote. He is constantly trolling on the side of the far-right with little attempt to hide the obscenity. We all know what is underneath – it is a Nazi.

With most people Musk’s brand became toxic. This could have led to consequences such as those that happened to John Schnatter, the former CEO and Chair of Papa John’s pizza. Musk’s brands are global and suffered a massive loss in revenue due to his unsavoury politics, but no one pulled the plug on him. His stalwart backing from the establishment is not despite him being a Nazi but because of it.

Musk’s cult following in the reality-optional community is a substantial economic resource, just as it is with Donald Trump. It does make some commercial sense to tolerate Musk driving away half of the potential market if you think that he can retain a loyal following of people who can reliably be conned into paying more than a product’s market value due to brand/cult loyalty. But this is only half of the answer. As we will see, white supremacy has a lot of institutional support. In fact, the tech industries are strongly linked to reactionary, misogynistic and fascistic politics because, unlike a food or retail chain, they aren’t really susceptible to consumer backlash. That is because they are actually rentiers – they don’t sell products to consumers nearly as much as they extract rents through fake innovation.

I will return to the tech industry in part 2, but I want to go back Musk for now because his continued “success” is a key driver of the normalisation of fascism.

As I said Musk’s success is definitely because he is a fascist, not despite the fact. While Musk cannot help his birth or upbringing, as a grown rich man he has been a union-bashing racist all along. I have had to swallow anger on several occasions when Tesla owners tell me they bought their vehicle “before anyone knew” as if his predilections were not widely reported before a couple of years ago. And these same people who have repudiated their Swasticars are as likely as not using Starlink, or installing Tesla batteries for solar storage, or using on X The Everything App while showing their #resistance by calling it “twitter” and posting about how bad it is.

This is the trick. He has told you that he is a Nazi and now by using his products you are saying that you are okay with that. It is true that consumer behaviour can not fix systemic problems, but in this instance we are dealing with wilful participation. This is the process of manufacturing assent. Historically fascist regime power has relied much more heavily on public assent than on public consent, with a plurality accepting extremism that they don’t actively share. A common right-wing trick is to make people think that the working class majority are more right-wing than they actually are. This, in turn, creates space for the bourgeoisie to think themselves far less right-wing and more virtuously progressive than they actually are. Thus they, they ruling class, assent to politics that are even further to the right.

The brand-conscious bourgeoisie are also the biggest suckers on the planet, easily in the same league as the MAGA crowd. They hunger for status and the aura of virtue so all you have to do is make an overpriced product that may or may not work marginally better than the competitors and then market it with an attached sense of saving the planet, supporting diversity, or even being political radical in some undefined way. This gives them the license to buy something when the real appeal is that other people can’t afford it.

Tesla cars, like Apple, owe their success to the credulousness of the brand-conscious bourgeoisie as much as any other thing. There is nothing like a life of comfort to dull the wits. But at least their suckers are real customers who provide them real revenue. With SpaceX the customers are a very small part of the total enterprise, with most of the business being made up of unrealistic promises.

At this point it is worth pausing to recount some of Musk’s most significant and ridiculous empty promises. In 2024 Quartz Magazine listed some: Robotaxis by 2020; the hyperloop that then became just a loop that then became a narrow 2 km tunnel in Las Vegas for Teslas to drive through slowly; humans on Mars by 2024; tourist Trips Around the Moon by 2018; “Probably close to zero new cases…” of Covid by April 2020; Coast-to-Coast Autonomous Driving by 2018; Full Self-Driving Cars “Next Year” every year from 2014 to 2021.

Musk is still promising a million person colony on Mars and it has been reported on seriously as a future revenue stream. Whatever surface plausibility this nonsense has dissipates when you ask the complex and detailed questions like “how?” and “why?” Musk actually promised Mars landings in 2018, 2022, and 2024. Then in 2025 he promised 5 landings within a year. Then in February he “pivoted” SpaceX to a lunar colony posting: “The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”

Musk reposted a ridiculous video on X The Everything App, commenting “Civilization on the moon!”. The scam uses its own flaws in judo like fashion as a form of boosterism. The plans are described breathlessly as “insane” and involving “never before heard of technology”. These are presented as selling points. This actually brings us back to fascism because it relies on an irrational belief in the triumph of the will as exercised by the übermensch.

