The Future of Political Change

welcome back to Gara's Economics. Today we are going to explain everything you need to know about the world's first trillionaire . Okay, so this week the world got its first trillionaire. It is Elon Musk. Congratulations to Elon Musk. We're going to explain to you everything that means today . The first thing is what is a trillionaire, what is a trillion ? We've had this long running problem in explaining inequality with the fact that like a billion dollars is like so much money that it's like impossible to conceptualize. And people don't understand the difference between a million, which is like quite a lot of money, but like amount that nowadays a lot of ordinary people will accumulate, especially in countries like the UK, the US and a billion, which is like, oh my god, like it's insane, so much money. I think the best example we've had to explain the difference between a million and a billion up till now is a million minutes is just under two years and a billion minutes is just under two thousand years. So a million minutes ago was a couple of years ago. A billion minutes ago was like Roman Empire . The problem you have is if you try to extend that to a trillion then you say like a trillion minutes is just under two million years and then once again you're back with the problem of this number . It's so big that the human brain can't comprehend it. So we probably have to go down to seconds. A million seconds is a week and a half . A billion seconds is thirty two years and a trillion seconds is thirty two thousand Basically, like a trillion is like just unbelievably like a stupidly enormous number and it's really hard to just understand how big it is . I think one of the best ways to understand the wealth of the super rich is to look at the passive income that they receive from the ownership of that wealth . So I often use the statistic that if you look at somebody who's worth a billion dollars or a billion pounds at a rate of five percent, they will make something like a million dollars or a million pounds a week . If we extend that to a trillion , then we see if somebody's worth a trillion dollars , then they will make every year fifty billion dollars. They'll make a billion dollars a week. I think probably the one that's maybe easiest to understand is that a trillionaire making passive income at rate of five percent will make one hundred thirty seven million dollars every day , five point seven million dollars every hour . That's about one hundred thousand dollars a min ute, one thousand six hundred dollars a second. So that is the passive income that Elon Musk will be making every single day every single second he'll be making about one thousand six hundred dollars. Every single minute he'll be making about one hundred thousand dollars pass,ive inc ome, not from his work, just from the assets that he owns without even getting out of bed. So that's the number, the number a trillion itself. It's ungodly large. It's absolutely enormous . And the second thing is this thing people would have been speaking about quite a lot this week, which is that one trillion dollars is assets that Elon Musk owns. It is not money in a bank . So some people have been saying, Oh well, it doesn't matter because it's not like money in a bank. The truth is, it's probably much more dangerous for somebody like Elon Musk to own real assets, which is like real physical infrastructure out there in the world, things that you need, things that your government needs, things that your country needs rather than just money in a bank. In this specific case , Elon Musk has is a trillionaire because he owns well, he already owned Twitter and Tesla, but he also owns about half of SpaceX which sends rockets into space. It owns a ton of satellites . That was floated on the stock market last week and basically traders think that this company is worth two trillion dollars and Elon Musk owns about half of it. So just his ownership in SpaceX itself is worth nearly a trillion dollars. I'm not an expert on SpaceX and obviously there's going to be some speculation about whether SpaceX really is worth a trillion dollars. When somebody owns assets that are worth a trillion dollars if somebody owns a company that's worth a trillion dollars. That is either because it is making an enormous amount of profit or traders think that in the future it will make an enormous amount of profit. So this is it basically Elon Musk, like all billionaires, like all trillionaires, even like all millionaires, he owns real physical infrastructure. It is physical infrastructure, which economists and traders, a lot of them believe you're going to need, your country's going to need, he's going to own the satell ites that's going to be used in things like weather forecasting and the military. Your government's going to need it and when you need it, you're going to have to pay Elon Musk to use those things . And that is why Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollars I think one of the most interesting things about Elon Musk suddenly becoming a trillionaire is this happened I'm filming this on the sixteenth of june. This happened less than a week ago and it was quite sudden suddenly El,on Musk is a trillionaire. And Ilamusk didn't actually do anything on the day last week when he became a trillionaire. What happened was because he suddenly sold some stocks in SpaceX and he did that on the stock markets. We suddenly were able to get like a valuation of what SpaceX was worth until he tried to sell some shares of SpaceX last week. We didn't know how much SpaceX was worth , and once we have sort of asked the markets, asked the traders to determine how much SpaceX is worth , we can see that it's probably worth something like