Ep. 1859 - Get Your Pitchforks. Woke CEOs Are Way Overpaid.

If you're like most Americans, you probably feel the pinch of higher prices, energy is rising, food is rising, housing is rising, by all accounts, the cost of living will prove to be the decisive factor in the upcoming elections, as it was in 24 and 2022, and has been basically every national election in the world, certainly since the pandemic, inflation and a decline in quality of life for many Americans has been the defining issues of the decade. Today, we're going to talk about one group of people who is not feeling the pinch, at least financially, and that is America's CEOs. Together, they've managed to weather the storm quite well, and today, I'm going to ask something that you don't often hear from commentators on the right, which is, are these CEOs really worth $50 million a year? Is that possible? Now, let's consider the case of one of them. This is a United Airlines CEO, Scott Kirby. Here's a photo of this guy. Kirby is, in many ways, the perfect embodiment of America's CEO class. He took a company in decline in an industry notorious for degradation, and somehow made the experience worse. Last June, the company went viral when a passenger posted this picture of a meal in business class on a flight from Barcelona to Chicago. So take a look at this gourmet fare. And if you, too, want to try the rubber chicken, United is serving in business class, but you can book a ticket on that route now for about $5,000. Since taking the reins at United, Kirby has turned their inflate experience into an ordeal that would, in a perfect world, be prohibited by the Geneva Convention. But making the airline worse isn't Kirby's only accomplishment as CEO. One year after taking his position, he announced a new United Airlines flight school saying, quote, our plan is for half of them to be women and people of color. So for Kirby, it's not enough to make you suffer on board. He wants to train unqualified pilots, hired exclusively because of their sex or color, so that eventually he can kill his customers also in fiery crashes. Now, this, of course, has a quota system that precisely zero United Airlines passengers have ever demanded or requested or desired in any way, presumably because they value their lives. Even after years of relentless DEI brainwashing, still every passenger on every plane in America instinctively feels a wave of relief when they see that their pilot is a white guy in his 50s with a mustache. We all do. Don't pretend you don't. Now, some people, not me, might then feel ashamed for having felt that relief, but we all feel it. And one of the other big problems with United is that they have a lot of delays that Kirby has done nothing to improve. Although to be fair, a large part of the issue is that they have a hub at Newark, which is an airport that has the look and smell and general unpleasantness of a giant football stadium-sized portapoddy. Now granted, it's in New Jersey, which is the portapoddy of states, but still. In any case, through it all, how much is this drag dressing comically incompetent moron who has done nothing at all to help his company improve any of its services actually worth? While his total compensation last year was 32.3 million dollars, which comes out to $124,230 per workday. Now, if Scott Kirby were a self-respecting person, he would quit his job in humiliation and shame. He'd go into retirement or hiding in a cabin in the woods somewhere, never to return to corporate America, but Scott Kirby is not doing that. Instead, he's finding ways to bring even more shame on the name of his company, United Airlines. Seems kind of unthinkable. You know, it should be impossible to do anything that makes United Airlines look worse than it already does. It's like doing something to further ruin the reputation of Osama bin Laden or headlights or Canada. How can it possibly be done, but he found a way? Recently, he started doing interviews, issuing the usual meaningless platitudes and rolling up the ladder for everybody else. This is courtesy of Fox Business, quote, "United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is calling for a national wealth tax and inheritance taxes, approaching a hundred percent for certain states arguing that growing wealth and equality poses a threat to American society. Kirby took home about $32.3 million in total compensation in fiscal year 2025. May the remarks when asked about declining public trust in corporate executives. Wealth and equality has become a danger to our society and we need to address that." Kirby said the airline executive argued that a wealth tax would need to be implemented nationwide rather than at this state level to prevent wealthy Americans from relocating to avoid paying it. Now, the thing about Scott Kirby is that he didn't actually build anything. He started his career as a budget analyst for the Pentagon, which notably has never passed an audit and has an annual budget of something like, I don't know, $1,000 trillion give or take and yet always needs more money. He rose quickly by jumping from failing airline to failing airline like a like a plague of locus before finally failing up to his current job at United where somehow he's worth per