There’s a special glee in watching the real-time, self-induced demise of the world’s richest man. Elon Musk, once crowned the boy-king of tech utopianism, has become a tragicomic emblem of what happens when unfettered power meets zero accountability and even less empathy. On Wall Street, his house of electric cards is collapsing: Tesla profits are down 71 percent, shareholders are restless, and even the once-smitten business press are using words like “panic.” And this week, Tesla’s notoriously sycophantic board reportedly—if only for a fleeting moment—considered the heretical notion of replacing him as CEO.

In Washington, his soon to be concluded reign as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leaves a legacy of bureaucratic arson: mass firings, dismantled aid programs, and a chainsaw routine at CPAC that felt like ketamine-laced performance. And still, with the bodies of his bad decisions piling up behind him, Musk went on Fox News to cry about how unfair it all is. He’s no better than a plantation boss bemoaning the loss of free labor, or a robber baron lamenting the bad press after forcefully putting down a strike. Yet, he dares to ask for sympathy. But this isn’t just the fall of a tycoon. No, it’s the flailing, unhinged collapse of a worldview: one that treats governance like a meme, human beings like data points, and compassion as a virus to be eradicated.

It wasn’t that long ago that Elon Musk was the liberal poster child for Green capitalism, the magical thinking that climate change, economic stagnation, and job scarcity could all be solved by sleek electric cars and billionaire jaunts to space.

In 2015, President Obama used his penultimate State of the Union address to give Musk and his companies a glowing verbal body rub for pushing green tech innovation. Two years earlier, Obama’s Department of Energy handed Tesla a $465 million taxpayer-backed loan, which helped the automaker finally post a profit in 2013. And while liberals went apeshit when Trump turned the White House lawn into a literal “Tesla showroom” during a March event, it’s worth remembering Obama personally toured a SpaceX facility back in 2010 to show his love for public-private bromance in aerospace and renewables.

Even before his courtship with the Obama administration, Musk had been glazed by progressive institutions, honored by the National Wildlife Federation, and handed the Global Green Product Design Award by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev. 

And before he cozied up to Trump, Musk made a brief show of conscience by quitting Trump’s advisory councils over the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. He even declared “climate change is real” and called the move “not good for America or the world.”

Naturally, that principled defiance didn’t stick. And now, Musk’s favorability rating, among everyone, not just liberals, is nestled somewhere between shingles and prostate cancer. His Teslas are dotted with Nazi insignias, and protests against him and his dealerships grow by the week.

Besides gifting us gems like “Elon can oligargle dez nutz,” the nationwide protests against the world's richest man may have been the official nail in the coffin in the collective hallucinations that Green capitalism was ever a panacea for our climate and labor crisis, and that Elon Musk was ever anything more than a self-enriching opportunist. 

“I think the days when people thought we could solve the climate change and crisis by driving an overpriced Tesla are dead,” jokes Thea Riofrancos, Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute. 

Alas, we deified Musk, only for him to unsurprisingly be revealed as a false messiah.

There’s already been plenty written about Musk and his fellow tech overlords (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Andreessen), and whether they were always oligarchs in disguise, ready to buddy up beside a conveniently right-wing government (a hard yes on that one). Musk is who he’s always been, which is the same as all high-level capitalists: a self-important, mendacious fuck, willing to choose whatever path is most beneficial to him, all others be damned.

As much as we’ve all basked in the collective schadenfreude over the past month—watching Teslas and Cyber Trucks get defaced with Nazi swastikas (which, for the record, is not a hate crime, no matter what the New York Times may suggest), it’s hard not to feel a little twinge of collective complicity. After all, we did allow taxpayer money to flow straight into his pockets in the first place. 

With Musk, we convinced ourselves we were investing in a climate Messiah, the next "great man" who would steer us toward a utopian green future. We imagined he would be the hero of the climate crisis, the one who would save us from ourselves. Instead, we handed him the keys to unfathomable wealth, elevating him to the point where he now wields influence on par with the president. And what does he do with that power? He uses it to decimate anything that threatens his stranglehold on the future. We didn’t bankroll a savior, we created a monster. A monster who has turned the very tools of democracy that enriched him, into weapons to dismantle democracy itself.

As the Washington Post recently reported, Musk primarily built his fortune and business empire from $38 billion in public coffers, both from federal and local governments.  In fact, he's drawing from the trough again as he stands to be rewarded handsomely from Trump's recently proposed $1 trillion Pentagon budget, which will enrich musk and other defense contractors, while education, arts, Medicaid, Social Security, health and everything else, not in the purview of our oligarchic overlords, stands to suffer.

Of course, perhaps it's simply the playbook of most rapacious capitalists propelled up a ladder through luck, stomping on the hands of others and assistance through the public purse, only to set fire to the thing, scorching it whole behind them once they reach the top.

“Tesla and SpaceX would not exist today without help from the government. People need to bear that in mind, when governments give tax breaks to billionaires, that means governments either need to spend less on other things, like schools, healthcare, and housing, or they need to raise taxes on the rest of us, so we end up paying for Musk largesse," says Jonathan Rosenblum, a longtime labor activist and union organizer with UAW. 

To Rosenblum’s point, Musk has been draining public resources long before he “volunteered” to lead the Department of Government Efficiency. Every dollar handed to Musk is a dollar diverted from essential public services: schools, transit, and healthcare. The opportunity cost of those subsidies isn’t abstract; it’s real, and it goes straight into his pockets. And it’s done at the expense of workers and unions.

“Doge is merely accelerating this track record of theft. In protesting the Tesla brand, people are properly drawing the connection between Musk’s obscene wealth and his thieving ways,” says Rosenblum.