two trillion dollars that makes Elom Musk a trillionaire. The fact is Elomus already owned half of SpaceX before last week, he owned it last year. So actually Elon Musk has probably been a trillionaire for quite some time and we only just really realized last week . And I think the thing you need to recognise about this is I think what this shows is how incredibly naive we are being as a society about the danger potentially posed by these trillionaires because Ilon Musk has been a trillionaire for some time and somehow we only realized it last week . I think this really highlights a little bit of the absurdity that we have at the moment, which is at the moment we are simply not accurately calculating how rich the rich are. You see this all the time if you look at things like the Sunday Times richness in this country where you have things like Suddenly Rushy Sunak, former UK Prime Minister, he's famous now so he appears on the rich list. What we , people who have been looking at inequality for some time have known for a long time is that we are not really making much serious effort to track how rich the rich are . And this is another really good example of that. Elon Musk has been a trillionaire for some time and suddenly we've realized that. So the first thing you can learn from this is that we as a society are not really making any serious attempts to measure how rich the rich are or how fast their wealth is growing. All right, so my next question here is Should you be worried? Just very coincidentally, somebody pointed something out to me in the first video I ever sh ot on this channel. So I started this channel in june twenty twenty, so it's probably something like the six year anniversary of this channel, perhaps maybe today. Cheers to GOS Economics and all of your watchers . Somebody pointed out something in the first ever video and I'm going to just show you a little clip of the first video we ever put out on the channel. This is a little glip about the enormous amount of money that the UK government gave out during COVID. This was right at the beginning of COVID and at that time the total amount of money given out was about three hundred billion pounds. It ended up being more than a trillion. But there's one little clip which I think was really interesting in the context of Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire. three hundred million pounds is an enormous amount of money. It's four and a half thousand pounds for every single man, woman, and child in the country. It's more than three times the net worth of Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man So this was said to me this week that just six years ago when I started this channel I was talking about this unbelievable enormous amount of money three hundred billion pounds and at the time that was three times the worth of the world 's richest man who was at the time Jeff Bezos . And now just six years later we are in a situation where that is less than a third of the wealth of who is now the world's richest man Elon Musk. So what this shows you is that in just six years we've gone from three hundred billion three times the wealth of the world's richest man to like the world's richest man is three times richer than three hundred billion pounds. It's like a nine X increase. It's scary basically, but I think what this shows you and the reason I wanted to cover it today is I think it really shows you that the things that I talk about on this channel and I've been really focusing for a long time on just some simple concepts, which is if you allow there to exist a relatively almost completely untaxed billionaire class . Just through the powers of compound interest, their wealth will grow incredibly quickly and they will start to basically gobble up all of the wealth of the rest of society and that's why you lose your wealth. And I think this week , the week that we have sort of officially established the world's first trillionaire , is just a great moment to sort of sit back and realize that these things that I've been saying and these things that I've been predicting and in that video itself I make a prediction that we're going to see enormous rapid increases in the wealth of the richest people in the world are happening and they are true and that in a sense that they were always inevitable to happen because if we go back to those numbers, you know, we're talking about somebody who's worth a trillion dollars, is going to be making one hundred thirty seven million dollars day day . Once you know that simple fact that a trillion dollars is going to give you one hundred seven million dollars a day passive income , and you have any understanding of how compound growth works or how exponential growth works . And it's not just Elon Musk, other billionaires, they are going to use this enormous passive income to buy more assets from ordinary people from the rest of society. Those assets will give them more passive income and they will use that increased passive income to buy more assets, that those assets give the more passive income. And I think it was very clear and it has been very clear really for as long as we have had an untaxed billionaire class in the absence of some sort of change to the taxation system , we will move and we are moving very quickly into a world situation where increasingly appro aching all of the world's wealth is owned by an incredibly small number of people . And the speed at which that is happening, I think is really clear from the fact that, as I've said, six years ago, three hundred billion pounds was three times the wealth of the world's richest man . And now the world's richest man. So that means the world's richest man was worth about one hundred billion pounds. And now the world's richest