“If We’re Not Careful, We’ll End Up With 25 Trillionaires and 19% Unemployment”

Two headlines that can’t coexist forever.

Tesla shareholders call it historic.

So do New Yorkers electing a Democratic socialist mayor the same week.

The same country. Same word. Two headlines that can’t co-exist forever.

Elon Musk just got a $1 trillion pay package, the largest comp plan in world history.

Days earlier, New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who ran on taxing billionaires and making NYC more affordable.

These stories don’t feel unrelated. They feel like cause and effect.

Bradley Tusk sees it. He’s not some populist, progressive outsider. He ran campaigns for Mike Bloomberg, was deeply involved with building Uber (and its war with regulators) and made a fortune in venture capital.

But this week, he said what most experts and politicians are afraid to.

“If we don’t do anything… you could have a world with Elon and 25 other trillionaires and 19% unemployment.

And to me, that just means the French Revolution’s coming.”

When voices of this magnitude from inside the system sound the alarm, we should pay attention.

We’ve seen this before. And the last time, our leaders acted on it.

One example I read about recently in Matt Stoller’s Goliath is Alcoa. The Aluminum Company of America controlled every ounce of American aluminum.

FDR’s DOJ didn’t host panels or send out press releases, they broke Alcoa’s monopoly. The antitrust chief Thurman Arnold launched similar actions against rail cartels, movie studios and utility conglomerates.

FDR wasn’t going after success, he was attacking concentrated power that was driving up prices and ultimately became a threat to democracy.

Today, one soon-to-be-trillionaire runs infrastructure the government used to regulate. And now it acts like it works for him.

We used to break up concentrated power like this. Now we bankroll it.

Bradley Tusk warned about revolution. The real danger is quieter: when people stop expecting anything to change.

Power keeps concentrating. It’s physics, until someone pushes back.

People are working harder for less and starting to call it normal. The risk isn’t revolt. It’s believing that this is just how things are now.

Let’s see clearly while there’s still time to fix it.