It’s true that few have taken more and given less back to the public than Musk. After receiving billions in taxpayer support, Musk has built a business model on suppressing worker organizing. From illegally firing union supporters at Tesla’s California plant to targeting software workers in New York, his managers have followed a consistent playbook of intimidation and retaliation.

“People are rightfully angry that the richest man in the world is collaborating with the most powerful man in the world to steal our retirements, our healthcare, and our educational opportunities. Musk is obscenely rich today in part because of the massive public subsidies he has pursued aggressively over the years,” says Rosenblum. 

Along with other rapacious billionaires, Musk has also led a full assault on the National Labor Relations Board over the last two years. Through his companies, Tesla, SpaceX, and X, he’s repeatedly violated labor law: threatening Tesla workers with the loss of stock options if they unionize, banning union t-shirts on the factory floor, and illegally firing employees at SpaceX and X for organizing or speaking out. 

These violations led to multiple rulings from the NLRB against Musk’s companies. But instead of complying with the law, he chose a path that reflects a long American tradition: when the rules don’t serve the powerful, fuck it, dismantle the rules altogether. Through SpaceX, Musk filed a federal lawsuit challenging the very constitutionality of the NLRB, which was created during the New Deal to ensure that working people, especially the most underrepresented, had a voice in the workplace. Make no mistake, this wasn’t just a legal maneuver; it was an ideological assault aimed at erasing one of the few remaining tools of federal protection for labor rights. It’s a stark reminder that in this country, the powerful often see accountability as optional, and when facing it, will do everything they can to rewrite the terms of democracy in their favor.

Today, Tesla stands as the largest non-union auto manufacturer in the U.S. It’s become a model of how to scale production while locking workers out of a voice on the job. Nor is this just a domestic issue. Tesla has refused to sign collective bargaining agreements even in union-strong countries like Germany and Sweden. That’s what we’re subsidizing with our public dollars: a global campaign against workers' rights.

Tesla, despite ranking ninth in earnings among U.S. automakers, commands a $1.25 trillion valuation, largely propped up by the aforementioned public subsidies. A functioning NLRB threatens that business model by giving workers a say in how those government-supported workplaces operate. By working hand in hand with Trump, Musk is pushing an agenda that would gut the NLRB, firing judges, paralyzing enforcement, and rendering union protections meaningless. 

The goal is clear: create a legal and political environment where companies like Tesla and SpaceX can violate labor law with impunity, silencing workers while continuing to extract billions from the public. If Musk succeeds, it won’t just be his workers who suffer, it will be a decisive blow to what little remains of labor rights in the private sector.

What we’re seeing is a coordinated attack on the labor law infrastructure itself, with Musk playing a leading role. With Trump openly dismantling collective bargaining rights for federal workers, nominating anti-union lawyers like Crystal Carey to the NLRB, and firing Board members like Gwynne Wilcox to disable its function, corporate America is being given the green light to ignore labor law altogether. Utah’s recent ban on public sector bargaining and the Michigan case where an employer refused to recognize a union election, citing the chaos at the NLRB, are early signs of what’s to come. Employers like Musk are watching closely and acting quickly. If the courts uphold this unraveling of the NLRB’s authority, we won’t just witness more union-busting, we’ll see the total erosion of the right to organize in America.

“Unions, when they’re doing the right thing, are the most effective force for change,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor scholar at Cornell University and leading expert on unionizing strategies. 

That’s exactly why she says Musk sees unions as such a threat. His attack on them follows the standard anti-union playbook: surveil, delay, intimidate, retaliate, and then challenge legal frameworks. What sets Musk apart is that he’s scaled up these tactics using the vast resources of his corporate empire along with leveraging the machinery of government to further erode labor protections. “He’s firing people in these agencies meant to keep corporations accountable so that there won’t be any checks and balances,” Bronfenbrenner says. 

Musk is attempting to deliver the death blow to a labor movement that’s been under attack for decades. The decline didn’t start with him; it was set in motion under Democratic administrations that claimed to support workers while advancing trade deals, deregulation, and immigration policies that weakened labor’s power. Bronfenbrenner is quick to point out that neither President Obama nor Clinton were true friends of labor. The former was the “deporter-in-chief” of immigrant workers, and the latter spearheaded NAFTA, which undermined organized labor and decimated working-class jobs in America.

“Unions haven’t been holding Democrats accountable. They’ve been so scared of having anti-union folks in office that they take for granted that Dems will do right by them,” she says. “We can’t dance around the subject anymore. Labor has to have its own party and educate workers.” 

This is why, at a time when only 6% of private sector workers are in unions—compared to 32% in the public sector—she argues that the public must be educated on what fascist authoritarians of the past did to labor. Figures like Franco and Hitler didn’t just target marginalized communities; they first dismantled unions, understanding that weakening labor was the first step toward unleashing full-scale assaults on broader societal freedoms.

“Unions have to stand up for trans workers, and immigrants. The rank and file can’t start thinking they’re safe, they aren’t. They have to have the courage to stand up and be in front of this struggle,” she says.

Public protesting and shaming are fine, but what workers and the general public really need to do, according to Bronfenbrenner, is truly hit Tesla, and all corporations that would assail labor rights, where it hurts.

“We have to use power, not shame. We have to interfere with supply chains. Whatever you’re doing has to cost enough to a corporation for it to do the right thing,” she says. 

But the fight against Musk, and whatever corporate misanthrope will come after him, ultimately boils down to whether labor can convince enough of the public that their flourishing is dependent on a greener and more democratic future.

“Can’t assume workers want a revolution. Workers want better lives,” says Bronfenbrenner. 

Don’t we all.