man is worth more than a trillion dollars . Okay, it's like currency mismatch there . But what you're seeing is that these guys are growing their wealth . You know, that's a rate of about forty percent annual growth in Western economies are growing about one percent . So I think what we can see , just in this one simple news story , we should be able to see like a relatively clear vision of the future, which is that Western econom ies grow up one percent . And okay the growth of specifically Elon Musk is perhaps bigger than other billionaires obviously because he'd become the world's richest man. But if he's growing at forty percent, other billionaires are growing at say ten , twenty percent in economies that are growing one percent . What you will see what we are seeing is basically the very aggressive gobbling up and sucking in at an exponential accelerating rate of all of the wealth . And what you really need to understand is this is not like an abstract thing that happens in a world that you are not in , that includes the gobbling up of your wealth. So when you see Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire, what I want you to see in that is the homelessness of your kids and your grandkids. This is like the inevitable logical consequence of the incredibly rapid untaxed wealth growth of not just Elon Musk, but the entire billionaire class is it is simply impossible for you and your family and your community and your kids to compete for asset ownership in a world where there are men who are accumulating wealth at a rate of one hundred thirty and seven million dollars a day in a way that is exponentially growing . So I mean that is what is happening and that is that is what will happen basically. basically in one hundred and thirty seven million dollars a day. There's essentially nothing he can do with that. It starts to take on its own basically its own physics. Once you have a wealth of that size, which is growing at an exponential rate of forty percent a year , you don't need to be a mass genius to recognize, he will own everything. He will own your house, you know, he will own your country, you know, he will own your government, he will own the media. You know, and obviously it's no coincidence that we have seen Elon Musk move into significant ownership of the media. That's not just El Musk. Jeff Bezos has bought the Washington Post. Elon Musk, of course, has bought Twit . He will increasingly influence your government. You know, we all saw Elon Musk make a pretty aggressive attempt to take control of American government policy. He's becoming increasingly influential in British politics, European politics. He's a big donor of political movements and political parties . But I don't want to like overemphasize because I think other people will be speaking about the influence that the billionaire class definitely is having and will have on politics and media and the political conversation. What I really want to focus on because I think this is what is really not being spoken about enough on the news is just quite simply what this means for asset ownership . Once you have this class with this unbelievably enormous amount and not only is it enormous but it's exponentially growing of like daily income, daily passive income, daily compounding interest . It's just like really like blatantly obvious that what they would do is buy more and more and more assets and what that will do is push asset prices further and further and further up and what they will do over time is squeeze other members of society away from owning assets. I think probably the correctest way understand the role that these super billionaires offer in this case a trillionaire, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. But I want to recognize these guys are just sort of the most visible examples, you know, we're seeing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billionaires across the world and you know, centi millionaires. The number these people are enormously growing. The best way to visualise these people is basically like black holes in your economy in the sense of these enormous sources of gravity that really cannot help but they just suck everything around them in. If you have that amount of passive income, there is really nothing you can do but buy all of the assets in the entire world and squeeze everybody out of asset ownership. So when you see that one trillion dollars and when you see that number growing, what I want you to see is the loss of your family home, the loss of assets of your kids, the loss of your government assets, the closure of your welfare state, all of the things that we have seen over the last twenty years as this billionaire class has grown , I want you to be able to look into the future and see what the consequence of that will be in the future. The aggressive un,believably rapid accumulation of assets by the billionaire class is not even just the cause of , it is the same thing as the loss of your family's assets, the loss of your government's assets. Our economies are not growthly, their wealth is grow rapidly because they are taking assets from you . Okay, so you know, this is this is out of the bag really . I think this like trillionaire thing. I'd like you to talk about it and push it around. I know it's incredibly depressing because when you see it , this is like this is like the end really . This is like, you know, you're here and you're watching you know the nuclear bombs flying and you're seeing the mushroom clouds going up and you're knowing like okay that's it. Like you know we're going to poison the atmosphere and it's going to be a nuclear fallout. Like when you see Elon Musk's trillion dollars I want you to understand this is the end of the welfare