'BradCast' 6/17/2026 (The Trouble With Trillionaires [and Billionaires]; Guest: Michael Mechanic of Mother Jones)

Elon Musk's inauguration is the first member of the Trillionaire Club, thanks to his SpaceX IPO, is also a potent symbol of the gap between rich and poor. In a clash with Elon Musk in 2021, the World Food Program produced a detailed plan of how it would spend $6.6 billion to save 42 million people who were on the brink of starvation. $1.1 trillion could fund that plan for 167 years. Well, that assumes Elon Musk wants to save $42 million on the brink of starvation. What color are they? Well, I don't know why I came here tonight. I got the feeling that something right. From Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, this is the broadcast. As heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. and on dozens of other fine affiliate stations over both your public airwaves and the internets around the country and the world, blanketing planet Earth. I'm Brad Friedman, your friendly investigative blogger, journalist, troublemaker, muckraker. An all-round, swell fellow, says me from bradblog.com. Welcome to the show. Lots to get to today. Gerrymandering War News and primary election results momentarily. And a guest shortly thereafter. If we can fit in everything today, we will see. Jam packed. Hi, Desi Doyen. But first, as the New York Times reports on Wednesday afternoon, a senior U.S. official disclosed what the official said was the full text of the so-called deal between the U.S. and Iran to cease hostilities, open the Strait of Hormuz, and start nuclear talks. The text of the agreement, or what is said to be the text of the agreement, was read out loud on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House. In short, for some reason, they are still not officially releasing the actual text of what is described as a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran. So if what was read by this unnamed official is the actual text of the agreement to... continue negotiations for 60 days while the Strait of Hormuz is reopened and the U.S. pulls down its blockade of Iranian ports. Well, whether that is the actual text, that is apparently still not certain. We've got a lot to get to today that I don't want to put aside on the word of an unnamed Trump official's claim to be sharing a final agreement to continue negotiating. We can get to the details when and if the agreement is actually signed, as still appears to be on track for Friday and then released so that we can actually see it. But in short, I still see nothing in the deal as explained that gives the U.S.

anything more than they had before Trump and Israel launched their war on Iran. And in fact, Iran will likely have much more than they did before the war, such as the end of sanctions, the ability to freely sell their oil. And yes, to continue their nuclear program as they had previously. The agreement read anonymously by that Trump official says nothing about Iran's missile program, which was a big complaint. About the 2015 JCPOA agreement struck under President Obama, which was about their nuclear program, not about their missiles. But this plan apparently simply reiterates what Iran has been saying for decades. Perhaps best quoted from the preamble of that 2015 nuclear deal that Trump unlawfully tore up upon taking office after repeatedly describing it as the worst deal ever made in the history of mankind. In the preamble of that 2015 accord between Iran, U.S., UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany at the very top of the agreement. It reads, and I quote, Quote, Iran reaffirms that under no circumstance will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons. So that was already agreed to by Iran 10 years ago in writing in an agreement that by the measure of all parties had been actually working and working well and verifiably preventing Iran from enriching or obtaining nuclear material for any use in any sort of weapon. Anyway, more on all of that in the days to come, I am certain, but make no mistake. This is a concession by Donald Trump and the U.S. to Iran. Iran comes out with much more from all of this than they had before the war, and the U.S. comes out with the pre-war status quo at best, and in fact, a mandate to lift restrictions like sanctions that had been in place before Trump's wildly ill-considered war. Anyway. More on that soon, no doubt. Meanwhile, in a surprise development, one that I will share with you today with some caution and a few caveats, as AP reports this afternoon, Georgia's Republican legislative leaders on Wednesday rejected Republican Governor Brian Kemp's call to redraw congressional and legislative districts during a special session. citing concerns about moving too quickly after a U.S. Supreme Court decision that weakened Federal Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters. Now, this move sought by the termed out governor, Brian Kemp, would have applied not to the 2026 elections, but to the 28 elections.

