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    Abigail Disney: ‘Every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath’

    My conversation with Abigail Disney opens with the kind of bog-standard line that starts most chats. But because she is a left-leaning American, with a record of righteous criticism of the man now once again in charge of her country, I suspect it might invite a very long answer indeed.Still, out it comes: “How are you?”“It’s a good question,” she says, “because we’re all struggling with it.”A deep breath. “I spend a lot of time trying to think of reasons to be optimistic, because I don’t know how to function without that. And I want to find the energy and the grit for a really long fight. This isn’t just four years … you know, there’s a whole civilisation-level reset to be done. I mean, I heard the other night when Trump spoke, he mentioned that we would get Greenland one way or another. And then there was laughter. Laughter! I just thought, ‘Oh, we have sunk so low.’”The film-maker (and the grand-niece of Walt Disney) is speaking to me on video call from her home in Manhattan. She talks with a mixture of speed, eloquence and certainty – partly because her view of Donald Trump and his allies is all about something with which she is well acquainted: wealth, and what it does to people.“Trump is an inheritor,” Disney tells me. “He never acknowledges it, but he wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things he did without an inheritance. He absorbed the lessons of inheriting money almost unfiltered: ‘You have this money because you’re special.’ If you read about his childhood, it’s like the textbook worst way to raise a person – you know, he was violent, he was a bully and he was rewarded for that, even as a very small child. And the more money he had, the more he exhibited these bad qualities, and the more people told him he was wonderful.”I then mention something she well knows: that Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk is also from a very wealthy background, having started his first business ventures with money provided by his father, and then becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This, she tells me, partly explains the frazzled morals of someone who has just imposed all those cuts to overseas aid, with apparently no regard for the consequences.Among the schemes Musk has frozen, Disney points out, was the Pepfar programme, AKA the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which is estimated to have saved 25 million lives by supplying medicine to people with HIV and Aids around the world. “There are people suffering and dying today because of that cut,” she says. “There are children who have HIV who shouldn’t because of Elon Musk. Now. As we sit here and talk.”She exhales. “That natural human proclivity to say, ‘Hmm, that doesn’t feel right’ – he doesn’t have it. Trump doesn’t have it. They’re spending no time in shame, and shame is a righteous emotion. It’s not an emotion you want to live in, but it’s an emotion you want as a motivator sometimes. And where is it? Where’s the shame?”View image in fullscreenWhat makes Abigail Disney fascinating is that she is also an inheritor. To quote from a speech she recently made – at the Vatican, where she took part in an event focused on making wealthy people around the world pay more tax, and the idea that large concentrations of wealth now threaten democracies – she acknowledges that she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”Now a 65-year-old mother of four, she is the granddaughter of Roy O Disney, who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney company in 1923. In her early 20s, she resolved to start giving away large chunks of her inheritance. By 2021, she had donated approximately $70m to causes centred on women living with HIV, women in prison and women affected by domestic violence. She has long been a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation focused on changing the system so that people as rich as its members – and those who have even more money – pay more of their income in tax.“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath,” she says. “Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of. And so by just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire. It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”She has also campaigned – successfully – to improve wages and conditions for workers in the theme parks that bear her family name (she still owns shares in Disney, though not, she says, enough to give her substantial clout). As an active Democrat, she was among the big political donors who, in the summer of 2024, said they would withhold money from the party until Joe Biden stepped down as its candidate in the presidential election.View image in fullscreenBut aside from all that work and her advocacy on wealth and tax, Disney is chiefly known as a film producer and director, some of whose work has presciently looked ahead to the polarised, angry country the US seems to have become.In 2015, for example, she made The Armor of Light, an acclaimed and very sobering documentary about Rob Schenck, an evangelical pastor based in Washington DC who was long associated with the American hard right, with views on abortion to match. The film portrays him trying to find the courage to speak out about the scourge of American gun violence and pull his followers out of their love affair with firearms; after it was released, he and Disney began to regularly make their case to gatherings of rightwing Christians.But as Trump began his march towards the White House, they started to get a sharp sense of what his politics were going to do to American society. “When I first started asking about Trump, the people we met were like, ‘Are you kidding? No way – he’s a joker, he’s nothing.’ And then, halfway through the summer of 2016, it was like the iron curtain came down, and we stopped getting invitations. And when Trump was elected, we never got another request to speak.”For Schenck, things were about to get very ugly indeed. Over decades, he had been involved in the campaign to nullify Roe v Wade, the US supreme court judgment that established women’s constitutional right to abortion – which, in 2022, was overturned. But three years before that watershed decision, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times announcing that he had changed his mind. At that point, Disney tells me, former allies who were now staunch Trump supporters turned on him.“Death threats and all kinds of things came in,” she says. “He was told he was going to hell by people he had been friends with for 40 years. It’s horrible what he’s been through.”That kind of belligerent nastiness is arguably the defining feature of the mindset of the president and his followers, but Disney is adamant that the roots of his politics lie in wealth and privilege, and how Americans view those things. As she sees it, Trump and Trumpism are not some sudden bolt from the blue: his rise to power, she says, highlights a cultural shift that began in the 1980s, when the US really started to venerate the wealthy.“Our magazine covers did not used to be littered with CEOs,” she says. “They used to have pictures of Martin Luther King on them, or a war hero, or the woman who founded the Girl Scouts. Just look at the magazine covers and you’ll see the way this country has lost its way.”Soon enough, along came reality TV, the frenzied worship of a new kind of celebrity, and social media. Trump, clearly, has skilfully used them all. “We all laughed and said he was stupid, but obviously he’s not,” she says. “In the 19th century he would have sold a lot of snake oil. He came along right at the correct moment. And he played his role brilliantly. You’ve got to give it to him.”View image in fullscreenOne question hangs over the whole of our conversation: what is to be done?For now, Disney tells me, pursuing political activism via film-making probably isn’t an option. She is understandably worried about what Trump and Musk might have planned for such outlets as the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which might once have played a key role in holding them to account. The fact that the TV and movie industries are in crisis – thanks to recent writers’ strikes, and the impossible economics of streaming – makes things even more difficult. “I’m thinking of maybe pivoting to short videos – just talking at the camera, and doing that low-maintenance kind of thing,” she says. “I feel like I’m missing an opportunity if I don’t go on social media and try to be present as a public voice.”As the Trump revolution gathers pace, I tell her, I often wonder when massed opposition will materialise. Put another way, why aren’t millions of people already in the streets?She sighs. “We could all show up on the streets. But what would be the uniting message? The chaos is deliberate: it’s meant to give us too much to handle. Do we go out there about the environment? Do we go out there about DEI [diversity, equality and inclusion policies]? Do we go out there about gay rights, about women’s rights?“You know, the difficulty of being progressive is that it’s difficult to unite everybody around a single issue. So most of the progressives I know are trying to figure that out. And even if we did go out [on the streets], what is our leverage? We have none.”What does she mean by leverage?“Well, we [Democrats] have a minority in the House and the Senate. We have a cabinet that is so radical, and they are lining the government with people who are beyond radical and there is no place where we can exercise visible dissent … We’re being shut out. And the way of communicating has completely changed. An op-ed in the New York Times isn’t going to change things.”View image in fullscreenDisney is at pains to talk about the necessity of slow and arduous work: building opposition from the grassroots up – which will be helped, she says, by the fact that Trump and his cronies will sooner or later hit no end of problems.“I really don’t think it will take very much time for a lot of the people who voted for him to regret it, especially on the economy,” she says. “We’re going to have so much inflation: the tariffs are terrible. I think that there’s going to be some turning, and in the meantime we have to really work on building institutions. Black associations, neighbourhood associations, PTAs – we need to do the work of rebuilding those spaces. We need the basis of a really vibrant progressive society. We let it die.”When I mention the progressive flag-bearers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have recently been organising Fight Oligarchy events across the US, Disney speaks with an urgency that sounds almost optimistic.“We need Bernie barnstorming,” she says. “We need AOC barnstorming. We need, you know, the people we have that are greeted as authentic in the real world, not focus groups, to go out and be authentic with their passion and their smarts about where to go from here.”She mentions a handful of impressive young Democratic politicians such as Maxwell Frost, the 28-year-old congressman from Florida who had a key role in the pro-gun-control movement March for Our Lives. “There’s a bunch of people,” she says. “And what we need to do is put together a coordinated campaign. But you’ve got to build the infrastructure to do it.”We end as we began, with Donald Trump, and how awful he has made so many Americans feel. “He has a critical mass of 35% to 40% of the American public – which is far too many people – who are completely on board with the cruelty and the derision and the trolling,” Disney says. “But that leaves everybody who’s either too tired, or too alienated or estranged from the process.”She suddenly brightens. “They’re ours,” she says. “But we have to do the work.” More

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    ‘They will collide eventually’: how long will the Trump-Musk relationship survive?