These space fantasies are heavily reliant on the use of the Optimus robot which Musk says will be able to do “anything that humans don’t want to do” (such as buying cybertrucks). It is not even much of a joke given that SpaceX (which has bought very large numbers of cybertrucks) will probably be a big market for Tesla’s as yet unmarketable robots. The robots are another questionable proposition with a dubious use-case that Musk has been failing to deliver on as consistently as most of his other headline grabbing projects. According to the wikipedia section on “Expert opinion” his robots have been described as “the usual overblown hype”, “pure fantasy thinking” and “a complete and utter scam”.

He has now merged two ridiculous lies into one by saying that the moonbase will produce the 1,000,000 outer space data centres he has promised – launching them into the void with a mass driver at a rate of one each hour!

Sam Altman has called Space Karen’s orbital data centres “ridiculous”, but he has also said “I do guess a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.” Arguably Altman’s idea is equally deluded because there is no way of paying for all these data centres and more dangerous because they are building them anyway. The point is that both CEO’s are pushing for a technologically and economically deranged answer to the problems that their industry creates, and the AI boosters, including many in the industry, live with a complete disconnection between what they think is possible and the magic that would be required for it to happen.

The irony is that a lot of what Musk is saying he can do could be possible in time (including orbital data centres if we end up needing them for something), but not if people like him and the other fascists of what Gil Duran has termed the “Nerd Reich” crash civilisation. Musk is projecting the fantasies of a rich brat onto reality yet again and the like his other pet projects this will flop.

So Musk can’t really do anything right. There are lists of stupid and scary and, above all, cringe-inducing things that he has said and terrible jokes he has made. Musk is to most a pathetic figure, less übermensch than goobermensch, yet he is by some measures the most successful entrepreneur in human history.

Being an idiot hasn’t actually hurt Musk. Muskisms serve the same purpose as Trumpisms and Bushisms. I would not say that Trump and Musk are faking their stupidity, but George W. Bush was and it is a very instructive comparison to make. His malaproprisms were relentless, and they are a very common comedy technique too. There is a poem composed by Richard Thomson entirely of Bushisms which goes:

I think we all agree, the past is over. This is still a dangerous world. It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked Is our children learning? Will the highways of the Internet become more few? How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me. I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity. I know that the human being and the fish can coexist. Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family! Knock down the tollbooth! Vulcanize society! Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

A lot of these things were actually much funnier in context. The ironies were too frequent to be accidental. You can easily contrast his slack-jawed dumbstruck yokel act when in office with his demeanour in post-presidential interviews. Some of them are prepared remarks probably not even written by Bush, such as: “They never stop thinking about ways to harm our people, and neither do we” or the classic “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.”

Bush’s clowning was clearly used as cover because the reality of a ruthless corrupt mass-murderer from an elite fascist dynasty would have provoked much more outrage. His great-grandfather and grandfather were both openly eugenicist fascists. His granddad Prescott was a US Senator who was so closely aligned with the Nazis that researcher Jonathan Katz has said that he could not have been involved in the fascist “Business Plot” attempt to overthrow the US Government in 1933 because: “Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so home grown as the Business Plot.” The Bush family were linked to exactly the same fascists who have, as we will discover, been shaping the politics of Silicon Valley since long before it even existed.

Dubya is a fourth generation skull-and-bones club aristocrat who affects saying “nukuler”. The utility of his schtick is nowhere better illustrated than in the fact that it is generally accepted that this man who grew up in a family steeped in power politics, intelligence work, and the oil industry did not understand the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Islam, even though he had grown up knowing Muslims personally.

