. . . His net worth at most recent estimate sits somewhere in the neighborhood of $860 billion. The 55-year-old Nazi-saluting CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who occupies his free time posting calls for race war, could dump half a billion dollars on each of the next 16 elections in a row before he had spent one percent of his wealth. The world’s richest individual spent, relative to the amount he can afford to spend, virtually no money at all. He can try this again, and he will, at larger scale and with better planning and more numerous redundancies. Unless.

The Democrats elected to all those offices will be inaugurated into a huge mess in January. The federal government is in tatters, the judiciary seeded with sneering MAGA goons like bear traps on a forest floor, the executive branch a metastatic growth of varyingly murderous criminal enterprises in unholy union with a psychotic, apocalyptic tech industry in suicide-cult thrall to bumbling chatbots. Donald Trump will still be the president. His various racist paramilitaries will still exist, and will still be disappearing people off American streets wherever they are not outright slaughtering those people in broad daylight. His senseless war against Iran will still be happening. The U.S.-abetted genocide in Palestine will still be happening. The campaign to drive trans Americans out of society will still be happening; young girls in the state of Washington will have to submit to DNA tests and/or genital inspection in order to participate in sports.

This week’s results notwithstanding, the electoral map is still gerrymandered to hell, voting rights are still under assault, and the social equality gains of the 19th and 20th centuries are still being rolled back all over the place. The mainstream press will still be all but totally consolidated in the hands of a tiny number of stupid fascist assholes. Normal day-to-day shit will still be insanely expensive. The day after the swearing-in of our newly enblued Congress, life will still suck mondo ass for basically every normal American.

There’s a lot to do, is what I am saying.

Somewhere amid all the Congressional hearings called for by all of this, though, someone simply must find time to break Elon Musk on the fucking wheel. The level of wealth he has attained would make him an existential threat to democracy even if the United States had reasonable campaign-finance laws, which it does not, and even if Musk were not, personally, an open and explicit enemy of pluralism, of the rule of law, and of racial and gender equality, which he is. As things stand, he is, in literal and fundamental terms, incompatible with a functional and functioning society.

Breaking Musk would be necessary even if he had not spent the past several years providing numerous perfectly good excuses for doing so. Thankfully(?), he has! Via the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which he ran, Musk shuttered USAID; when that action’s effects are done spooling out, he will be responsible for millions of deaths around the world. He has used SpaceX’s Starlink network to manipulate the war in Ukraine. His car company’s cars are shoddy pieces of shit, and their faulty autonomous self-driving technology routinely kills people. His space company’s rockets are shoddy pieces of shit that routinely blow up high above the Earth and litter its surface with toxic burning trash.

The silver lining in allowing such obscene wealth and power to concentrate themselves in one revolting addled herb, constitutionally incapable of winning the sincere esteem of any person less detestable than himself, is this: It is a problem with the exact same size, dimensions, and outline as Elon Musk himself. Yes, OK, sure: He is in turn a symptom of a much larger and more complex problem, that of capitalism itself. We will deal with that as we go. But Elon Musk’s wealth and power can be broken, as straightforwardly as by breaking Elon Musk. The most direct path to doing durable good for American democracy, right now, is the one that leaves tire tracks across Elon Musk’s stupid fucking face.