    A picture is worth a thousand words – or, more precisely, $288m. That was the sum tech entrepreneur Elon Musk donated to Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. His reward was dramatically illustrated by the cover of this week’s Time magazine: an image of Musk, coffee cup in hand, sitting behind the Resolute desk used by every US president since Jimmy Carter.Some speculated that the picture of “President Musk” was designed to provoke the thin-skinned Trump, who is known to revere Time magazine and has twice been named its “person of the year”. The president reacted on Friday with a pointed joke: “Is Time magazine still in business? I didn’t even know that.”Musk, for his part, wrote on his X social media platform: “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man.”It was the consummation of an unlikely relationship that is bringing an unnerving revolution to America. Trump and Musk share an appetite for disruption, rule-breaking and goading liberals. The convergence of the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man spells double trouble for democracy in the eyes of critics.Can the bromance last? Recent history is littered with examples of Trump acolytes who threatened to steal some of his limelight and paid the price. Sceptics have been predicting the demise of the Trump-Musk axis almost since it began, suggesting that two giant egos will surely collide.But others perceive a symbiotic relationship that might go the distance. Joe Walsh, a former Republican representative and a Trump critic, said: “They’re the two most powerful people on the planet right now. They desperately need each other.“They’re in this for the long haul so people who think this thing’s going to bust up in a month or two are smoking something. We’re looking at four years of these two doing this. They are like two monsters and every day they’re growing stronger.”At first glance, Trump and Musk have little in common. Trump is a 78-year-old property developer and reality TV star from New York who came to politics late, spends hours on the golf course and has a cultural frame of reference rooted in the 1980s.Musk, 53, was born in South Africa during the era of racial apartheid, made his fortune in Silicon Valley and is chief executive of Tesla, an electric vehicle maker, and SpaceX, a rocket company aiming for the stars. He has publicly stated that he has Asperger syndrome, part of the autism spectrum.View image in fullscreenIn 2016, he said Trump “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States”. In 2022, Trump described Musk as a “bullshit artist” for supporting his opponents in 2016 and 2020. By last year, both were singing a different tune.Musk threw his weight behind Trump in the election against Kamala Harris, becoming his top donor, speaking at campaign rallies and elevating pro-Trump propaganda on his X social media platform. He spent election night at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and celebrated his inauguration with an apparent Nazi salute.Musk has so far been the biggest single difference between Trump’s first term as president and his second. Dubbed “first buddy”, he was appointed as head of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a taskforce aimed at restructuring federal agencies, cutting budgets, rooting out waste and corruption, and dismissing employees.Musk, known for a leadership style that rules by fear and demands total loyalty from workers, has duly brought a Silicon Valley-style “move fast and break things” approach to scything through the federal government with no regard for the constitution or rule of law.His Doge team of young software engineers quickly gained access to the treasury payment system, which is responsible for a billion payments a year totaling $5tn. It includes sensitive information involving bank accounts and social security payments.Then Doge shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) without seeking the necessary authority from Congress, destroying a tool of American soft power and severing vital food and medicine programmes worldwide. Musk tweeted gleefully: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”Doge’s tactics have included locking out employees, freezing funding, terminating leases and offering “deferred resignation” packages to workers. Musk is also using his X platform to promote Trump’s agenda, attack critics and make outrageous statements. He labelled USAid as “evil” and a “criminal organization” without providing evidence.Musk is not a full-time government employee, instead holding a “special government employee” status, allowing him to sidestep financial disclosure and public vetting processes. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, said: “An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.”But Trump appears unconcerned, claiming: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won’t.” A White House source told the Guardian that the president had recruited Musk to do “crazy shit” and he was delivering.To some commentators, the match makes sense. Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University in California, said: “It’s safe to assume Donald Trump has always admired wealth and there are only a handful of people on the planet whom he can look northward to in terms of wealth and Musk is one of them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump obviously has the power that Musk thrives on but the one thing that might be in common here is they both enjoy being disrupters and mischief makers.”Musk has incentives both financial and ideological. His companies have extensive contracts with the federal government and, as head of Doge, he is in a position to streamline regulations to directly benefit them.He has also found common cause with Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement, making it clear that he is focused on eradicating the so-called “woke” agenda. He eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at X, formerly Twitter, and appears to be bringing that mindset to his government work.View image in fullscreenHe shares Trump’s worldview on race. Musk has falsely claimed that the South African government is allowing a “genocide” against white farmers; Trump announced that he would shut down all aid to South Africa over what he alleged was a “massive human rights violation” in the form of a new land rights law.Still, no