day. This is the end of this kind of golden period of history in the West at least, these sort of seventy years we've had of good living standards for ordinary working people , you know, ordinary working people being able to afford housing and education and healthcare. When you see Elon Musk one trillion dollars, I want you to understand that that is what is written on the gravestones of your kids and your community? We are going to go back to the world that our great grandparents and our great grandparents lived in of extreme inequality, extreme poverty, of , you know, just really extremely terrible living conditions because these two things are just not logically , consistently possible at the same time . You cannot must make a choice as a society between one of two things . Either we accept that we have an untaxed billionaire class and we will own nothing and our kids will be poor or or we tax the very rich. You know, these are basically only two options and it's clear what we're doing at the moment. So I just want you to understand this will continue. This is this is the end if we don't stop it , but of course we can . And if you do want to stop it, I think it's pretty clear what you and we need to do. You need to support, obviously, tax wealth, not work movement . And this is what the battle is. And I think I think when I see this trillionaire story , what that says to me is it's very important that we and you understand that this tax wealth not work movement reintroduced the billionaires into the system of taxation. They're currently relatively untaxed. This is not about left or right . This is not about labor versus reform or the conservatives. It's not about Republicans versus the Democrats. It's not about, you know, Nigel Farage or Zack Polanski, it's not about Zora Mamdy and Donald Trump. Really, it's just a very simple question of do you want your kids to own things or not? Really . And you know, I suspect that a lot of right wing people here in the UK, in America, across the world do want their kids to own things. You cannot allow one guy to own everything and also ex pect your kids to own things. You know, at the moment you're paying fifty percent tax on the work that you do. These guys are paying in many cases nothing, you know, Jeff Bezos got like benefits for his kids because his declared income was so l ow. This is the current situation, you know? The reason Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollars is because they reckon his assets are going to be assets that you need and you're going to have to pay all of your future income to him . So you know, it's I think what this is a bit of a call to arms, it's a call to seriousness . But I want it also to be like a call for us to like stop pretending that the taxation of the super rich is a left right issue because it just quite simply is not . It's about dignity or poverty. You know, look at history, you know, look at European history, you know , before the mid twentieth century, you know, desperate poverty was the norm. I've spoken about how my grandma was born pretty much exactly a hundred years ago here in London , which was at that time the richest city in the richest country in the world and lost three siblings to tuberculosis and a disease or poverty. That kind of poverty was normal, it can happen again . It will happen again , but we also created a much more equal world where ordinary people could live in dignity. And we have a choice either we tax the super rich and we preserve that dignity, we preserve our welfare states, we preserve the ability of ordinary families to own property, or we accept going back to that kind of extreme inequality, extreme poverty, feudal era that we li ved in, you know, really the whole eighteen hundreds, seventeen hundred, sixteen hundreds, basically the whole of the history of Europe . And that shouldn't be left or right, it shouldn't be left or right. It's quite simply a question of if you don't tax them , they would aggressively buy up all of the assets and you will be left with nothing. Now the next thing that I want to do is I want to address one pushback that I might get on this or it might be more of a sort of psychological push back in people's heads, which is this idea that, well, well, I'm going to be okay because I've already got some assets and I'm going to sell mine. And as the rich get aggressively richer, they're very rich. of O thene big consequences that we are seeing and will continue to see is the very aggressive increase in asset prices and that is like a quite predictable understandable consequence of the fact that as rich people generate larger and larger amounts of passive income , the very riches spend basically all of their income on asset purchases. So as they get richer and richer and richer, they'll be putting more and more money into the purchasing of assets and asset prices will go up and up and up. And this causes quite a frequent kind of like psychological game in people's heads, especially the heads of asset owners , which is like, well , oh my house pr goingice is to go up. that Like's going to be fantastic and I'm going to be rich . The thing you need to understand about that is as the rich get richer and richer and richer and richer as they buy more and more and more assets , they will also increase their consumption of the things that you need and they will start to try and squeeze you out of being able to access those things . I think the most obvious examples of this at the moment are housing in large cities . So the rich and I think one thing that's important to recognise about the rich and the billionaire class is they will build quite a large entourage around themselves. I think what we're seeing at the moment is basically the recreation of