It is time for an expanded class consciousness in this country. People need to see how insane the divide is between the bottom 99.9% and the top 0.1%.
As the most severe example, we will take Elon Musk’s ludicrous net worth into consideration and compare it to the average working class American.
Elon Musk is worth around $440 billion on December 14, 2024. To put this absurd number into context, it is best to list it as a full number:
$440,000,000,000.00
I know that actually does nothing to contextualize such an insane sum, so we can look at it from a different angle.
If you are a wage earner, you’re familiar with the concept of an hourly wage. The average hourly wage across the United States is around $35 an hour. In most of the corners of the country, this is considered a pretty good hourly rate. Where I live, it puts you among the educated high earners. I live in the rural Midwest, so it’s mostly dead-end retail and the like.
Elon Musk makes $650 per second. This equates to $2,340,000 an hour. This is equivalent to 66,857 average hourly workers.
Now imagine the work you do for a living. If it’s a 40-hour work week, you can expect around $1,400 before tax at $35/hour. Elon Musk’s 40-hour pretax total is 93,600,000.00.
1.1 million to 3 million is the average LIFETIME earnings of folks in the United States. In one week, he made more than anywhere between 30 and 90 people will make their entire lives.
So potentially everyone in your family for several generations could work their whole lives and still not make what this man will make in a single 40 hour week. All of the work they do, all of the things they helped to create, all they build, improve and tear down. Do you honestly believe that Elon Musk puts more good into the world in one week than everyone you have ever known or will know for their entire lives? Because you can’t make that scenario make sense and it is all a fact based on current averages. This level of wealth should not exist and it should not be aspired to.
You have literally nothing in common with the billionaire class. You enrich them with your worship and further widen the divide we can never hope to close. It is the largest case of Stockholm Syndrome ever.
It feels like a symptom of some greater social contagion. Like the majority of people will willingly give up their autonomy for the most remote chance at the spillage of the riches of their captors. It is the worship of wealth without doing the math to see they will never experience what they are so devoted to promoting.
The average person can’t hope to make a fraction of one percent of what any one of the Forbes 400 currently owns. The average person would have to work between 300 and 900 lives just to join the list of over 2,700 billionaires across the world. These numbers don’t take into account paying anything out to live, you’d have to save 100% from every lifetime.
2,700 billionaires in the world that currently has a population of around 8.025 billion.
1 in every 2,972,222 people are in this club, accounting for a fraction of 0 percent of the global population.
99+ percent of us are on the wrong side of this equation and can do very little to improve our chances because we weren’t born with the winning genetic lottery numbers.
Revision:
As of 12/17/24, Elon Musk is now worth $460 billion. He has gained $20 billion dollars in three days. In three days, his net worth has gone up as much as 6,666 to 18,181 lifetimes of average peasants. To put that into focus, he has gained enough that he could pay the entire town I live in a lifetime’s worth of average income and have money to spare. The work that he may have done in those three days is not more valuable than the people who live in the town I call home. These are boring, ordinary people with boring, ordinary jobs and lives, but I will defend their work over his literally any day of the week.
I honestly feel we are living in an alternate universe where the bad guys win and we are just starting to realize it even though it’s been happening for decades.