A Tesla shareholder meeting held last week in Texas finally approved that Elon Musk receive a bonus worth $56 billion. As Miguel Jiménez told this same newspaper, a court in Delaware, where the company previously had its headquarters, decided that this amount was disproportionate and that, for the moment, it was paralyzed. Musk moved the headquarters to Texas and, in the end, the majority shareholders said yes, they will know why (perhaps it influences that they are stock options of the same company and can only be executed within five years).
Be that as it may, the striking thing is that someone believes that they have earned 56,000 million dollars in one year. And that someone, at the same time, is a fierce enemy of the unions and of the workers of their multiple companies associating to ask for better salaries. Elon Musk is exactly like that. Less than a year ago, in New York, he said verbatim: “I don’t agree with the idea of unions.” He resents the mere idea that they exist and does everything in his power to combat them, in the United States and in the world.
Months ago, he had a minimal and fierce opponent: the workers of one of the Tesla companies in Sweden. They have been on strike for several months, with the support of other groups of workers in their country, demanding the right to negotiate their salaries en bloc. They have fought so much that, in the same meeting in which Musk received his incredible bonus, the Norwegian Pension Fund, which has about 162 million dollars placed there, asked that the company not interfere with the rights of its workers. “Freedom of association… and the right to bargain collectively are fundamental human rights that are protected by international standards,” his spokesperson patiently explained. But Elon Musk doesn’t like unions. Spot. And, of course, the majority of its shareholders, dazzled by the promise that the company will soon be worth some 20 billion dollars on the stock market, do not even think about opposing it. They may even join his idol in his declared support for Donald Trump in the upcoming North American elections. (By the way, we will have to be careful, because it is possible that a good part of the videos circulating with the image of a half-demented and robotic Joe Biden are fakes spread on the networks).
If you want to support the production of quality journalism, subscribe.
Subscribe
And that’s where we are. In a surreal world in which a businessman earns 56,000 million bonuses and in which the 10 richest people in the world (Musk is the second or the third, depending on the day, with 193,000 million dollars of personal fortune) accumulate something as well as 1,319,000 million dollars (1.3 trillion), according to Forbes.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the brilliant president of the United States (between 1933 and 1945), already had a good grasp of the millionaires of his time (much less super-millionaires than those of today). In a speech he gave at the 1936 Democratic National Convention he railed against them: “They admit that political freedom is the business of the Government, but they believe that the economic order is no one’s business.” Roosevelt ironically: “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsty for power, tried to control the Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the mantle of economic freedom… The hours that men and women worked, the salaries they received, the conditions of their work, all of this had escaped the control of the people and was imposed by this new industry. .
Elon Musk is one of those new privileged princes who demand that the conditions of the world of work escape the control of governments. And much better if we go back a couple of centuries and the very idea of unions disappears, and even better if the European Union and the European unions, so willing to support the determined Swedish mechanics, disappear. David Dayen, director of the American magazine prospect, writes: “The antidemocratic, unpatriotic, and freedom-restricting spirit that animated Roosevelt’s wealthy enemies is more than present in the Biden Administration’s super-rich enemies.” Perhaps the wonderful Mexican journalist Marcela Turati is right, who one day asked us journalists to stop writing about the poor, something that no longer seems to mobilize anyone, and start writing about the rich, about their way of life and his ideas, which, when known, may revolt multitudes.
Sign up here to the weekly Ideas newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Lets #talk #lives #ideas #ultrarich