Why is he calling for a new map now for the 28 elections in a special session? Well, Brian Kemp knows that there's a very good chance that Republicans will not have the legislative trifecta that they currently have in the state. majority control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor's mansion. They may not have that after the 2026 election. So if they're going to rig the maps for 2028 in the Peach State before that year's presidential election, they need to do it now, or at least they need to do it this year, most likely. Georgia House Speaker John Burns sent Brian Kemp a letter hours before a special session was set to begin on Wednesday and announced the decision as demonstrators filled the Georgia Capitol with chance of black votes matter. The decision marked a setback for now for both Brian Kemp and Donald Trump, who has urged Republican-led states to redraw congressional districts to their political advantage rather than, you know, change to popular policymaking, of course. Ten states have already enacted new congressional districts ahead of the November midterms this year. Georgia would have been the first to do so for the 2028 elections. And as of now, they're not doing it. Speaker Burns said it was more important for lawmakers to focus on economic matters than, quote, partisan games. Good for him. He also cited pending litigation over existing Georgia districts and the need for the state to understand the full ramifications. for how race can or cannot be used in redistricting. I wonder if it also might have something to do with Georgia Republicans being scared that they, if they do it now, they will anger voters in boost turnout. Yeah, clearly they are, A, concerned about the political blowback that they're going to get from doing this in 26. Yep. B, they're concerned that. redrawing the districts could result in a dummymander where you stretch your votes so thin in this redistricting. In a blue wave year, Republicans actually end up losing seats in districts that were otherwise considered to be safe Republican districts, you know, until they got so thinned out to create these new districts. Yeah. And C, I think that I believe they can do this just as easily in a lame duck session after. this November's election, but before a new state legislature or governor, potentially a Democratic one, are sworn in. As AP reports, Republican legislative leaders did not rule out revisiting redistricting later this year. About a third of Georgia's 180 state representatives are black, Latino and Asian, and other minorities bring the total non-white share to about 40%.

Roughly reflecting the state's overall population, yet Georgia's U.S. House delegation has only five districts out of 14. where the electorate is majority or plurality non-white, all of those districts elected black Democrats in 2024. So the U.S. House map is already gerrymandered in Georgia as is. Disproportionately against the state's minority voting population, Republicans had hoped, and it seems to me still hope to make that even worse by redrawing the map when it will be more politically tenable for them to do so. Now that the corrupted right-wing Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act and given the OK to states to erase majority minority voting districts as they wish, districts created under the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution, by the way, to assure that minority voters could elect representatives of their choosing, particularly in old Confederate states like Georgia. In any event, for now, it is a win. For now, for voting rights advocates, and given who Republican primary voters have now chosen to run, for example, for the U.S. Senate, they probably do not need to give any more fuel to their opposition about how racist the base of the Republican Party has now exposed themselves to be. As our coverage of several key primary, primary runoff and special elections from several states on Tuesday this week, including Georgia, seems to prove. Let's start there in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate. On Tuesday this week, the Donald Trump endorsed very right-wing congressman Mike Collins defeated the governor, Brian Kemp endorsed former football coach Derek Dooley in their runoff, their primary runoff on Tuesday for the GOP nomination. for the U.S. Senate in what had been seen as one of the Republicans' best chances in the nation to flip a Senate seat from blue to red this year against the incumbent Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff. As noted, Susan Collins, who appears to have won, is very right-wing. Trump endorsed him anyway, or perhaps because of that. For example, Susan Collins engaged with a social media post asking users to choose between groups when he was asked to choose between Muslims and dogs. Yep.

And yet he's still lost. Don't get too excited about Trump's candidate losing here, however. Jackson worked really hard, spending millions of his own dollars as a billionaire to portray himself as Trumpy or Trumpier than Jay Jones. Proving that, by the way, with enough of your money, in this case, $93 million of his own money to win the nomination. Yes, a billionaire can. Defeat a candidate endorsed by Donald Trump. Jackson will now go on to spend his money in an effort to defeat Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic former mayor of Atlanta, who easily won without a runoff, won the Democratic nomination during the Georgia May 19 primary. Scott Bottoms was just the second black woman to serve as Atlanta mayor, and she's vying to become the first black woman elected governor. Ever of a U.S. state, incredibly enough. I hadn't realized that. We have never had a black female governor in this country. Keisha Lance Bottoms could be the first one. Vernon Jay Jones, the other Jay Jones, Vernon Jay Jones ran for the runoff for the Republican Secretary of State nomination. Jay Jones is the former Democrats turned 2020 election denying hard right Maga Trumper. The second 2020 election denying Jay Jones to fall in Georgia on Tuesday night, he was trounced by Republican Tim Fleming in the race for the Secretary of State nomination for the Republicans on Tuesday. That's probably good news when we're talking about the race for the chief election official in the presidential battleground state of Georgia. Both Joneses, one black, one white, by the way, both Looney. knocked off the ballot for November in Georgia on Tuesday. Good. Tim Fleming, the Republican, will face Democrat Penny Brown Reynolds for Secretary of State this fall in Georgia in the contest to fill the seat being vacated by the termed out good friend of the broadcast Brad Raffensperger. Who, not really a good friend, who failed to even make the GOP primary runoff himself in the governor's race that he was running in on May 19. So he finished a distant third, Brad Raffensperger did. That was his thanks for standing up to Trump's thuggery in 2020 when Trump tried to tell him to find enough votes to flip the state from Biden to Trump. Which Republican voters did not like. Well.