Bush oversaw the horrors of the Iraq invasion and occupation. The brutal bloodletting was, like the two-year onslaught on Gaza, the holocaust phase of a longer grinding genocide from which Iraq still shows no signs of making a real sustained recovery. The oil wealth, the geopolitics, and, as much as any other thing, the demography of Iraq made it a threat to US global domination. One can easily see why it serves their interest far better to portray a bungled and arrogant adventure than a successful process of genocide that grinds up millions of innocents, and I do mean millions, in a premeditated process of death and destruction.

This digression about Bush is no real digression, because these topics intersect on many levels. The same system is used for Trump and Netanyahu. Trump is a literal heel from the world of reality TV. Those who believe in their negative cults of personality, in which they are Demon Lord instead of Demigod, are no less mystical and deluded than those who worship their genius.

The idiotic president myth was central to selling a narrative about the US crimes against Iraq. It worked through exactly the same mechanism as that which makes people accept Musk’s “insane” moon base plans with ever more enthusiasm not despite but because of the objective unbelievability of the claim. A 50-year tradition in the US had it that there is a binary between the liberal “doves” and the conservative “hawks”. Those who identify as doves derive considerable emotional satisfaction from seeing their opponents as intellectually inferior. For that reason the interpretation which feeds that emotion take hold. Once that happens even the most hyperbolic and unreasonable new information actually only goes to confirm the original viewpoint which can become an important and violently defended part of one’s world-view.

Having spent decades trying to show people that Bush et al. were faking, I can firmly attest that as the saying goes “it is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” This is actually a tie that binds people. Fascist leaders, like other cult leaders, actually gain strength from being extravagantly wrong and from being comical. Musk and Trump embody this.

Musk and Trump are both genuinely capable of being foolish and self-defeating. That isn’t fake. But Trump is a billionaire who is President of the United States and is currently accumulating money at a truly insane rate. His blowhard bullshitter personality made him a perfect money-laundering front to run a seemingly endless series of worthless enterprises where dodgy contractors siphon off huge percentages and each failed business seemed to leave Trump miraculously richer. His latest venture, apparently, is the United States of America. I don’t want to say that the people of the United States are basically Davey Scatino – the “degenerate gambler” who is unlucky enough to know Tony Soprano, but despite really not wanting to say it I feel I have to because it is true.

Trump made $1.4 billion in crypto currency last, nearly half of it in royalties, even though his $TRUMP cryptocoin lost value, and the World Liberty Financial coins dropped to 89% of it’s value and the Trump affiliated Fight Fight Fight company dropped 97.5% of its value. The losses that his investors and customers suffer are almost exactly the same as his profits. It is simple theft and this is real liquid capital too, not growth in stock value, which is an important point when a crash looms closer with every second that tick by.

Trump is making out like a literal bandit and the people stupid enough to invest in his ventures are getting shafted. This did not happen overnight. Trump entered office with an incredible history of lawsuits and legal troubles. Even though these are mostly civil issues, the hundreds involving non-payment or underpayment of workers show a pattern that establishes a criminal intent. It is theft and in a properly functioning justice system it would prosecuted. Likewise in a properly functioning news media system it would never be omitted nor forgotten. Instead the media have always treated it as a minor character flaw, barely worth mentioning, even as Trump whips up racist fervour in the name of law and order.

The liberal media are far more interested in condemning Trump’s manners and vocabulary choices than his worst crimes, and in fact famously celebrated his first major war crime as Commander-in-Chief when the US bombed Syria 2017. Fareed Zakaria on CNN said “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night. I think this was actually a big moment.” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post that Trump had put “more umph, more credibility” back into American power. Brian Williams on MSNBC described the images of the missiles as “beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments” and said he was “guided by the beauty of our weapons”, which is a Leonard Cohen lyric.

