Taylor Swift, Donald Trump & The Grotesque Spectacle of The Super Bowl.
It's a billionaires world. You are just paying for it.
I will probably watch it.
I like football. I love Kendrick Lamar. And I am fascinated by the grotesque.
The Super Bowl is always the High Holy Day of American Capitalism. You may claim it is Black Friday, but that is simply the day we all obey. Super Bowl Sunday is when the dollar is truly worshipped and this year promises to be the most ugly spectacle of all, taking place in the "Caesars Superdome" paid for with state money and branded by a Casino. How American.
A Billionaire will raise a trophy, won for them by the physical sacrifices of Black athletes. Another Billionaire will be in the private box, cheering for her millionaire boyfriend. Another Billionaire will publicize her world tour. A Billion dollar franchise will promote their next movie. A supposed Billionaire president will wave and smirk and yuck it up. Billion dollar gambling companies will lure millions of people, who can't afford homes, to spend a Billion dollars on bets. All while the richest man in the world takes hold of the public finances of the richest country in the world.
Elon Musk is not an inventor. He is not even an engineer. He is not an Edison-type figure—though Edison, to be fair, was also a thief. No, Musk is something far more American: he is a brand, an abstraction, a curated avatar of progress who has managed, through sheer meme-powered repetition, to convince the public that he is some brilliant mind of the 21st century.
The issue with this, aside from the existential insult of it all, is that Musk has essentially executed a financial coup on the United States government, a hostile takeover so brazen yet so boringly technical that most people don’t recognize it for what it is. This is the kind of thing that used to require military juntas, strategic assassinations, or at least some telegenic tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. Musk, being a product of our time, did it with government contracts, subsidies, and a grotesquely overleveraged cult of personality.
Consider SpaceX, Musk’s most objectively impressive endeavor, exists primarily because of NASA. The company’s entire business model hinges on massive federal contracts, funneled into Musk’s pockets in exchange for his supposedly revolutionary launch technology—except, fun fact, NASA was already developing reusable rockets before Musk even knew what a Falcon Heavy was. He just privatized the idea, repackaged it, and convinced the public that the government is inefficient while simultaneously taking billions from it. It’s the kind of scam that would make a defense contractor horny.
Or take Tesla, that great beacon of "free-market innovation," which has received more than $7.5 billion in direct government subsidies, plus billions more in indirect tax incentives, carbon credits, and municipal bribes for the privilege of housing one of his so-called Gigafactories. Musk has achieved the American Dream, by which I mean he has convinced libertarians that he is self-made while suckling endlessly at the teat of the federal budget. If there is a purer expression of late-stage capitalist hypocrisy, I have yet to see it.
The thing about fascism, real fascism, is that it rarely looks like a leather-booted dictator at first. It looks like efficiency. It looks like a return to when things were sensible. It looks like a strong man who gets things done, a singular figure who is smarter than the bureaucracy, someone who can "cut through the red tape" and save us all. Musk has weaponized this mythology expertly. His businesses do not function without state intervention, but he has convinced millions—including most of Congress—that he alone is able to determine the future of transportation, energy, AI, space, and even public discourse. He has made himself indispensable to the state while claiming to be above it.
Which is, of course, the oldest con in the book.
There are more billionaires in Trump’s cabinet than there are transgender college athletes in the entire country, but only one of these groups is framed as an existential threat. The existence of a mere handful of transgender athletes is reduced to bogeywomen conjured in congressional hearings. The fascist machine requires an enemy. The real crisis, we are told, is not the wealth hoarded at the top but a handful of teenagers running track meets in towns no billionaire could find on a map.
There is a hallucination surrounding wealth. The idea that these men—and they are mostly men—got here through their own brilliance. That they actually built something. That they worked harder, wanted it more. But anyone who has waited tables knows that work and wealth are not the same. Anyone who has picked fruit in fields under the sun knows that labor is not what makes billionaires. What makes billionaires is the ability to extract, to hoard, to pull more from the world than one person could ever need and still say: it is not enough.
In the end, it is always about power. It is power that allows them to believe that the world is theirs to shape, that their ideas are always the best ideas, that their vision is the future’s only path forward. They build rockets because the world they made is dying and they would rather escape than fix it. They buy platforms because the weight of their own voices is never enough, because they need amplification, validation, because they are addicted not just to wealth but to the certainty that they alone are right. They create problems only to return later with band-aid solutions, holding them out like gifts, expecting gratitude, expecting reverence, expecting—always—more.
Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Rihanna are of the same breed - as much as we may love them and think of them as better - they hoard and they extract and ruin the planet. Nothing for them, everything for them, is never enough. Being a talented woman does not inoculate you from the ugliness of being ultra-rich.