Elon Musk and Twitter: The Robbery of the People Continues.

Dad owned an Emerald mine. Grew up white in S Africa

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

10-05-22

 

And the Robbery Continues.

 

I have wondered what the cost to the taxpayer has been for the manchild Onan Musk’s little game he played agreeing to buy Twitter, backing off and now changing his mind yet again. I do not have the resources or ability to determine that but life has taught me that somehow, workers are paying.

 

For a whole month the manchild Onan Musk used the courts to back out of the deal that amounted to a $44 billion offer for a company doesn’t really produce any of the necessities of life for millions of working class people.

 

But I do know this, some other parasites are going to profit from it. And it appears I am right. Trust your class instincts sisters and brothers.

 

On the news, Twitter shares jumped 22% to $52. Reports in the press say that no one knows why Musk changed his mind. But workers know that there was nothing egalitarian or socially conscious about it. Money has been made by that class that hates work.

 

Sure enough, one over 80-year old has done quite well, Carl Icahn, who invested close to $500 million in the interim paying $30 a share for Twitter shares, should make a little over $250 million. Other social parasites that bought Twitter shares over this period have also made undisclosed millions.

Carl's old Yacht You Paid for

 

Folks might remember Carl Icahn, the loafer who made almost half a billion dollars breaking up Trans World Airlines back in the 1980’s. He did a lot of this stuff in the 1980’s, making $1 billion selling his stake in US steel. I don’t think any of this activity effects workers though does it? Well maybe. It does, I remember reading an article in Business Week back then. It said this:

 

“Between 1980 and 1992 steel companies reduced the man hours necessary for the production of a ton of steel from 9.2 to 5. Roughly in the same period, 1982 and 1994, manufacturers in the US slashed 4 million jobs still employing roughly the same number of production workers as they did in 1946 but producing approx. 5 times as many goods.”  We didn’t benefit from that increase in labor productivity; it turned us in to paupers. We suffered because of it.

 

Forbes, as it does with all of them, describes Icahn as a “self made man”.  Brothers and sisters, you might and probably do assume that he worked a lot of overtime to kick start his career in the robbery business, but a Wikipedia bio on him suggests otherwise.  Icahn ended up working in the money business in 1961 but really got going in 1968 when he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, “…..with $150,000 of his own money and a $400,000 investment from his uncle..”.  His own money is gambling profits he made as a stockbroker and that $550,000 would be the equivalent of $5 million or more today. There’s nothing self-made about that. We all want to help our children and grandchildren get a start in this mad, competitive world, but people like Musk and his class colleagues are in a different bracket.

 

Working people can be so frustrating at times as we fall prey to the mass media, the education system (universities are capitalist think tanks) and the voices from the pulpit that promote the benefits of capitalism and the so-called free market, and turn on each other for the depravations that this social system imposes on us.

 

Many of us blame the poor for being poor (there’s work out there if they want it), immigrants for stealing our benefits and for being “willing” (more desperate is the correct term) to work for less undercutting our wages, and godlessness and communism for our ills.  The petty crime we are witnessing on a daily basis is the fault of the criminal risking years of incarceration for stealing a catalytic converter. The mentally ill and the destitute for being homeless. The victim is blamed for their conditions that are not of their own making.

 

 If you work hard to reap the rewards we are told, but that depends what you are working hard at. Carl Icahn, Onan Musk, and all of these “loafers” hate work. They do no productive labor but engage in legal robbery. We are supposed to look up to them, see them as successful and that we all have the same opportunity if we apply ourselves.

 

These characters are the real robbers and the system they defend and propagate is the vehicle that legalizes their robbery. Divide and rule is their tactic.

 

We will pay for this backward and destructive view of who our enemies are and what we must do to change this situation. Society needs new managers.

 

For Working Class Unity and Socialism