the feudal system. So if anyone doesn't know what the feudal system is , there's this commonly like drawn as like a pyramid. So the feudal system was the kind of social system that was common in Europe throughout most of the medieval period, you know, the whole of I don't know from year eight hundred to the year, I don't know, seventeen hundred or something like this feudal system basically. And you have the king he owns everything. But you know, he has you have these classes around him like the knights and the landed gentry and the clergy and all of these different important members of society that you know, you have that are each you have like each rung, like a pyramid is a bit poorer than the other and the rich they will build a big entourage around them. And you will see , you know, somebody like me when I was from a poor background but was getting paid a lot of money to basically manage money for the rich . I was basically sort of part of the rich's essentially like protective entourage . And you will see like certain groups of people who are willing to like directly protect the rich's interest, like polit icians, like people who are willing to go on the media and argue against wealth taxes , like traders making good money . But basically you will have the situation where the rich will increasingly monopol notized just ass et ownership, but also the usage of the things that you need for their entourage. And you'll reach the situation which we're already in where basically you will not be able to like rent in a big city like London or New York or Paris unless you are part of the direct entourage of the rich. So what you see is they drive up the cost of like renting in big cities goes up . Another really big example of where increased consumption of the super rich class and their entourage is squeezing ordinary people out. Probably the most obvious is education . So just twenty years ago when I was at university , I went to university for one thousand pounds a year, three thousand pounds in to tal. In just that twenty years since I went to university, what you've seen is education has aggressively become sort of I'm talking about university education has become aggressively unaffordable for like regular working families. I went back to my old high school as part of the documentary I've been making and what I found was most of the AIB economic students there have given up on the dream of going to university. What's interesting about that is if you go to LSE which is, the university I went to, it's enormously expanded in that time. And that is true of most of the most elite universities in the country. So how can it be that the universities have expanded massively and yet ordinary poor people can't afford to go to university anymore. It is quite simply that you are competing with a super rich class who can pay enormous amounts to take those places. So it's exactly the same as London housing basically. They're going to squeeze you up London housing, they're going to squeeze out education . Another great example is healthcare. So a lot of my friends from school became dentists . Dentistry, I know some people here not watching from the UK. Dentistry is becoming increasingly inaccessible to ordinary British people at the same time as like, you know , we continually increase the number of dentists. And when I speak to my friends, you know, why is it that there's more dentists but dentists are unaffordable? They're working privately for rich people, you know, they're doing Botox, they're doing cosmetic procedures for rich people. You know, rich people , they don't just sit there and, you know, bouncefully increase the economy. They consume the things you need. They consume the things you need. And then you will eventually be in a situation where for example if you need end of life care, you know, if your kids need to go to university, if your kids need to live in London . So good, so good, so good . No markdowns up to seventy percent off are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Stock up and stay big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories, and more must have for summer. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first , and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices . That's why you rack . This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. They can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block or finally break that longdown article you've had open for weeksed . Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus. The only way you will be able to maintain a decent standard of living for you and your family will eventually be to sell your assets to the rich. So what I want to say is like the point I'm trying to make here is I know that some , especially like slightly richer people, maybe people whose families are worth or two million pounds or even half a million pounds are often really against taxation of the rich. And I understand why because they want to protect their assets . I want to make it clear that if you are in that bracket, you are probably the kind of person who really has the most to lose here when you see happening. Like if you look at your mask becoming a tri llionaire, and maybe you're thinking, I'm excited my stock portfolio is going to go up if the billionaire class increases. I don't think anybody really has more to lose here than you because you are currently owning assets, you are the kind of person who is about to be squeezed out of asset ownership and you and your kids and your grandkids will lose this sort of comfortable middle class life that you currently have. So I don't like this current situation where sort of more middle class people are opposing wealth taxes. It really is a sort of Turkeys