Two egos like Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s could never share the spotlight if it weren’t for the unifying force of grifter solidarity—two oligarchs teaming up to further tip the scales against everyone else. Just as Trump’s P.R. campaign as a canny dealmaker hid his multiple bankruptcies, Musk’s rogue genius performance serves as cover for the fact that he’s just another billionaire buying up others’ ideas and playing the system with enough of a safety net to repeatedly fail. His whole shtick is built on the idea that he’s a bold, self-made innovator who defies the odds, shuns government handouts, and stands for the unbridled power of the free market. In reality, his empire, built originally on an apartheid emerald mine, has been propped up by public money for years. One of its most consistent sources of income has been Tesla’s exploitation of the carbon credit market.
Tesla, the supposed future of clean energy, isn’t just making money by selling electric cars—it’s making a fortune off a regulatory loophole. In the first nine months of 2024, 43 percent of Tesla’s net income came from selling credits to other automakers that hadn’t met emissions standards. It’s not innovation that’s keeping Tesla’s finances afloat; it’s a rigged system that Musk is milking for everything it’s worth. And all the while, he’s using his newfound power as Trump’s unelected co-president to gut the very government programs that provide working people with a fraction of the support that he’s quietly pocketing.
Musk loves to sneer at working-class people who rely on food stamps or unemployment benefits, claiming they’re lazy or entitled. But what’s more entitled than using regulatory credits to boost your company’s stock price and then leveraging that stock for loans to keep your cash flow steady? The hypocrisy gets even more grotesque when you look at Musk’s role in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—the dystopian fever dream where he’s now helping Trump dismantle social programs under the guise of “cutting waste.” While he’s ensuring billionaires like himself keep their tax breaks and loopholes, he’s working to slash food assistance, disability benefits, and Social Security. The plan is clear: If you’re rich, the government will help you get richer. If you’re poor, you’re on your own.
Meanwhile, Musk has strategically positioned himself to undermine public infrastructure alternatives to his products. Musk has started targeting public transit and infrastructure projects, claiming they are bloated and inefficient—while his own half-baked ideas, like the Las Vegas “Loop” (a glorified tunnel for Teslas), receive public subsidies and fizzle out into tech-world vaporware. He is claiming that government spending on social good is a waste, while positioning himself as the one true visionary who should receive those taxpayer dollars instead.
Here’s how Tesla’s legalized scam works: Under California’s Zero Emission Vehicle, or ZEV, mandate and the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards, carmakers are required to meet emissions targets. If they don’t, they have to buy carbon credits from companies that produce cleaner vehicles. Tesla, which only sells electric cars, racks up a surplus of these credits and sells them to gas-guzzling automakers that don’t want to invest in real change.
In other words, Tesla isn’t making money because it’s selling cars efficiently—it’s making money because Ford and GM still rely on gasoline. Musk has figured out how to turn regulatory inaction into a billion-dollar side hustle. If Tesla’s carbon credit well ever runs dry—if regulatory standards change or if automakers finally catch up—Tesla’s bottom line takes a hit. That’s when the whole house of cards Musk has built starts to wobble.
Musk’s entire empire hinges on one thing: Tesla’s sky-high stock price. He’s leveraged Tesla shares to take out massive loans, using them as collateral to fund his lifestyle and side projects. This means that keeping Tesla’s valuation high is a matter of personal financial survival. Those carbon credits—essentially free money from the government—make Tesla’s earnings look better than they actually are, which in turn props up its stock price.
But this strategy is starting to fall apart. Tesla’s stock is plummeting—down nearly 40 percent this year—due to increased competition, battery technology falling behind, and Musk’s erratic behavior scaring off investors. When a company is built on smoke and mirrors, it doesn’t take much for the illusion to shatter.
Musk isn’t an anomaly. The ultrawealthy have always found ways to rig the rules in their favor, whining about government overreach while their fortunes are built on government handouts. They attack welfare programs for the poor while hoarding subsidies for themselves. They position themselves as antiestablishment disruptors, even as they manipulate laws, lobby for loopholes, and install themselves in government positions to protect their wealth.
But Musk isn’t just exploiting the system—he is the system. Directing DOGE, he has the power to engineer even more policies that funnel taxpayer money to himself and the rest of the parasite class while gutting the programs that hold society together. Through DOGE, Musk is orchestrating deep cuts to social programs while ensuring billionaires like himself keep extracting wealth from public resources. While DOGE regularly inflates its cost savings, the proto-agency is doing real harm in service of funding an extension of the 2017 tax cuts from which wealthy earners would get an outsize share of tax benefits. According to the Tax Policy Center, those making $450,000 and up would get nearly half the benefit.
DOGE’s slashing of the workforce across agencies like the Social Security Administration threatens the on-time delivery of benefits to those who rely on assistance. But the threats to Americans’ livelihoods hardly stop there. The Agriculture Department cut $1 billion that would provide food to schools and food banks through local farms. The School Nutrition Association warns that this ruthless decision could end free school meals for approximately 12 million students in 24,000 schools across America, hitting hardest in the poorest communities already grappling with rising food costs. This comes in tandem with Republican cuts to SNAP, which helps no- and low-income Americans afford groceries. Some recipients say their benefit has already been cut by half.
With DOGE’s help, the Trump administration is also dismantling the Department of Education, which provides social mobility to millions of students by making college more accessible to low-income students and students who could otherwise be discriminated against by race, sex, or other characteristics. DOE also provides critical funding for K-12 education. Cutting that would deprive particularly low-income families, students with disabilities, and marginalized communities of essential educational resources, entrenching systemic disparities for generations to come. Simultaneously, Musk is advocating for the dismantling of consumer protections such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, despite his conflicts of interest. This would directly benefit predatory financial institutions at the expense of working-class Americans.
This is what happens when a billionaire grifter is put in charge of the government: The money flows up, the protections collapse, and working-class Americans are left to fend for themselves. The parasite class, led by Musk, isn’t just feeding off the system—they are actively tearing it apart so that no one else can ever use it again.
Reagan may have invented the welfare queen to shame the poor, but it was always the rich that embodied it. The carbon credit scheme that bolsters Tesla’s finances perfectly exemplifies this larger pattern: a system that appears to promote environmental goals while primarily enriching those who know how to game it. While ordinary Americans struggle under inflation and stagnant wages, billionaires like Musk can transform regulatory requirements into profit centers. They build their fortunes on handouts while demanding that everyone else fend for themselves.
The question isn’t whether we’ll finally see through the con—it’s whether we’ll do anything about it before people like Musk can cement their power even further. Instead of allowing this plunder to continue, we need comprehensive regulatory reform that closes these loopholes and ensures that environmental incentives serve their intended purpose rather than becoming billionaire bailouts. We need transparency around DOGE’s operations and stronger congressional oversight of unelected power brokers who shape policy without accountability. And, as the climate crisis accelerates, we need real fixes, not get-out-of-tax-free cards for those most responsible for carbon emissions: large corporations. The Trump-Musk project is the inheritance of four decades of class warfare. Not content to merely buy favorable policies, the oligarchs are now in the driver’s seat. Their rise to power highlights the broken system that lets the rich extract limitless wealth from the working public while the rest of us are told to work harder, sacrifice more, and expect less.
