A golden age of power and influence

Last month, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk added to his list of firsts when he became the world’s first trillionaire. Many people, from Wall Street to Main Street, celebrated this mind-boggling feat. But Rachel Gittleman wasn’t one of them. The Seattleite was among the roughly 300,000 federal workers who were either fired or forced to resign after Musk joined the Trump administration, taking charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, according to the Tribune News.

From the time Gittleman was hired at the Office of Student Aid in July 2023 until she was fired two years later, she earned about $200,000. In those same two years Musk’s wealth grew from $232 billion to $726 billion.

“On March 11, 2025, we were alerted by email that our department would be affected. We received notice that the office would be abolished and that the work we did would be done outside” of the federal government, Gittleman said. Gittleman’s job as a student loan ombudsman was funded by the US Department of Education. When loan borrowers had disputes with their loan servicer, they would call Gittleman for help. She had a caseload of about 400 clients and also worked with state officials who oversee student loans.

“My system access was shut down before getting the email,” said Gittleman, who now works as president of the American Federation of Government Employees. She wasn’t allowed to turn over her caseload or notify clients about what had happened. After a period of legal manoeuvres, she was officially fired in August.

Musk understood his assignment from President Donald Trump. Not only did he create hardships for government workers, he dismantled agencies that help the extreme poor such as the US Agency for International Development, which provided medicine and care to thousands of people worldwide.

Yet, while doing so he was working to become a trillionaire. In a capitalist society anyone who amassed such wealth is viewed as a success, at least financially. But peel back the layers and Musk’s story isn’t one of rags to riches. It’s one of privilege, extreme wealth and income disparity. Musk can thank America’s political climate and its financial markets for his success.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that donations by corporations and unions to political campaigns are a form of free speech. Musk donated about $290 million to Republican candidates and PACs during the 2024 election cycle.

This ruling helped the wealthy buy access to the levers of government, from school boards to the presidency to the Supreme Court. And on Tuesday, the court went even further and removed limits on how much political parties can spend with candidates for Congress and president.

Money indeed talks. Musk’s SpaceX, coincidentally, received more than $4 billion in government contracts and other perks in 2025 alone. As political donations have grown since 2010, so has the wealth gap, as the rich have gained from tax breaks, corporate deregulation and tax structures that make it possible for billionaires to pay less of a percentage of their income in federal taxes than do teachers and nurses.

Meanwhile, people at the lower end of the income ladder contribute to a system that keeps them at the bottom. While the middle class and the rich have benefited from different tax programmes over the past 15 years, low-income people nationwide have lost ground over decades, according to the Pew Center, in part due to the declining value of the federal minimum wage, which has been at $7.25 for 17 years. Washington’s minimum wage is at $17.13 an hour, a 2.8% increase from a year earlier.

A University of California, Davis study found about 1% of workers earn the federal minimum wage or less. Many such workers have two or three jobs.