voting for Christmas. I just want you to understand this simple thing. You know, if Elon Musk and the billionaires are growing their wealth at forty percent a year in wealth that is growing only one percent a year, economy is growing only one percent a year. Where do you think that wealth is going to come from? It is going to come from you . And increasingly, this wealth has been coming from governments. Governments are becoming effectively bankrupted. And we are going to move into situations in the UK where we're kind of already there where governments basically have only three options the taxation of the very rich, the taxation of the sort of middle class, hiing workers, or the shutting down of the welfare state. So if you are somebody who is like relatively comfortable and you do not want taxation of the very rich, I want you to understand you are effectively advocating directly for taxation of yourself. And the next point I want to make is, you know, you just cannot separate yourself from this. You know, once you see the size of it, the scale of it, the rate of the growth of it, I want you to realize you cannot separate yourself from this. You are threatened by this. And you know, if we look at the last time we saw like real aggressive rapid wealth growth on this scale , you're probably talking about the colonial period and the industrial revolution period in Europe in the sort of seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds where we saw this like really aggressive rapid expansion of wealth ownership by the elites essentially in Europe . And you know, if you look at what happened here , what this shows us is compound interest is incredibly powerful . If you allow it to grow unchecked, it will inevitably take over the whole world. And we saw that once European wealth starts to grow very, very rapidly , very, very quickly it takes over the whole world. And you know, if you are over in China, if you look at like picture world history, China has always been one of massive population centers and technological centres and economic centres of the world . And obviously, especially in the context of before plane travel, it was a long long, long, way away from Europe . And they might have thought, you know, this aggressive growth of wealth in Europe is not a threat to us. You know, we're we're China, we're incredibly powerful, you know, we're, you know, the Middle K ingdom, we have this amazing amount of wealth and this history. Who cares if Europeans are getting rapidly rich? And you might be thinking that now when you see this unbelievably rapid growth of Elon Musk, you might be like, well, you know, who cares about Elon Musk? I'm sitting here, I'm comfortable with my nice family house. Who cares if Elon Musk gets rich? And then if you look at what happened, you know, back then , European growth goes very, very, very, very, very, very rapidly and they generate they start to create these incredibly efficient ways of producing goods and services . And then suddenly they're going out there to China and India and they're able to produce goods and services enormously cheaper these countries could at the time . And you know, this is so reminiscent of what is very possibly about to happen now with things like SpaceX and with things like AI. You know, you might want to like bury your head in the sand and say, you know, who cares if Elon Musk gets rich He and the other very wealthy people are actively creating with their exponentially growing wealth systems that are going to outcompete you for your job . So and the Europeans turn up in India and China with their factory produced goods, you know, you know, you can look into the history of sort of the cotton trade and the fabric trade is a good example of this. Suddenly, they're like, well, we can produce these things so much more than you . And these countries are in a situation where if they were to allow themselves to trade freely with these factory produced western goods, it would immediately create enormous poverty and enormous unemployment in these countries. So you see China saying, Well, we're not going to trade with you. And then what does Europe do? He says, if you don't trade with us, you know, we're going to blow you up basically, you know, and this is the story I'm trying to tell you here . It is incredibly naive to look at somebody over the sea that is growing their wealth, growing their power unbelievably un,believably enormously quickly and say to yourself, that doesn't matter to me . You know, there's a really good I'm going to expose myself as a bit of an art house Wanker here. There's a really good French film I like called Lehaine, you might have seen it. It's black and white, check it out, very artist, very fancy. And I really like the opening scene of that film where he says, have you heard the story about the guy who jumps from the top of a skyscraper? And the guy says, Oh, you know, I haven't seen it. He says, As he was falling, each floor he passed, he said to himself, so far so good, so far so good , so far so good , so far so good . If you are looking at Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire this week and you are not worried about what that means for the future of your children, for the future of your country, for the future of your family , that is you. You are the man falling from the top of the skyscraper saying to yourself, so far so good, so far so good, so far so good, so far so good. You know, you are China, you know, in the eighteenth century, saying we are the central country in the world. Who cares if those guys over there are getting unbelievably wealthy and unbelievably powerful and incredibly quickly? And China endured its century of humiliation for that, of which it's only just coming back