year, about 30 times more than the average American will make in a lifetime. Now, remarkably, one of the things he's focused on in the last year is pulling coach seats from his airplanes and expanding the premium cabins. So, Scott Kirby has no problem at all, making it harder for middle-class families to afford flying, even as he pretends to care about them. I mean, one thing he could do is try to make the coach seats more comfortable, give a little more space to coach to the people who cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars to fly. But he's not doing that. And if you want to know why socialism is on the rise in America, look no further than Scott Kirby. And that's why he's on TV promoting hypothetical taxes and voicing the same banalities and platitudes that he hopes will keep him safe when the pitchforks come. And we know, by the way, that it's nothing but platitudes because the Treasury website includes a link where you can voluntarily give the government money in addition to what you owe in taxes. So if Scott Kirby means what he says, surely he'll go there right now and donate. Hey, why would he donate $30 million? I mean, Scott, you don't need more than $2 million a year, do you? Aren't you worried about wealth inequality? But of course, Scott Kirby who's built nothing won't do that. And said he wants to make sure that the millionaire owner of your local excavation company who built everything himself can't hand anything down to his kids. It's interesting how that works. Now, the reason Kirby is doing this is not because he believes what he's saying. Instead, what he's actually interested in doing is finding some way to stave off the rampaging communist hordes that are threatening to take control of the government in a few years and are intent on destroying the economy. He thinks that if corporate executives start talking about taxing the rich, then maybe the communists will be nicer to them. Maybe they won't nationalize his airline. Maybe they won't raise the corporate tax rate to 100%. Maybe they won't gun him down in the streets of New York and celebrate his murder all over Reddit as they did to the United Health Care CEO. It's a desperation play. It's a sign of weakness. And of course, if and when the communists do take control, all of these gestures will mean absolutely nothing to them. They will seize his airline, confiscate his wealth and throw him in prison or off a cliff and think nothing of it. The best case scenario for Scott Kirby in the event of a communist takeover is that he escapes like Alex Kurenski, who also tried to make 11th hour amends with the Bolsheviks immediately before they took over. And of course, none of this would really matter for us because at the end of the day, Kirby is just a bureaucrat running a crappy airline in a failing industry. But unfortunately, guys like Kirby making unreasonable amounts of money in exchange for doing nothing does have implications for us. And that's why it's important for conservatives to acknowledge that while it's very important for highly productive entrepreneurial impressive innovators to be rewarded for their work, it's also true that in modern DEI-oriented corporate America, highly productive entrepreneurial impressive innovators only become CEO if they build the company themselves. And it's important to distinguish between idiots like Kirby, who should he disappear tomorrow would be replaced by a corporate drone just like him and nothing at all would change at the company or in the world. And, you know, between them and innovators like Elon Musk. Now, when talentless corporate hacks who have achieved nothing, you know, make tens of millions of a year, of dollars a year, it breeds resentment. And honestly, it should. Now, what's interesting about what's unfolding right now is that Democrats actually seem though to prefer corporate shells like Kirby. Remarkably, they're targeting the innovators specifically. The same day that Elon Musk debuted a flying car, which is one of the most impressive things we've ever seen any company do ever. Bernie Sanders called for the abolition of trillionaires. Really? Elon Musk, the last American who's truly innovating at scale, is the problem. The guy making flying cars and catching rockets, rockets out of the air and, you know, wants to go to Mars and we'll actually do it. He's the guy we got to worry about. But this Internet of itself is extremely revealing. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will gush endlessly. about how horrible Elon Musk is. But they'll never mention the moronic CEOs who are looting the carcasses of once great companies. They somehow control today, but could never have built. And it's not just Scott Kirby. I mean, this is a widespread problem in corporate America. One CEO you never hear Bernie Sanders talk about is General Motors and Mary Bera. She's the former HR executive turned CEO. In fact, Bera has been celebrated as a role model by liberals like Hillary Clinton, who once claimed that Bera broke the steel ceiling by becoming a CEO of a manufacturing company. So how valuable is Mary Bera? Well, last year Toyota's CEO made $6 million. VW CEO made eight million. And Mary Bera and General Motors, can you guess how much she