They didn't. And that's why Brad Raffensperger's political future for now is either over or on hold. In the meantime, the Democrat Penny Brown Reynolds easily won her party's runoff for Georgia's Secretary of State on Tuesday. Meanwhile, let's move to Alabama. Trump endorsed Congressman Barry Moore defeated Navy SEAL and political newcomer Jared Hudson in Alabama's Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by one of the dumbest, if not the dumbest senators in the upper chamber. That would be Alabama's Tommy Tuberville, who previously won the GOP nomination this year for governor. because Alabama really likes the pain, I guess. Hudson attacked Moore as a Washington insider, but it wasn't enough to overcome Trump's endorsement here. On the Democratic side in the Senate race, Moore will run against Democratic lawyer Everett West, who also won his primary runoff on the blue side on Tuesday in the otherwise very red state where there would have to be sort of a blue tsunami of historic proportions, most likely. for a Democrat to flip Tuberville's seat, sadly, though this is also the same seat that was held previously by Doug Jay Jones, the Democrat who won in a special election after Trump in his first term. chose U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions as his AG. Of course, Jay Jones was able to run at that time against the guy Roy Moore, who became famous for trying to pick up high school girls, which even Alabama Republicans pushed back against. So we will see. Let's move over to Oklahoma now. In Oklahoma, Trump endorsed Congressman Kevin Hearn. Easily defeated four other candidates to win the nomination to try and fill the seat of former Senator Markwayne Mullin. Now Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security, Hearn will run against either Nikila Jasmine Thomas or Jim Priest in November. Those two Democrats will go on to compete in a runoff. As they topped the five-person Democratic field on Tuesday, Jasmine Thomas pretty easily won but did not get above 50% in the race to fill the seat that Republicans have held for decades now in Oklahoma. In the Republican governor's primary?

In Oklahoma, former state senator Mike Mazzai didn't receive Trump's endorsement until pretty late in the race for the Republican nomination in Oklahoma in an otherwise crowded field of Republicans, nine candidates. Seeking the nomination for governor, Mezai was barely edged out as of the last count I checked by less than a point by the state AG G. G. G. G. Drummond. So those two will go off to a runoff in August to fill the open seat for governor, which has not been filled by a Democrat since 2011. On the Democratic side in Oklahoma, state rep Cynthia Munson won easily on Tuesday for her long-shot bid for governor, though at least she won't have to compete in an intra-party runoff as the Republicans will between now and November, so that should be fun. Now to the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., with about 68% of the vote in... As of today, Democratic Socialist Janice Lewis George, a third generation Washingtonian and D.C. council member appears poised now to become D.C.'s next mayor after the currently serving mayor, three-term Muriel Bowser. chose not to run again this year amid criticism that she was too friendly with Donald Trump, basically. Lewis George is currently leading her closest competitor. That would be fellow DC Council member Kenyon McDuffie by about 15 points. However, D.C. now has ranked choice voting. So Janice Lewis George will have to finish above 50%. to avoid ranked choice voting so-called instant runoff. As of now, however, with 68% of the vote in as we go to air, she's currently at almost 53% of the vote in the eight-person field. where only McDuffie appears to pose a real threat to her with 36.5% of the vote for his part. Everyone else is coming in at single digits. So it seems kind of impossible that McDuffie would overtake Lewis George in this first round of voting. His hope, therefore, is that she drops below 50%. That's why this race is not yet called for Lewis George, but it does look for now like she's on track to become our capital city's next mayor and more in the mold of Democratic Socialist New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, then DC's current mayor, Bowser, or...