from . You know, history teaches us if you allow incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful people to grow their wealth and power completely unchecked, they will, in almost all cases , try to take the world over and try to monopolize natural resources of the entire world. You know, we've seen this again and again throughout history and we are we are quite clearly repeating that mistake now. You know, I tried to make the case and this is going to make housing more expensive, this is going to make food more expensive, this is going to make water more expensive . And people say to me, that's absurd you know, you know there's only so much food , the rich can eat. You know, and I want to make it clear to you, you know , you know, after this happened and after, you know, European powers col onized the entire world, you know, we had these terrible fam ines in parts of India where millions of people died and the fields that used to produce food fed these people were producing tea and cotton for export to the rich in Europe . You know, these people will take the resources that you need and they will convert them into luxury production for themselves . That is what will happen. And you know, the best example of this is what is happening to water and the data centers . You know, these guys want your water you feed your kids so that they can live for their data centers to fucking monitor every fucking move and replace your fucking job . You know, this is this is incredibly dangerous. Incredibly incredibly dang erous for you and your family. Now I want you to see this for what it is. You know, this is one person Elon Musk, part of a group of people like a global international billionaire class that is aggressively exponentially raising and accumulating power . I want you to see if what it is, which is a group of people rapidly, aggressively, exponentially raising an army. And I want you to recogn that once they are making wealth at a rate of one hundred thirty seven million dollars a day , you are not going to be able to compete with that by raising your own army. If you try to compete with that on the basis of power accumulation, you are coming into the game of monopoly where the other guy already owns all of the properties on the board and you are saying, well, I'm just king good up monopoly. That is not going to work. At the moment, every single day that goes by, Western governments become poorer, become weaker, the Western working class and the western middle class become poorer and become weaker, and their power, their wealth , their assets are being relatively quickly transferred to a super billionaire and it will become more commonly a trillionaire class , which is raising their power aggressively year after year after year. If you want to protect what you have , you absolutely must stop the progressive daily annual transfer of power and wealth away from you and towards that class of people. Listen, if we're playing chess and every single turn you take one of my pieces and I never take any of yours, I am going to lose that game of chess . We need to stop the transfer of wealth . We need to stop the transfer of wealth. And the only way to do that is as the T shirt says, tax wealth not work. Listen, all the signs are incredibly visible. You know, if you haven't watched that video, the first video I ever did the reason I started this channel almost exactly six years ago . Go watch it, go watch it . And I tell you the reason you should watch it is because every single prediction I made in that video has come true . The aggressive, enormous, incredibly rapid increase in wealth of the rich est, the incredibly rapid fall in living standards of ordinary people, the incredible increase rise in asset prices, in the gold price, in inflation, the decreased affordability of housing, the decreased affordability of food, the inequality crisis , all of these predictions are there . And you know the thing that frustrates me so much about being in this world of economics where a bunch of like rich people paid by the rich say oh my god it's never going to work, it's never going to work. It's never going to work. When I was in trading, people recognized that it's incredibly difficult to make continually make accurate predictions unless you know what you're doing. You know? The reason I've been able to continually accurately predict this crisis, to make millions of pounds betting on this crisis is because the basic concept is true . If you have a untaxed, incredibly wealthy billionaire class, then we will move very, very quickly towards them owning everything and you owning nothing, and that will lead to incredibly low standards of living for ordinary people . If you want to know the future of this country here in the UK, over there, wherever you're watching, if you do not deal with that aggressive growth inequality , then if you can afford to take the time to go to a really unequal country and see what life is like there. You know, go to Mumbai, go to some of these most unequal countries in the world. I've been to Mumbai. I stayed in a luxury hotel and outside the luxury hotel there was a family lying on the floor on flattened cardboard boxes, naked, dying in the street and people came out of luxury cars and stepped over them and walked into the hotel. That is what life is like. That is what life is like in incredibly unequal countries and that is where we are going if we do not tax the rich. So when you hear Elon Musk, trillionaire, I want you to imagine your grandkids living that life because that could be you. It has happened here in the UK and it will happen again if we allow the super rich to go on growing their wealth like a black hole completely untaxed. All right, so that's a return to another