But while Trump is fleecing the people of the US and elsewhere he is actually a very useful tool for the US empire. He has long perfected certain rhetorical techniques. Some of these, especially his misogynistic bullying, would not work without a certain amount of complicity from the news media. A key technique, however, is his constant use of elevated overconfident underinformed overstatements. He doesn’t care about reality or consistency he simply asserts as true whatever it is that best suits his purpose at the time, and may reverse mere moments later. Akin to Gish-galloping or flooding the zone with shit, this habit makes everything as nothing, or at least nothing that isn’t deniable. His vacillating praise and condemnation for international leaders, in particular, works well because, despite its surface appearance of untrammelled conviction, it is highly contingent. He runs hot and cold with everyone from Iranians to Zelensky to Europe’s leaders.

Meanwhile, no one who seriously thought through the amount of forward planning required to launch a war can think that a narcissistic easily distracted octogenarian conman is calling the shots, yet his completely incoherent and contradictory personality traits are trotted out every time to explain the latest breath-taking US crime. The 2011 Iraq withdrawal notwithstanding, imperial policy never changes with new administrations, yet commentary about that very policy always centres on the President. As Douglas Adams wrote in 1977: “The President in particular is very much a figurehead – he wields no real power whatsoever. … For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.”

Trump has got where he is today because he is a criminal and a bullshit artist, but in contrast Elon Musk has got where he is today because he is a criminal and a bullshit artist with a slightly different modus operandum. In truth, the richest people usually rely on criminal activity to gain and maintain their wealth. Sometimes they and their friends write the laws so that they are not committing crimes (such as wage theft which is often not counted as a crime despite, you know, being theft), but mostly making really large fortunes is quite reliant on crimes ranging from bribery and fraud, to murdering unionists. Generally, though, being a criminal is a necessary but insufficient basis for amassing immense wealth.

By contrast, crime is not a marginal part of Musk’s business. That is why, like Trump, Musk becomes ever richer without doing anything that is a notable commercial success. Trump famously assessed his own wealth based on an inflated “brand-value”. Musk has succeeded in getting everyone else to agree with his “brand value” through his two meme-stock companies. His constant glib lies are clearly wilful misrepresentation and he would not have succeeded to this point without them. It would not be hard to convince a jury of his criminal guilt if the case were laid out well, but he is protected by political power – both his own personal political power and the general presumption of impunity that protects all rich people until withdrawn by all the other rich people.

At one point Musk was facing a criminal fraud charge over his self-driving car claims, but that was ended by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which Musk himself was running. What happened was that Musk spent $352 million on Trump’s re-election and then Trump created DOGE with an executive order and Musk sent his henchbros to wreak havoc. A lot of attention has been paid to the impact on USAID and the attack on DEI, both of which are serious issues, but we aren’t talking enough about how this attack seems to have saved Musk from ending up broke and probably imprisoned. Along with stopping the fraud investigation, DOGE or Trump intervened in investigations of Musk or his businesses by: National Labor Relations Board; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; U.S. Department of Transportation; Federal Aviation Administration; NASA; Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Federal Election Commission; Securities and Exchange Commission; Food and Drug Administration; and the Environmental Protection Agency.

It is almost as if the net was closing on Musk and he had only one way out. His success in buying a government may partly be explained by the fact that lots of other tech interests benefited, including Amazon, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. In a report from August 2025 Public Citizen found that nearly half of all enforcement actions against the tech sector were halted or suspended, including 23 relating to cryptocurrency.

So Musk is really just the tip of the iceberg. The tech sector has become very scammy as a whole. A lot of activities in the tech sector have very little or no real world production involved. Key amongst these are the crypto and prediction market industries. By their very nature any gains made in these industries have nothing to do with value, they are all gains made at the expense of someone else. They are a zero-sum game, or would be if they did not have running costs and destructive externalities. In reality, as Dubya’s speechwriters might have said, they make the pie lower.

When crypto was born there were many justifications given for its existence. They can all still be argued in theory, but in the real world they are footnotes to a giant body text of scams, speculation, drug deals, money laundering, and sundry other blights on society. On the other hand, while crypto can claim some utility the claims about the positive side to “prediction markets” are transparently blithering nonsense.

