What extreme wealth costs everyone else — the excess, the extraction, and the harm
California voters are considering Proposition 40, a one-time 5 percent tax on the state’s billionaires. An analysis for Tax the Ultra Rich Now identified 22 California billionaires who gave substantial funds or opposed the measure; their combined wealth rose 64 percent in 20 months, and some donated millions to the No on 40 campaign.
After Elon Musk ordered Starlink throttled for Ukraine amid disputes over military use, SpaceX reportedly told U.S. officials asking about the outages that Ukraine could restore access by switching to a pricier contract. The episode highlights one man's leverage over a war.
A Data for Progress poll for the Institute for Policy Studies finds likely U.S. voters view private jets as net harmful by 13 points. 72% back cracking down on tax evasion by jet owners, and 69% want higher airport fees for private jets.
Two right-wing super PACs, one tied to Leonard Leo's network and another funded by billionaires, are spending heavily on ads attacking Democratic-backed candidates for the Ohio Supreme Court. The article traces decades of dark-money spending and a 2021 law adding party labels to judicial races.
A coalition of more than 20 North Carolina groups is campaigning against ballot amendments that would cap income tax rates and limit local property taxes, arguing they favor corporations and the wealthy while squeezing schools and local services. Organizers report hundreds of thousands of doors knocked and tens of thousands of pledges collected.
Elon Musk has become the largest political donor in modern U.S. history, per a Washington Post analysis, after nearly half a billion dollars went to Republicans this cycle. Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers sent a fundraising email urging donations to "protect Elon" from congressional scrutiny of his DOGE work.
— via Truthout, Sharon Zhang
Cyprus's Parliament held hearings on reports that Deloitte's Cyprus affiliate and MeritServus backdated documents for Abramovich-owned companies, enabling billions in assets to move to the British Virgin Islands. Officials said police would assess the claims; Abramovich's lawyers deny tax evasion.
— via OCCRP
The trillionaire has given more than $445 million to Republican political groups this election cycle, as Democrats vow to investigate him.
Elon Musk gave his personal political committee, America PAC, more than $76 million in the first two weeks of October to boost Republicans in the final stretch of the midterms, according to a pre-election report the PAC filed Thursday evening with the Federal Election Commission.
The group spent nearly $43 million in the first two weeks of October, and entered the campaign’s last leg holding nearly $47 million in cash.
The Texas Senate race dominated the new spending. It drew $15.2 million, double what the PAC spent there all summer. That spending included $12.4 million to attack Democratic candidate James Talarico and $2.8 million to promote Republican Ken Paxton.
Half of the 14 billionaires in Bloomberg's "$160 billion hole" for the UK don't qualify under Bloomberg's own two conditions: three hadn't actually moved out in the window, and four were credited with wealth that isn't theirs or isn't theirs alone. Bloomberg's own data also shows only $39 billion of the $160 billion was UK-based to begin with.
— via Tax Justice Network, Tax Justice Network
California's Proposition 40 would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the total net wealth of roughly 200 billionaires, the first wealth tax of its kind in the world, and its backers expect it to raise about $100 billion over five years. About 90 percent would go to replace federal health care cuts, while the billionaires it targets are spending hundreds of millions on competing ballot measures.
— via Truthout, Marianne Dhenin
Deloitte staff in Cyprus backdated and rubber-stamped more than 1,000 documents for Roman Abramovich between 1999 and 2013, a leak-based investigation found, making roughly $600 million in luxury assets and nearly $2 billion in cash simply vanish from company books.
— via ICIJ, Joanna Robin
Readers sound off: one man's decades-long Amazon boycott, a dig at "Kensington Kemi," and a challenge to the claim Ed Davey leads the most successful Liberal gang in a century. Plus, why tax the super-rich when you can just wave them goodbye.
— via The Guardian — Inequality, Guardian Staff
Six million cubic metres of dredged sand are becoming 25 artificial islands in the Maldives, home to a $790 million luxury zone where owning a beneficial stake can be made illegal to disclose without a court order. Critics say the project's offshore banks, tax breaks and new golden-visa scheme risk turning the archipelago into a money-laundering haven.
— via OCCRP
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Monday that the country’s three strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers last week had been a resounding success.
Zelensky told reporters that social media platforms had seen a notable drop in Russian bot activity. Following the strikes, “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said.
“To make this film, I set out to solve a mystery,” Gibney says in the documentary. “How could Musk assume so much power, and why had we given it to him?”
When Tesla introduced its first mass-market car, the Model 3, at an event in 2016, Elon Musk seemed like a different person from the one he is today. Boyish and trim, he started off his presentation by reminding the audience of Tesla’s mission and why everyone should care about what it was doing. “It’s very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport . . . this is really important for the future of the world,” he said. A screen behind him showed a chart of rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere; Musk noted that the line was still moving sharply up. “What that CO2 increase results in is a steadily increasing temperature. So we’ve already increased by two degrees. In fact, that doesn’t tell the whole story, because the extremes of temperature increased by as much as twenty degrees, and that line is gonna keep going for some time into the future.” Tesla was a critical part of pushing the world to electrify its vehicles, Musk went on, citing a former executive at General Motors who’d said that competitive pressure from Tesla pushed G.M. to introduce a hybrid car, the Chevrolet Volt, and spurred Nissan to release an electric model, the leaf. Much of the rest of the industry soon followed.
A railway company that lists no commercial projects quietly funneled nearly $13.5 million to a pro-Fidesz propaganda operation, leaked documents show. The donations, which include a $9 million transfer in 2024, trace back to Viktor Orbán's billionaire friend Lőrinc Mészáros.
— via ICIJ, Joanna Robin
Pete Hegseth just put Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey in charge of picking future military weapons systems, despite their companies holding billion-dollar Pentagon contracts. Neither man has served in uniform; Hegseth also used the speech to announce a new religious affairs office critics call a Christian Nationalist power grab.
— via Truthout, Chris Walker
America's three million "Main Street Millionaires" quietly hold thirteen times the combined wealth of the Forbes 400, a new book finds, their fortunes built on pass-through businesses and tax changes they helped lobby for. Less visible than billionaires but far more politically entrenched, this group now controls roughly $55 trillion.
— via Jacobin, Daniel Colligan
A new index finds California's top 99 political donors outspent the bottom 99.9% of residents and businesses combined over two decades, roughly $5.8 billion in all. Chevron leads the list, trailed by DaVita, the Realtors' association and Philip Morris.
— via Capital & Main, Mark Kreidler
Russell Vought's campaign to gut federal agencies isn't abstract policy wonkery: it's already tied to a live foodborne illness outbreak, and the pattern points to more preventable harm ahead. The argument here: defending civil servants' jobs and unions is also a defense of public health and the working class broadly.
— via Revolving Door Project, Kenny Stancil