of my old school incredibly depressing style of video , which I use to see a lot more . And I've done less and less recently as we continue to totally dominate the narrative on wealth taxation . But I think it's important that when we have weeks like you've had this week and we see things like what have happened with Elon Musk becoming the first trillionaire. We need to recognize that we are part of that. We have allowed that to happen by not stopping it. You know, our grandparents fought very hard for a fairer tax system, which taxed the very rich at high rates and forced the very rich to provide us with good quality housing, education, healthcare, food . And we have allowed that to be lost . We have allowed the rich to avoid tax again like they always did in history . And we are losing we are losing the equality and the dignity that our grandparents fought so hard for. And it's important that we recognise it's our job to stop this and it's our job to change it. And the question that I'm asking myself here and the question that I want to ask you is what are you going to do ? Listen, we have an opportunity here. You know, we live in this incredible , unusual time where the vast majority of people here in the UK, in the US, in Europe, in Australia, even in Japan, all around the world, New Zealand never gets mentioned, Canada, I always get to say them . People are clamouring , absolutely clamouring for change for something new . People are increasing ly waking up to what I would say is the increasingly obvious reality that if we stay on the path we are on , we will definitely see more and more real desperate poverty for not just the bottom ten percent but for the, average family , for the vast majority of families in the UK, in the U. S., in Europe around the world. And people don't want that . People want change. And I guarantee you that because we are not fixing the problem yet, that poverty and that clamour and that desperate demand and desire for change is going to grow. I absolutely guarantee you that and I won't be wrong. You'll see that I'm right, you'll see that I'm right. And as people demand more and more more and and more and more for change. One other thing I can guarantee you is that we will get change. We will get change. It's certain. We will get dramatic, drastic change as quick as the next five, ten years, you know, you're going to see it. You're going to see it happening because people are not going to accept this growing poverty. The question is not whether we will get change because we will, I absolutely guarantee you we will. The question is what change are we going to get ? Because that is what is not clear yet. And that is the discussion which we here in the UK and over in the US and every single country all around the world and I've been to so many countries in the last eighteen months, two years, this conversation is happening everywhere . The discussion which we need to have as societies is what kind of change do we want ? And at the moment , you know, the main arguments are taking their place , you know, and all of the main players are getting involved and starting to argue about what they want . And I think it is increasingly obvious there are sort of three players in this game for how our societies change . There is the boring centre , the Boy Stewarts and the rest of the politics of this world and unfortunately the Keistars, perhaps even the Joe Bidens , that think they can get out of this with some kind of non dramatic , boring technocratic centrism . Support for that is collapsing and it will keep collapsing . It's clearly never worked anywhere it has been tried and those guys will be off the board very, very soon. And we will be left with two options, right? There will be me and my guys and hopefully you and Gabrielle Zuckman, you know, and people all across the world that are aggressively pushing for a fairer tax system where the rich pay their fair share, where we no longer accept them getting richer and richer and richer and richer every year while we get poorer . And there will be the other side , which I think is very clear what they're going to do. They're going to tell you the problem is foreigners . The problem is people who don't look like you, who maybe follow a different religion, who maybe don't sound like you . And the way to fix it is to go after them. And the other thing that I want you to think about when you see the other thing that I want you to think about when you see El Musk becoming a trillionaire . I want you to ask yourself if Elon Musk can see this game like I can see this game and like you can see this game . And he realises that there are two horses in this race . One that says tax the rich , tax the very rich aggressively . And one that says blame foreigners . Blame people who look different , blame people of different religions . What do you think Kila Mkus is going to do ? You know, every week I make a video like this and I've been doing this work for a number of years and I did it for free for a long time . And I always noticed how whenever I would go on TV I'd go on for free and I'd go up against somebody who was funded by a Think Tank , paid by a think tank that was funded by billionaires and super wealthy people . And I think it's amazing what we've managed to achieve here on this channel with relatively little money . But I think we have to be realistic that these very wealthy people are going to aggressively fund the conversation on this they are going to pay people to convince you that it's impossible to tax the rich , that it's not in your best interest that if we try and tax the rich, what we're actually not doing is taxing you. And they get richer and richer every year and they get more powerful every year. And we will never