made $48 million in a year? Now wait a second. You might be asking, well, what did she do at General Motors that made her worth eight times Toyota's CEO and six times VW's CEO? After all, Toyota is a much more successful company according to every objective financial strategic operational metric you can think of. Toyota is worth three times General Motors market cap. Toyota is dramatically more profitable, generating more than $24 billion annually compared to GM six billion. Toyota sells far more cars than GM, something like four million more every year. And they never needed any government bailout. They never had to declare bankruptcy. So really, what has Mary Bera done? Well, she oversaw a failed transition to electric vehicles that cost GM more than $6 billion in write-offs. She was overseeing the release of the 6.2 liter V8 engine, that is, breaking Tahoe's and suburban nation wide right now is currently the subject of a federal investigation. Industry insiders describe it as a total disaster. Meanwhile, she's laid off more than 20,000 workers, mostly Americans and often during the holidays. Bernie Sanders and Rokana will demand that Elon Musk be forced at gunpoint to sell his shares in his company, which is where virtually all of his wealth comes from. They'll demonize him at every opportunity. Tim Walls will go on stage and celebrate when Tesla stock drops. Meanwhile, Mary Bera is barely mentioned if she's mentioned ever. You know, I'm obviously about as far from a Bernie Sanders communist as it is possible to get. But still, the sheer amount of money this woman is earning given her contributions to the company or total lack thereof is baffling. $48 million a year is nearly 700 times the average US salary, which means the average person in the US would have to work for 700 years or about eight lifetimes to earn what this woman makes in one single year. Even as the CEOs of other giant car companies, companies significantly more successful than hers, make a fraction of what she makes. Think about this, Toyota's far more successful, but the CEO doesn't get anywhere near as much compensation. It's very similar to the situation with Boeing a few years back when the CEO got a massive golden parachute, worth tens of millions of dollars, after overseeing the disastrous back-to-back crashes of the Max airplanes, which were totally preventable, Boeing's incompetence caused those crashes. Meanwhile, Airbus is CEO who didn't oversee any crashes was getting about one-third of the Boeing CEO's compensation. Even the most rapidly pro-free market capitalist of which I am one cannot honestly defend what Mary Bera is doing and making. And quite frankly, we shouldn't have to. Conservatives should be honest to acknowledge the role that people like Bera play in driving up the demand for socialism. The discrepancy also reminds me of this extraordinary true story from 1984 when GM and Toyota actually agreed to work together on a joint venture in Fremont, California. It's one of the most interesting and revealing stories in automotive history that no one really talks about anymore, but the joint venture was called new united motor manufacturing or new me. And the basic idea was that for a brief shining moment, these two arch rivals would put aside their differences and work together because they both had something to learn from each other. And for GM, they wanted to learn how to run an auto plant. They had a really bad dysfunctional assembly plant in Fremont that they had to close a couple of years earlier because the employees, many of whom were diverse, never actually showed up to work. And if they did show up, they were drunk or high. The unions were destroying the place. They were making garbage cars. In fact, in some cases, the employees were sabotaging the cars on purpose for the fun of it. They would do things like seal coke bottles inside the doors just to mess with the customers. So GM shut the Fremont plant down. They fired all the workers and they were desperate for Toyota to fly in and show them how to run an auto plant and manufacture a car in an affordable, sustainable way. I never really understood the concept of buying clothes that aren't comfortable. 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To see back at Fremont, the GM workers were told to push every car through to the end of the line no matter how many problems were obvious. The idea was that the issues would get patched up in the repair yards at some point. But in Japan, the GM workers were taught a different routine. They were given something called an Andon cord on the assembly line and they were told to pull the cord if they spotted any issues during production at all. And once they did so, the line would stop the problem as well as its root cause would be addressed immediately. It was a really kind of mind blowing experience for these employees to be around managers who actually cared about the finished product. And the workers also received much more general training watch. All new hires went through a four day orientation and then 450 team leaders and group leaders were then sent to Japan for three week classroom and on the job training program. Nume adopted the Japanese spirit of heavy training. New production