The grotesque inequality embodied by Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg is a threat to democracy | Jeff Sparrow

The higher the monkey climbs, the more he exposes his backside.

So too with the super rich.

Take Elon Musk.

Between April 2020 and April 2021, Musk reportedly made nearly US$140bn.

In the United States at the time, the average annual wage was about US$75,000.

In other words, Musk earned a mind-boggling 1.86m times more than the average American: some $383m each and every day.

What morality could possibly justify such a disparity?

Did Musk work 1.86 million times harder than everyone else? Was he, perhaps, 1.86 million times smarter?

The last few weeks have, rather definitively, settled such questions.

Having acquired a social network seemingly on a whim, Musk set about running Twitter via Twitter, a process that provided a tweet-by-tweet glimpse of his very David Brent management energy.

Most spectacularly, he monetised blue-tick certification, a policy that (as absolutely everyone predicted) unleashed a torrent of verified parodies.

Meanwhile, over at Meta (the corporation previously known as Facebook), Mark Zuckerberg put on a similar display of concentrated ineptitude.

Not so long ago, the Zuck earned an eye-watering $28,538 a minute. Business Insider calculated the Facebook founder could, at that stage, hand over $100 to every living person in the US, and still keep more than half of his fortune intact.

To put it another way, Musk shelled out dollars with a billion or so to spare.

In part, we can blame a media too often prone to slobber over the intersection of wealth and technology.

When people show you who they are, Maya Angelou warned, believe them the first time.

To that end, the relative transparency of the internet constitutes a tremendous boon, providing oversharing plutocrats with all the digital rope necessary to publicly hang themselves.