Louis George's main competitor, McDuffie. I don't think Republicans even put up anybody to run against the Democratic nominee in the very Democratic city. Also on Tuesday, D.C. residents voted for a new non-voting delegate to the U.S. House, since outrageously, they are still not allowed real representation in the U.S. House. Robert White. has been now called as the Democratic primary nominee to run against Republican Denise Rosado. As the U.S. Special Delegate from D.C., Rosado ran uncontested with virtually no chance of winning against the Democrat in December. That's the seat to fill the one being vacated by Eleanor Holmes Norton, who served in that position for 35 years. White previously served as her legislative council. And finally, yes, back to California, where Democratic state lawmaker Aisha Wahab appears to have easily advanced on Tuesday to the special... General election in California for the U.S. House seat vacated by Congressman Eric Swalwell after he resigned from Congress amid allegations of sexual assault. Wahab, a state senator who focused her campaign in the California Bay Area House District on reducing housing costs. Goes on to the August 18 runoff to determine who will fill the remainder of Eric Swalwell's term through January. It does not appear that she will win more than 50 percent. vote from Tuesday, so that will head to a runoff. She's way ahead of the 10 other challengers running from all parties in the same race at more than 42%. It's about 82% of the vote counted, but that's not enough to avoid a runoff. She will run against one of two other Democrats, it appears. Most likely Melissa Hernandez with 17% of the vote. Wahab has said that this race is not about, quote, replacing Eric Swalwell, but ensuring voters have a representative who is, quote, not necessarily working for any other reason but to make their lives better. Wahab and Hernandez. We're also the two top vote getters back in June 2 in the regular election to fill that same seat permanently well for the next two years in a full session. They both advanced to the general election in November. If one of them comes out on top, however, in the special election, they hope that serving in that office for a few months might help them win in November. We will. Try to keep you updated as noteworthy results are otherwise finalized in the days ahead. Next Tuesday, its primaries in some big states, including Maryland, New York, and Utah. Let's take quick break right now and a left turn or right turn if you prefer, I don't know, to talk about the world's newest and, yes, only trillionaire Elon Musk and what to do about it and...

All of his other billionaire buddies. Michael Mechanic, author of Jackpot, How the Super Rich Really Live and How Their Wealth Harms Us All, is Standing By. I'm Brad Friedman, and this is your Bradcast Jackpot. Hey, this is Desi. The Bradcast and the Green News Report survive thanks to you and your support. Please drop by bradblog.com slash donate today to help us stay independent every day over your public airwaves. That's bradblog.com slash donate and thanks. Oh, it's hilarious. Money, money, money, always sunny in the rich man's world. Indeed, welcome back to the Bradcast. Brad Friedman from Bradblog.com. On yesterday's broadcast, we spent some time discussing with John Bergmeier, the legal director of the government watchdog public knowledge, the very real concerns that news outlets such as... CBS and soon CNN are now facing in the wake of mega mergers by Donald Trump's pal David Ellison swallowing up their parent companies with the fairly clear mission of breaking those news outlets or at least bending them to serve the mission of Donald Trump, the administration, and the wealthy millionaires and billionaires like yes, Donald Trump. and David Ellison. That on the same day that the Rupert Murdoch family owned Fox announced that they would be swallowing up the world's largest streaming platform by buying up Roku and thus taking control of streaming media from news to sports to entertainment in 100 million households globally, 90 million of them in America alone. And all of that comes on top of last week's news of the world's richest man. Elon Musk, becoming the world's first trillionaire last week after shares of his rocket company SpaceX soared in Wall Street's largest ever initial public offering of stock. Between his holdings in SpaceX and Tesla, where he is also CEO, Elon Musk is now worth an estimated $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes. At the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, the four largest American fortunes owned wealth equivalent to 4% of US GDP. Today, that same tiny fraction of the population, the top 0.001%, which now includes 19 households could buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the U.S.

That's how Elon Musk could buy Twitter on a whim for $44 billion back in 2022. That's how Larry and David Ellison can buy TikTok and CBS and CNN today. That's how billionaires could account for 20% of all political donations in the 2024 federal election cycle. There is sometimes a view that the wealth of these billionaires is somehow virtual. Observes Gabriel Zuckman, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, an author of We Need to Tax Billionaires this week at The Guardian. It is not like cash at the bank, but merely notional, some say. The super rich would be benign figures, according to this view, less influential than unions or advocacy groups. But he notes, extreme wealth is in fact always very real. And a lot of the problems in today's world are downstream of the booming influence of the super rich on policymaking. Tesla, the company that Elon Musk founded in 2003, did not turn a profit until 2020. That didn't prevent him, however, from buying Twitter, turning the social network into a platform for a variety of political and ideological causes, including getting Donald Trump reelected. His fealty then earned him a quasi-cabinet position, the director of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, with total freedom to slash U.S. government spending not to his personal liking. During his tenure, Doe shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, leading to the termination of numerous programs tackling malnutrition, HIV, and preventable diseases around the world. A study published in the Lancet found that these funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including 4.5 million children younger than the age of 5. by 2030. Great wealth, right, Zuckman is never virtual. But if, as Zuckman argues in his book that we need to tax billionaires, what should be done with trillionaires now that the world actually has one? One who, by the way, has proved to be anything but a benign figure as he has used his wealth and the social media platform that he owns, controls, and wields like a weapon to support his fanatically white supremacist views. that have, in addition to the points Zuckman made, kindled not just political upheaval, but actual violent upheaval in nations around the world. Michael Mechanic, author of 2021's Jackpot, How the Super Rich Really Live and How Their Wealth Harms Us All, argues at Mother Jay Jones, where he is a senior editor, that trillionaires should not be allowed at all.

