Technically that's linked; the money Elon makes is from stealing employee wealth and could be used to solve the aforementioned problems.

Not defending the gov though, it's rotten.

I've started shifting my investments towards foreign markets. Not that if the US market crashes everybody else will come out unblemished, but you have to do something.

The Economic, Political and Legal systems have for a while been structured to deliver the highest return on investment to rent-seeking (i.e. to the taking wealth away from others) rather than wealth production.

The result of decades of ever more of this is that most of the system is now the machinery that allows a few to pillage it. You see it in the insane house-price to income ratios, you see it in the ever more broad enshittification, you see it in the level of inflation people feel in their day to day lives being way higher than official inflation figures, you see it in the ever shrinking social support systems (more noticeable in countries with more of such things, not quite as much in the US that doesn't even have Universal Healthcare), you see it in the explosion of inequality and crash of social mobility, you see it in politics being ever less about quality of life for the many and ever more about Moral subjects that mainly affect minorities and have zero impact on wealth distribution or people's access to resources.

In other words: the snake is eating its own tail.

Further, as shown in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash, the "winners" in this and their bought and paid for politicians will never accept any deceleration in the increase of their wealth - the more the system eats itself the less it grows the more the system needs to eat itself to keep feeding the same to owner class that controls it, the more the system eats itself - much less a reversion and trying to go down a different path.

In the absence of some kind of wealth infusion from outside (basically the US doing as Britain did at this stage of its Empire cycle and pillaging wealth from the lands it controlled abroad to feed its homeland elites, which the US was kinda doing via large Tech companies using their market positions to extract more money from foreign operations), this shit is mathematically bound to end up in some kind of nasty collapse as the empoverishment of the many reaches extreme levels and the few extracting rents from the rest get into ever nastier infighting.

Personally I think that how far this keeps on going and thus how stretched things get before they crack and thus how bad the collapse it will be when it finally happens, depends mainly on the population of the US (you will notice how the rest of the World is trying to decouple from the US) and judging by its past behaviour (notice the how the last General Strike in the US was 8 decades ago), things will get pretty damn extreme.

Maybe CEOs should only make 10 times as much as the lowest paid employee?

You can't spell "Felon" without "Elon".

But if me and the boys do it it's called money laundering. Smh we don't even wash our clothes what are you on about feds???

And when you slosh around cash you pay taxes...

The Dow, the Dow right now.

I like how the insurance company's building is right next to the bank buildings close to DC

I'm not opposed to this new scam per se if we could tone down the old scam of atomizing society and turning things civilized countries do by default into a GDP boost. Maybe if NVIDIA gives some company run by a cartoon villain $500B to buy NVIDIA cards then we don't need to charge $900 for an IV bag or we could take the hit to car sales of having functional mass transit. One scam at a time, amirite?