workers received over 250 hours of training in their first six months on the job and 50 more hours of training each year thereafter. Typical American workers were lucky to receive 40 hours in their first six months and 20 hours annually thereafter. In the old GM system management held all the power no matter how competent they actually were. Toyota on the other hand defused certain responsibilities out into the hands of the workers. So rather than like a traditional military hierarchy, you have these small special forces units of four to six workers. These were all cross trained in each other's tasks. Ergo all the aforementioned training time. Now after this brief experiment, most of the problems were resolved at the Fremont plan. All of a sudden they were producing good cars. Pretty much everyone had a job again because part of the deal Toyota had agreed to rehire 85% of the workers that GM had fired, including some of the union bosses that had caused so many of the problems. And again, you know, that's how this all worked out. And this is from the channel Asianometry, which kind of tells the rest of the story much. By 1986, a number of hours it took for Numi to produce a car, adjusted for well-number, automation, car size, and other factors, far exceeded that of the old GM plant. It also exceeded that of a similar plant, GM Framingham, and nearly matched Toyota's core Corolla plant in Takahoka. Absenteeism fell from 20 to 25% to just 3 to 4%. GM Fremont closed with over 2,000 grievances, outstanding, Numi had just 700 grievances its entire first eight years. 90% of employees at the factory describe themselves as being either satisfied or very satisfied with their work. The experiment isn't perfect mainly because it's possible that some of the other factors were involved in the workers' improvement, in particular many of these employees had just been fired. No, they had been unemployed for a while, stands a reason that for some of them they got a wake-up call and they were motivated when they came back, but for the most part it looks a lot like Toyota simply had a much better company, they had a better system for dealing with problems on the line, which is to say they actually had a system at all for dealing with them. They didn't have a diverse workforce, they had less bureaucracy, and the result was that they produced a better product. Now, the really funny part of that story though is that GM didn't apply the Toyota model to all of its plants. The other union boss is all over the country, we're not interested in slowing down production or adopting a quality over a quantity model, the experiment fizzled out, and evidently no lessons were learned. To this day Toyota is a more successful company, Toyota again outperforms general motors across virtually every operational financial and strategic metric, and meanwhile their CEO is making dramatically less money than the girl boss Mary Barra at GM who has no idea what she's doing, but Mary Barra gets to keep her job anyway because she's the product of a corporate environment that rewards gender more than competence. It cannot be stressed enough, and this is one of the problems with the standard right-wing conservative response to some of the economic talking points on the left, is I hear conservatives say, "Well, but these CEOs are all there, the builders and innovators," and yeah, some of them are Elon Musk is Mary Barra and all the CEOs like her are not builders. She has not built anything ever, she's not an entrepreneur, she's not a shrewd business woman, she has no skills, she's done nothing, she has achieved nothing, she was put in charge of a massive multi-billion dollar company, she didn't grow it to that point, she didn't have anything to do with growing it, and all that has happened under her regime is the company has become worse at everything in every way. You could put literally anyone in her job, and they could do what she does, which is really nothing except the company becomes a little worse while you're there. Anyone could just sit there behind the desk and get paid $50 million to make the company worse. I'll do it, I'll do it for 10 million, I'll take a massive pay cut compared to Mary Barra and for 10 million dollars I will be the CEO and just not do anything and make everything worse. I'll happily do it, I'll do it for five million, this is low as I'll go. The criticisms that the left makes against millionaire CEOs, again, actually apply to somebody like Mary Barra, and she in fact does not remotely deserve the salary she's getting paid. She is an effect of kind of welfare case, that doesn't mean the government should come in and take the money, redistribute, not saying that at all, it's not at all what I think. In fact, we started this by talking about why these wealth taxes are retarded, and that's what I believe, but still the fact remains, I mean, this is just the fact. And yet she is precisely the kind of CEO, the left will not single out, instead they single out Elon Musk, who is in every conceivable sense the exact opposite of Mary Barra. He is an actual builder and innovator. Mary Barra wouldn't have a job if she were a man and everyone knows it. The company became completely woke when it was popular to do