that as his headline at Mojo reads on red on the day that Elon Musk became the first trillionaire quote no human should ever be allowed to have a trillion dollars oh really Michael why not And oh, by the way, who would enforce that? And how could it ever actually be enforced? I do not know the answer to those questions, but let's see if Michael Mechanic does. Oh, Mr. Mechanic, welcome back to the broadcast, sir. Thanks, Brad. Glad to have you here, my friend. All right, I got to say, and based on your mother Jay Jones piece, it sounds like you'd agree. It's really, really hard to wrap one's brain around how much a trillion dollars actually is. For that matter, I have trouble even understanding a billion dollars, to be honest, which a thousand billion dollars is what a trillion amounts to. But that still doesn't mean too much. It's very difficult to understand. You tried to wrap your own brain around it in your piece. What were you able to come up with the best way to help folks understand how much a trillion dollars actually is? And I will say, I was impressed by your calculations about the time that it would take to simply try to count to a trillion out loud. Oh, yeah. I mean, the first thing I did was count myself. a time myself counting to 100 as fast as I could. Now, the longer the numbers get, the longer they take to count. So this was just an incredibly conservative estimate of how long would take to count 100 numbers. And it was 38 seconds. Right. And so I did the calculation based on that, if you were going to count to a trillion, it would take you over 12,000 years. And then I kind of back, reverse engineered. I said, well, if I was born... an infant who was capable of counting at high speed. Just right out, right out the womb. For a hundred years, without eating, drinking or sleeping. I would make it to $8.3 billion. And that's conservative. That's it. Yeah, it's remarkable. And, you know, I've seen other people try to come up with ways to explain it. I think the human brain can't really understand it. And I'm wondering if the lack of understanding of how much even a billion dollars is, much less a trillion dollars, is that one of the reasons why it's so difficult to... you know, kind of rile up folks in society to demand that something be done about this out-of-control wealth inequality that we're all saddled with in this country and around the world? Yeah, I mean, people still, you know, there is still what's called mobility optimism in this country to this idea that you can move up. And

It's really interesting because here's one thing I use AI for. I took the wealth thresholds, basically the amount of money you would need to break into any wealth class to break from the lower 50 into the middle class, to break from the middle class into the top 10%, and then the top 1%, and the top 1%. So I use these wealth thresholds from Gabriel Zuckman's website Real Time Inequality. And I had AI build. actual ladders. Like these are how far the rungs of wealth are apart. You were trying to climb up. Right. And I did it in different years, you know, from going back to the 80s and then all the way to the present. And the ladders get longer and longer and longer. And the bars get, the rungs get farther and farther apart, especially on the high end. And it gets to so you couldn't possibly represent. these groups on one ladder because, you know, if you are going to include like the top 200 richest people on that ladder, well, even the 1% and the 0.1% are squished at the bottom. Wow. It's just as you go up, it's quite, it's literally exponential the wealth. And that's really all policy choices is the problem. And yet people, as you suggest, think, well, we don't want to go too tough on those billionaires or those, I guess, the trillionaire because we might want to be one of them someday. We might become one of them someday. You know, that's changing, Brad, though. Is it? Because there really is a lot of momentum to tax great wealth. People see this. You know, it's bipartisan, too. If you look at polling over the years on the various wealth tax proposals, even the ones that would tax wealth directly, like Elizabeth Warren's Ultra Millionaires Act, which I think she proposed it in 2021, those got like two-thirds public support in polls. And even a majority of Republicans approve of that because they're sort of like, well, you know, these people have. You know, even a billion dollars, right? That's more money than you could ever spend in a lifetime. Right. And you have these, you know, average families like can't pay the high cost of housing in their city. And, you know, one thing I've noticed with the explosion of wealth, the wealth has to go somewhere. People... They're not content to, they're always trying to, you know, re-up it, right? There's no stopping when you have that much money. It's, it becomes, you know, you don't need it, obviously. Right. But it becomes kind of a measuring contest, so to speak. During my book, I interviewed this lawyer who's, he describes themselves as a concierie for some of the America's wealthiest families. And he's kind of a fixer. He'll take care of all these problems for them. But he had just come back from this. It was Mitt Romney as his annual conference where there's senators, there's former presidents, there's all these billionaires. And the people come and give their business leaders. There's presentations. They talk about the problems of the world. I said, well, do you ever talk about wealth inequality? He says, no. Right. Because not a problem. But he says, you walk into that room.

