Face It, the US Is In the Hands of Ultra-Rich Grifters Good at Only One Thing: Getting Richer

Today's mega-bilionaires didn't invent anything except money making gimmicks.

Megabillionaires Mark uckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (along with minor billionaire Sundar Pichai of Google) at rump’s Second Inauguration (courtesy of BBC video)

Look at the billionaires backing Trump. Look at Trump himself, who wasn’t a billionaire until he became president for a second term and thus saw his failing social media venture Truth Social, briefly soar with his election win, allowing him to cash in.

These billionaires flocking to Trump are all phenomenally selfish, greedy people who know how to hustle the rubes (as Trump did, launching a Trump-memed crypto coin and peddling it to his supporters, collecting over $100 million in trading fees while leaving 800,000 MAGA suckers with $20 billion in losses.

Elon Musk, the purpored rocket scientist and founder of Space-X and billionaire owner of Tesla Inc., did not invent the first commercially successful electric car. He didn’t even come up with the clever idea of naming ther vehicles and the company after electrical wizard Nicola Tesla. Two computer engineers, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, founders of Tesla Motors, did all that with the help of two other engineers, J. B. Straubel and Ian Wright.

All Musk did was make money. His first venture was Zip2, company that produced maps and business directories for use by online newspapers. He developed and marketed this and then sold it to computer company Compaq for $307 million. He used some of those winnings to found X.com, an online financial transaction company later called Paypal. When Ebay bought that operation for $1.5 billion, Musk joined the big-leagues of America’s wealthy. He used his new wealth to found SpaceX (which he was able to staff up with real rocket scientists and engineers) and to become a major investor in Eberhard's and Tarpenning’s Tesla Motors, which, when it held a public offering of shares, became worth $226 million.

Jeffrey Bezos, like Musk an engineer by training, started his career working on Wall Street before striking out on his own, founding an online bookstore, which ultimately became an online store for virtually anything and everything, making him, as largest shareholder and chairman, as rich as Musk. Indeed he and musk as swell as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of an online site that rated girls at Harvard as dates and eventually became Facebook. The three men periodically trade off being the world’s richest man depending upon the shifting valuation of their companies’ shares.

All three guys stood fawningly behind Trump as he took his inaugural oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution of the United States (an oath he promptly began violating before the day was out), watching as honored guests simply because they are incomprehensibly wealthy, not because of any admirable character traits or brilliancec on their parts.

It’s important to look at who these people behind Trump are because they are not really the creative geniuses and admirable leaders that they and other people in leadership roles in Washington think they are.

If one looks back at who has led this country over the course of its history, we find generals like George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson, William H. Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Rutherford B. Hays, James A. Garfield, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison.

Six presidents have been engineers, surveyors, inventors, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, widely considered to have been the country’’s two best presidents and both trained land surveyors, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, both engineers, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both inventors.

One. president, Woodrow Wilson, was a teacher.

Twenty-five of the presidents have been lawyers, a profession that makes some sense given that governing is very much about working with, writing, improving, refining and replacing laws.

Based upon constant dollars, only two presidents — Donald Trump (arguably our worst president in terms of criminal record, respect for the Constitution, and lack of human empathy), and John F. Kennedy (whose short tenure before his assassination makes his presidency hard to asses) — have been billionaires in today’s dollars, though eight have been millionaires.

Surely the least impressive resume for a president would seem to be real estate investor, which is all our current one has got to show.

This may explain why, to kick off his second term as president, the first thing President Trump did was announce his plan to buy (or invade and occupy) Greenland, to pressure Canada into becoming America’s 51st state, and to try to claim the Gulf of Mexico by renaming it the Gulf of America.

I”m not saying that all those presidents with more impressive resumes than Trump were better for having them. Some like Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, both generals, were terrible presidents according to historians, and Hoover, despite his engineeering training, was at sea trying to deal with the onset of the stock market collapse and subsequent Great Depression.

But real estate investor and casino owner is about as far from the experience one would hope a national leader would have to draw on in running a country, and we are seeing that demonstrated.