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During a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence last week, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani took aim at the richest person in the world to make a salient point about growing inequality.
“We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” he said.
Elon Musk, who temporarily became a trillionaire following his company SpaceX’s IPO last month, didn’t take kindly to the slight.
“Mamdani has built nothing,” he tweeted angrily in response. “He is a taker, never a maker.”
But his knee-jerk retort didn’t exactly land. The most-liked reply pointed out that Musk’s empire had been built on tens of billions of dollars of government handouts. One user called him out for being the “biggest single recipient of US taxpayer dollars of all time.”
One particularly scorching takedown came from grassroots political organizer Jay Ponti, who pointed out that many of Musk’s business successes were built on the shoulders of others.
“[Martin] Eberhard and [Marc] Tarpenning founded Tesla,” he wrote, referring to the EV maker’s original CEO and CFO before Musk joined in 2004. “You didn’t invent eBay or Twitter.”
“Your wealth is from acquisitions, hostile takeovers, and stealing credit,” Ponti added. “Everything you have was built by workers and you fight to keep from unionizing while you receive [government] welfare.”
“You are a parasite,” the political organizer concluded.
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