And, you know, he's probably ultra wealthy himself, ultra wealthy being, you know, 30 million and up. Right. He said, I walk into that room. A, I feel like a pauper. And B, he said, they, you know, the question is who has the biggest yacht? And that is determined pretty quickly. And I think he's talking about, you know, that's the yacht is an analogy for something a little dirtier. Yes. So it really, it is, it's a measuring contest. It's like who, you know, who swings the biggest bat. I'm using all the euphemisms. You are. Thank you. This is FCC radio. I appreciate it. Elon Musk, by the way, I looked at, there's something called, Forbes has something called real-time billionaires. And you can look at their wealth in the moment. And today, Elon Musk's wealth was $1.3 trillion. It's right. My, my calculations were already off because SpaceX has been going up like every single day by double digits, although I think it did come down today. So we'll have to check that again later this afternoon. But let me play the- I was going to say that the point three part of it, just the point three is richer than any other billionaire. Yes. Let me play the annoying devil's advocate for the moment, Mike. What's the problem with someone having a trillion dollars in and of itself? Yes, we've seen how Elon Musk has misused his wealth, obviously, but not all multimillionaires and billionaires behave like that. I mean, Elon Musk, frankly, was evil well before he became a trillionaire. So how does the idea, the simple idea of someone having... billions of dollars? How does it actually hurt me or anybody else in and of itself? Well, A, they're unaccountable. You cannot. I mean, Elon Musk would have to murder, you know, a whole church full of people or something before he could possibly go to jail. I mean, anything else, the guy would get off. We see what happens with Donald Trump, right? The other thing is that... These guys evade taxes with impunity. They control the levers of power. I mean, Elon Musk put more money into the... I would say, I don't say donated. He invested more money in the last election than any other human being in history has ever done. And, you know, it clearly made a difference. He put in $282 million. But you know what that is of his current wealth? That's 22 1,000th of 1% of his current wealth. It is a tiniest fraction. It's like you giving a penny. You know what happened? He goes in. A bunch of his companies were under investigation by various federal agencies. Those investigations went away. All of a sudden, he gets billions and millions of dollars more in government contracts. And, of course, you've got to remember that... Elon Musk's wealth was built on taxpayer money. It was built on federal subsidies.

I mean, the profitability of any of his companies relied entirely on, you know, subsidies for electric cars, subsidies and all these things. And then he turns around, he acts like he's done it all himself. In fact, all of Silicon Valley, you know, we did a very early article about Elon Musk and sort of this attitude in Silicon Valley, this libertarian attitude that, oh, we shouldn't be regulated, we shouldn't be. the government shouldn't interfere in our affairs because we built this. It's like, no, you did it. This was, I mean, where do you think the internet came from? It's like all government research. Sergei and Larry Page of Google, well, they were actually on federal grants at Stanford when they developed the technology that became Google. A lot of these guys came out of, you know, government-funded academic labs. And then, of course, all of the infrastructure that... that their companies use, how their employees get to work is all taxpayer money supporting those things. The fact that we have a stable society that costs money. And if you're going to just amass wealth and then use that wealth to protect your wealth and hide from taxes, which is what these guys do. They cut every corner to avoid paying. And it's like they are benefiting more from the system than anybody else. They are taking more. And they just want to take even more and not. pay for what they took. Let me ask you this. Is the calculation, because you've explained the dangers of billionaires and trillionaires and what they can do with their money, is that calculation still true then? If these billionaires and trillionaires, many of them who made their money thanks to us, thanks to the taxpayer, and thanks, by the way, to the labor that actually built their wealth for them. But if we actually tax those billionaires and the trillionaires the way that a doctor or a farmer or a journalist or a factory or fast food worker is taxed, would we feel better about there being billionaires out there? In other words, is it the fact that they have billions of dollars or is it the fact that they're not properly taxed and giving back to the folks and the society that made them billionaires in the first place? Well, yeah, so a lot of these people would never have anywhere near the wealth they had if they were taxed the way you and I are for wages, right? Right. The thing is most of their money, and increasingly, increasingly the upper cost in America, most of their money is... comes from investment gains. And if you don't sell, say, let's just assume stock, but it could be in other investments, if you have a stock and it appreciates throughout your lifetime and you never sell it, well, you don't have to pay tax on that. That's sort of the way our government views capital gains, not as income.

