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Bernie Sanders Slams Elon Musk with “Dictator Who Murders His Own Citizens”

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Sen. Bernie Sanders

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been headlining rallies for months, speaking to large crowds across the country under a banner that reads: “Fighting Oligarchy.” (Sanders’ partner in the rallies is Democratic New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.)

The Vermont Senator contends that America’s widening income inequality gap has become a chasm, exacerbated by Trump administration policies that redistribute money upward to the “one percent” — an administration priority epitomized by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that Trump signed in July, slashing Medicaid and cutting taxes for billionaire and corporations.

At the top of the oligarchy sits a group of overly powerful — and therefore dangerously unaccountable –centibillionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, to name only a few of Sanders’s famous targets. (Centibillionaires possess individual fortunes in excess of $100 billion.)

The power wielded by these vast fortunes isn’t merely financial either, as Sanders has lately been reminding his followers. The concentrated wealth of American oligarchs is also dominating the media, and so is able to drive narratives and influence opinion in ways that threaten democracy. (Note: While anyone is free to post on X, Musk controls the algorithm that determines whether a post receives engagement or traffic.)

Sharing a post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Sanders warns of the dangers of unlimited election spending enabled by Citizens United, the controversial Supreme Court ruling from 2010 that opened the election-tilting financial floodgates. He also warns, perhaps even more direly, of a corporate-owned media landscape being engineered to function largely as a propaganda engine, prioritizing positions and viewpoints that are beneficial to its owners.

Sanders envisions a media environment where a union voice can no longer receive adequate coverage in outlets like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post for example, as Amazon staunchly resists efforts by its employees to unionize.

Note: Despite notable media prostration in the form of spurious lawsuit settlements and performative apologies, the free press has not yet succumbed entirely to the pressures applied by billionaires and the Trump administration, a fact known because it is precisely a Washington Post article exploring the ill effects of billionaire influence that Sanders shares.

Still, Sanders writes that “the move toward authoritarianism is not just Trump suing and intimidating mainstream media. It is the growing concentration of ownership in what we see, hear and read.”

This concern is amplified by fresh worries about artificial intelligence (AI), the technology now poised to utterly dominate what we “see, hear and read.” In a separate post, Sanders goes beyond his nearly quaint, analog-era concern about legacy media ownership and points out the perhaps far more troubling concentration of oligarchic power guiding AI.

Sharing a photo of four individuals wielding vast power in the world of AI, Sanders asks if “anybody really believes” that Elon Musk, David Sacks, Greg Brockman and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang “want to ‘wipe out poverty’ or improve life for ordinary Americans?”

Though that is the optimistic promise of AI — a better world with happier people, filled medical breakthroughs and economic prosperity for all — Sanders doesn’t believe that’s the real priority of those running the AI boom. Answering his own question (“does anybody really believe?”), Sanders writes: “I don’t.”

Sanders doesn’t tread lightly on the occasion for the photo either, which was this week’s state dinner at the White House for Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), whom Sanders calls “a dictator who murders his own citizens with a bone saw.”

Linking Musk, Huang and the other “AI oligarchs” to MBS, Sanders contends that the world we all experience is increasingly controlled by fewer and ever wealthier people, for whom even horrific alleged crimes are not a barrier to oligarchy membership, for which the only qualification is extraordinary wealth. Of the kind that can effectually purchase governments that ostensibly belong to the people.

(The photo did not include high profile AI entrepreneur Sam Altman, though Altman also attended the dinner, as did Michael Dell and Apple’s Tim Cook.)

Describing the Saudi Crown Prince, Sanders refers to the finding by American intelligence agencies, including the CIA, that Mohammed bin Salman “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi” in 2018. The finding, released during Joe Biden’s term in office, was removed from the official website of the U.S. Office of the National Director Intelligence before his visit.

Sanders links Musk to MBS — and calls attention to MBS’s alleged crimes — both because Musk is the richest and most famous of the oligarchs and because this linkage is not a revelation. Sanders means to expose and emphasize that this is everyday business for these wealthy men who are, by definition, what the MAGA movement aims to excoriate: they are globalists. And globalists for whom rules and laws are fungible in further pursuit of power.

[NOTE: This week it was announced that MBS and the Saudis have invested significantly in Musk’s xAI company and will work with Saudi-backed Humain to build the company’s biggest data center outside the U.S.]

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