Using the concept of the “wisdom of crowds” the Polymarket and Kalshi have both made claims that they are serving a purpose by determining the market odds of events. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan claims the have created the “global truth machine”. This is a huge part of the scam. The very name “prediction markets” makes it seem as if this is somehow the purpose of the enterprise, but they are not polling firms. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour wants to “financialise every difference of opinion” which is not actually like polling, but sounds a lot more like another thing called gambling.

Perhaps in some ways it is a truth machine in that it can actually make its own truths. The outcomes of events on Polymarket are adjudicated by people who have Universal Market Access tokens which they can use to vote on what reality is. There is nothing to stop people who own a lot of these tokens from betting on something and using their tokens to vote that they won the bet.

This all sounds unsustainable and illegal and even pretty stupid – just another scam like NFT’s – but Kalshi has partnerships with CNN, CNBC, and Fox and Polymarket has a partnership with Dow Jones which owns the Wall Street Journal. They are being treated as very serious worthy establishment figures despite a clearly nihilistic cash-makes-right attitude. In reality they are just gambling apps that advertise themselves as such but then claim they are not gambling apps but actually financial instruments platforms where you can hedge against losses, such as the losses you would sustain if Trump didn’t use the term “Sleepy Joe” in a speech.

Their “wisdom of the crowds” claim is clearly bunk as they are not measuring a range of estimates, but measuring how much money people are willing to bet. There is an ever-present likelihood of insider trading and the added nuclear option of a very rich person simply rewriting reality for financial gain – which is more-or-less what rich people do anyway but now it comes as an instant commodity. As they have already did with cheese, our good friends in the USA have made spraycan version of 1984.

Like generative AI, or the internet of things, or surveillance technology, this is innovation that is largely detrimental to its ordinary users aimed at making them pay directly or through taxes for things that are actually used to control and rob them.

This scam is quintessentially fascistic if only in the fact that it is on one level laughably stupid and on a different level monstrously and brutally harmful. This relates directly to real world issues that includes things like war in which people die violent horrible deaths. Even without the hazards of adding yet more opportunities for financial gain from mass death, this creates a gamification of all sorts of real-world events which may involve tragic suffering and loss. It spreads a sociopathic attitude wherein real people become abstract. Their fates become tokens to be fed into a slot machine.

Why is this even being allowed to happen? Why does anything happen these days? Why did the BBC spend over 80% of a news report on tortured hostage Dr Hussam Abu Saffiya repeating lies given to them by Israel even though Israel still hasn’t charged him with any crime after 500 days? Over 1000 people in Gaza have been killed directly by Israel since the “ceasefire” without a single Israeli killed in return. Now there are 23 giant cranes with remote-controlled machineguns hemming them into their tiny enclave like watchtowers around a concentration camp. Exactly like watchtowers around a concentration camp. The slow-motion extermination we are witnessing will not seem that slow in the telescope of history and our notions of politics give us no explanation for why it cannot be stopped. Somehow, though, our media and politicians go out of their way and sacrifice considerable credibility to maintain the pretext that this is not a one-sided slaughter. The Palestine Genocide is the most prominent, but not the only issue that seems to defy even the most pessimistic understanding of how the world works. It is all inconceivable.

The things that don’t make any sense are happening because the ideological edifice of Western liberalism is falling apart. The myths of Western liberalism – that it is morally superior, that it is civilised, that it is democratic, and even that it is particularly liberal – are cracking as the needs of the US empire make the charade untenable. There are only two places for the empire to go if it is to survive – to become a regime of raw lawless power or to become a society of profound delusion. The fascist answer is what it has always been – why not both?

The recent nihilism of the tech sector with its totally unproductive scams is only happening due to a crisis that is far more widespread. If we were not in a declining self-destructive political system the political establishment would never let such destabilising corruption continue, because they would be guarding their own slower surer corruption.

But before we even get to what is going on in the traditional economy I am going to have to delve even deeper into the tech industry, before eventually circling back to the AI bubble that should never have existed, let alone persisted to this point. And that is going to take a whole ‘nother episode.