honeymoon lasts forever. Musk’s approval rating is falling fast, even among Republicans. Just 43% of Republican respondents say they want Musk to have “a little” influence, and 17% say they want him to have “none at all”, according to a recent poll from the Economist/YouGov.This week, protesters outside government buildings carried hand-painted placards complaining: “Nobody elected Elon.” Democrats in Congress have made him their prime target, accusing him of an illegal power grab. Representative Jared Golden of Maine posted on X: “My constituents, and a majority of this country, put Trump in the White House, not this unelected, weirdo billionaire.”This could make Musk a useful foil for Trump, deflecting attention from the president. But it might also eventually turn Musk into a political liability, leading voters to question which is the master and which the puppet. Pressure from allies such as Steve Bannon, a sharp critic of Musk and other tech oligarchs, and Republicans in Congress would surely grow ahead of next year’s midterm elections.Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group that this week released an attack ad titled “President Musk”, said: “They will collide eventually. When Trump sees Elon causing political damage to him, he’ll cut the cord in a hot minute.“It won’t even take five heartbeats. Once he sees that Elon is dragging him down in the polling – and Elon has become spectacularly unpopular in the last few weeks – Elon’s going to have a rough moment.”On the other hand, Musk is not like anyone that Trump has encountered before. His estimated wealth of $426bn dwarfs that of the president. He wields huge power and influence through X. He might prove harder to dispose of than previous lieutenants.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “I don’t know how he solves a problem like Elon. He can fire or destroy anyone else. He can brush Marco Rubio off. He could destroy JD Vance’s political future with a Truth Social post. But he’s stuck with Elon Musk.“Elon Musk now has his own power base. He’s got his own cult of personality. There’s going to come a moment where these egos are going to clash – there can be only one master of the universe at the same time – but how is this resolved? How does Trump disentangle himself from the Frankenstein’s monster that he’s gotten into bed with?” More

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    Elon Musk is spending millions to elect Trump. Let’s boycott his companies | Robert Reich

    For many years I’ve argued that the consolidation of great wealth in the hands of a few undermines our democracy.Elon Musk is the poster child for that concern.Wealth is most dangerous when transformed into political power.One way Musk is transforming his gargantuan wealth into political power is by committing $45m a month, according to recent reporting, to a new pro-Trump super PAC founded and funded in May by other tech oligarchs. On Tuesday, Musk distanced himself from that claim, saying that the actual amount is lower.Either way, we may never know how much Musk is plunking down for Trump because of Musk’s avowed distaste for groups whose donors must be legally disclosed. Musk prefers to wield his political power through dark money.A second way Musk is transforming his wealth into political power is by posting pro-Trump, anti-Kamala Harris messages to his 189 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.The reason Musk has 189 million followers is that he owns X. He can adjust its algorithm to give his tweets maximum exposure and effectively buy and capture huge numbers of X users.Immediately after Biden withdrew from the race, Musk interacted with and reposted a number of X posts mocking and criticizing Harris while expressing support for Trump.Musk retweeted former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who said: “We’re not running against a candidate. We’re running against a system.”Musk also tweeted out a video of Harris in which she said the pronouns she uses and described her appearance for the accessibility of blind people. Musk captioned the post: “Imagine 4 years of this … ”Musk also retweeted and expressed approval of comments made by a QAnon-linked influencer, who had tweeted Biden’s resignation letter with the remark “Democrats destroy democracy in pursuit of power.” The Anti-Defamation League has highlighted this influencer as one of the “extremists and conspiracy theorists” that X has allowed back on to the platform.A number of X users have complained on the platform that they have been unable to follow the @KamalaHQ account, the official rapid response page of the vice-president’s presidential campaign. Instead, the users found a message that said they had reached their “limit” and could not follow any more accounts at this time.Trump is obviously delighted with Musk. The former president is reportedly thinking about offering the billionaire an advisory role in his administration, if there’s a second Trump presidency.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn all these ways, Musk and Trump seem on the way to merging into a single vortex of wealth and power. The result undermines American democracy and the rule of law.Maybe we should call it the Mump – the joining together of two rich and famous narcissists who crave attention, lie through their teeth, enjoy provoking critics, hate labor unions, refuse to be held accountable for anything and have utter contempt for democracy.Toward the end of America’s first Gilded Age, Louis Brandeis, the eminent American jurist, said: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”Musk demonstrates the truth of Brandeis’s insight now, in America’s second Gilded Age.High on the list of legislative objectives for Harris and the Democrats, if they regain power, should be a wealth tax that makes it impossible for future Mumps to use their great wealth to undermine democracy.If a wealth tax is not politically feasible, an alternative would be to end the “stepped-up basis” inherent tax rule that allows heirs to great fortunes to avoid paying a dime of capital gains taxes.What can you do about Musk in the meantime? Use your economic power. Boycott Tesla and tell advertisers to boycott X.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

    This article was amended on 24 July 2024 to reflect Musk’s suggestion that the $45m figure is inaccurate More