until it's sold. They say realized income. It's unrealized means you haven't sold. It's paper money, right? It's paper profits, right? But the trouble is there's something called buy, borrow, die. And these very rich people have all these stock holdings. They're greatly appreciated in value over the years. They just hold on to them. They can borrow. money at low interest rates against their holdings. Yep. And then they pay, you know, whatever, they might pay three, four, five percent interest instead of paying what would be the capital gains tax of 23.8% if they sold. And already, even that tax rate is a discount. In your book, your 2021 book, Jackpot, how the super rich really live and how their wealth harms us all, you wrestle with the idea of how much money and wealth people should be allowed to accumulate. Should billionaires even be allowed to exist, which you concede is sort of a quaint notion now just five years later when we're looking at the world's first trillionaire? But the question remains. Should billionaires be allowed to exist? Much less trillionaires. And if they shouldn't, how much money should they be allowed to have? Who should make that decision? Who should, you know, place such a limit on wealth as you see it? I mean, that's not something I have fully thought through to be honest with you. What we, you know. Good. I want to make you work for this one, Mike. Okay. Well, I mean, give me an hour. But I do, you know, So much of that depends on the system. I mean, it's really not individual billionaires that I issue with. It's the system that allows them to amass wealth at such a ridiculously high rate and to evade taxes. There's really a two-tier tax system. Jeffrey Winters, who's a study's oligarchy, he has a new book called The Blind Spot, and he did an excerpt in Mother Jay Jones recently demonstrating how any time there's... You know, somebody politically connected, kind of oligarch, very billionaire, who gets pulled aside for tax evasion or evidence is discovered that implicates them in tax evasion. All of a sudden, all these wheels start turning, phone, you know, phones start lighting up in Senate offices. And the word comes down, don't mess with this guy. And the IRS, you know, these people don't want their careers ruined, so they comply. They don't really go after the people with the real money. The people they go after to make an example is like the dentist who takes things too far and they can nab him easily. You know, the lawyer maybe who goes and has an offshore account that you could easily track. Right. But, you know, these guys have some of the most sophisticated tax lawyers in the world. They can set up these opaque partnerships, structures. go all around through these different tax havens and it's impossible to know even who owns them. And we were just starting to make progress with like transparency in that realm. The Biden administration had finally passed some, what's called beneficial ownership laws that would make these complicated partnerships divulge who actually owned them. And Trump came in and he nixed the whole thing. And so it's like he's...

encouraging money laundering, honestly, and tax evasion. Which is, it's crazy because, you know, not only that, but they're cutting the IRS. So it's like, you're killing your revenue arm. What business executive would kill the arm of your company that allows you to collect money? Because they don't actually care about the debt or the deficit. They don't actually care about bringing in money to the government. They clearly only believe about saving themselves money. Period. End of story. But, and that's why, you know, it's maddening that we would elect someone like Donald Trump in the first place. But at the same time, Mike, out here in California, billionaire, Tom Steyer, just lost his bid for governor after he was calling for, among other things, a wealth. tax on billionaires. You mentioned Elizabeth Warren, who has called for similar. Bernie Sanders has called for similar. They both ran for president, and they couldn't win the nomination. So it begs the question. We say, oh, we want to do something about wealth inequality. But when a candidate shows up and says, yeah, I want to do something about this wealth inequality, here is my plan. We seem to reject them. Yeah, well, it's true. And it's, I mean, we have yet to have a woman president in this country. That's one problem. It's very challenging for women to compete on presidential level. Bernie, you know, he, first of all, he was sort of way off on the sidelines when he started. But he really, he gained an amazing amount of ground. And with some of the same kinds of people who ended up voting for Donald Trump, interestingly. And except sort of just, it was, you know, economic populism, but except it was real and Trump's was fake. Trump's like, I'm looking out for the little guy, but Bernie really is. And has his whole career looked out for the little guy. And, you know, the Democrats kind of sat on Bernie, too. They kind of cut him out. Yeah. So, I mean. There's so many factors there that it's really hard to gauge. And, you know, Trump is a master manipulator. And he has talent as a showman in that way. And even just, you know, up is down. He's sort of this Orwellian talk, you know, the projection of accusing someone else of doing exactly what you're doing right now. And I don't really understand how he succeeds at that. But, you know, he has. He does. But let me say, it's, you know, it's not just Trump. I mean, there's this whole idea. And I'm glad to hear you say that you think that more and more people are sort of getting fed up with this. You know, they're not yet bringing out the guillotine. Maybe they're just sharpening them in the garage. But, you know, I hope that's the case because it's not just Trump. It has been for years that by and large, the Republican Party has been able to hoax the nation into voting against their own interests. And when people do come around like a Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or even Tom Steyer, a billionaire himself calling for these things, you know, ultimately in the end, it seems like voters don't pull that lever. I'm hoping that will change. I've got to say, I actually, I think Tom Steyer lost because he's a billionaire.

He spent a great deal of his own money. And we've had his history in California of people like, I remember Dan Lundgren or Huffington, the Michael Huffington. Right, right, right. Came in and, you know, he was, he, people didn't like him that much first of all, but that he spent all this. You know, we have these rich guys come in and finance throwing elections. That's never really gone over that well here. I was going to say, just back to the billionaires thing, the trouble with having a billion dollars, even if you did pay regular taxes and the system was less rigged, well, having a billion dollars just, I mean, it gives you too much power in politics. It allows you to... sway people to an undesirable degree. And I'm not talking Democrat Republican. I mean, this is across the board. I mean, do you remember when Biden had had the terrible debate and was wavered? And you looked at all the, all the New York Times and Washington Press, and they all writing these stories about, well, what are the Democrats going to do? What's Biden going to do now? Well, they were all about how. panicking and talking to the donors. It's like, oh, we have, how are they going to convince the donors? And what they're talking about is like the billionaires who are supporting the Democrats, right? Yeah. And it's sort of like, it's just without any irony, these headlines were channeling, this is the way it is, these super rich people, if they get to decide who runs. Yeah. So we get to choose from the ballot. But they decide who's on the ballot. And the donors, you're right. The donors they're talking about are the hundred or so millionaires or billionaires who are giving the big dollars. They're not talking about the hundreds of thousands who have given $10 and $15 and $20. They weren't asking them, what should we do now? I got to get out, Michael. Let me run something really quickly by. I need just a quick answer from you. But other than, you know, arguing that someone like Elon Musk should never be allowed to hold as much wealth and power. that goes with it, which I would argue, you know, was true, frankly, when he was only half a trillionaire. But what, if anything, would you like to see happen to bend this increasingly dire wealth disparity in the other direction? Can something actually be done as you see it or are, you know, plebs simply destined to watch it all play out over our Ellison-owned... CBS streamed over our Murdoch owned Roku devices. Well, things have gotten so out of control with the wealth gap that it's almost hard to dial back in any way. I mean, because the Constitution doesn't allow you to tax wealth directly. You have to tax unrealized capital gains, unrealized investment gains. That's the only way to slow this down. You know, the billionaires are going to fight that to the bitter end. And there's many proposals out there to do that. And it's even could be constitutionally iffy, but there are ways to do it. And I've actually written about one of them from Mother Jay Jones in a piece that's going to go up in a week or two.

So, you know, there are ways to do it. And you can do it state by state. Of course, it's a bit like whack-a-mole, right? California passes a billionaire tax and then they all move to Florida. They claim they're going to move. And that's another thing, you know, that I talked to the chief, former chief counsel of the franchise tax board. That's the California State Tax Authority. And he said, anyone who tells you they know what's going to happen is either as an agenda or they're delusional. You just don't know. I mean, California is a very desirable place to be for these people. It's just like the New York Petitera Act. It's like, are these people going to just not have a place in New York? No, they're going to keep their place in New York. It's going to pay a little more. You know, too bad. Let them go. Let him go. We need this space here anyway. The rent's too damn high. I like what Jensen Wang said, right? He's the NVIDIA guy. He said, you know, I don't like. He's like, I don't like this. California wealth tax, I think is bad policy or whatever. But if they pass it, I'll pay it. Of course. He's like, you know, look at all the money I have. Yes. I mean, just, I wish some of these guys would just be like that. Look at all this money I have. It's fine. Take some of it. I don't care. He hasn't been a billionaire long enough to know better, apparently. He's one of those new billionaires. He shouldn't say that. He's saying the quiet part out loud. Michael, I got to get out, brother. Thank you. Always a delight speaking with you. Michael Mechanics, senior editor over at Mother Jay Jones. He's the author of the book Jack Pot. how the super rich really live and how their wealth harms us all. Check it out. And you can follow his work at motherjones.com. Also, Michael Mechanic.com. Yes, it is spelled the way it sounds. And you can find him on the social media's at Michael Mechanic. Thanks, Mike. Talk soon, I hope. Thanks, Brad. You bet. See later. Okay, great conversation. I could have gone on with him forever. Oh, I know. But I got to get out. I'm sorry to say. Thanks again to Michael, thanks to Desi Doyen, our producer. Thanks, Des. And thanks to all of you for spending a portion of your day or night with us. We hope we made it worth your while. It's always an honor and a privilege to have you here. If you missed any portion of today's show, download it for free. Give it a listen at bradblog.com. Now, easier than ever to share with folks you know, love, or hate. Bradblog.com, while you're there, hit a donate button if you don't mind to help us stay on the air. We rely on you to do exactly that. Drop me email if you like. If you have any thoughts on today's show or any other reason, I am Bradcast at bradblog.com, and you'll find me. on the social medias at the Brad blog. See it all the above until we see you here. Hopefully tomorrow. I'm Brad Friedman. Good luck, world.

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