it, they're falling apart, but the woman in charge is rewarded with glowing profiles from various left wing outlets while GM's employees lose everything. That's not a single out GM. I mean, pretty much every recognizable major corporation is like this or many of them are. When Chrysler announced the Jeep Grand Cherokee in 1992, the highly politically incorrect President Bob Lutz drove the SUV straight through a glass window at the North American International Auto Show. Every American spirit was evident there is now gone, at least in corporate America. Even Apple, one of the biggest companies on the planet, has spent the last decade doing nothing. They invented a pregnant man emoji, and that's about it. Every new product from Apple is just the iPhone again, but in a slightly different form. Here's the iPhone attached to your wrist. Here's the iPhone on a little stand on the kitchen counter. Here's the iPhone you can wear on your face. Meanwhile, this is the McDonald's CEO, famously trying to sell his company's latest burger, which he describes not as a burger, but as a product with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner of war being forced to eat the banana rice in Somalia. You've probably seen this, but let's enjoy it again. We've got two quarter pound patties, a delicious big-arch sauce, and of course, some lettuce. So, oh, there's so much going on with this. First of all, let's try to get this thing, I don't even know how to attack it, got so much to it. Ooh, there's also some crispy onions on here as well, I see those kind of coming out. All right, the moment of truth. Mmm, that is so good. That's a big bite for a big arch. It's distinctively McDonald's. Only McDonald's could do this type of burger, but it also was unlike anything else on our menu. It's a delicious product. You've got sort of the cheeses and the gooeyness, but those crispy onions as well because a nice texture. And of course, we've got the pickles, so. Just nothing but bread in that bite, the smallest possible way you could have taken. And even that one little bite of the big arch sandwich, almost, you know, makes him want a puke. And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is how obviously robotic and inauthentic the whole scene was. It's like chat GPT, you know, is talking about eating a hamburger. And somehow this guy wasn't fired over this, even though he went on camera and made it abundantly clear that he hates the product as company is selling. He's viscerally disgusted by McDonald's food, but McDonald's is still happy to pay him $20 million a year. But I guess it's fitting because it's $1 million for each percentage point the stock has declined in the past year. Now, people see this happening at every major corporation and they think, "Well, it doesn't make any sense. That's not fair." Now, the primary reason that America never became communist or socialist is that for most of its history, the rich people, you know, what was corporate America, the actual. Back then, actual builders and innovators, and they felt something called no bless oblige. They cared about the well-being of the country and the people in it. They voluntarily made an effort to improve the country since the country made it possible for them to get rich in the first place. The most famous example of this is the steel barren Andrew Carnegie. We're a long way from, you know, Andrew Carnegie these days with these people, but he voluntarily gave away 90% of his fortune, funding more than 2,500 libraries across the United States, along with the Carnegie Hall in New York, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which became Carnegie Mellon. He created a fund for civilians who saved other people's lives. He created endowments and foundations to promote teaching and scientific research and peace. He even paid for more than 7,000 church organs because of why not. He wrote a book called The Gospel of Wealth in which he wrote, quote, "The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladder upon which the aspiring can rise." He believed that the proper administration of wealth would bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. Now, around the turn of the 20th century, these views were actually popular in America. After the Civil War, the banker George Peabody built schools throughout the American South. John D. Rockefeller was responsible for eliminating hookworm, Julius Rosenwald of Sears Corporation built 5,000 schools for black children in the South. Henry Ford wasn't laying off workers and building defective vehicles like Henry Barra. He was paying line workers enough that they could afford the cars they were making, and he was the first to do that. The small mill town of Rumford, Maine, perfectly in bodies, how this used to work. It has a Carnegie library across the street from Strait Glass Park, which is full of high-end company housing for workers from the local paper mill. The mill owner, Hugh Chisholm, took so much pride in what he was doing and what he was building that he hired an architect to build the company housing, but not just any architect. He hired the same guy who designed the Supreme Court. And it's still there today. You can go look at. Just blocks away as a four-story mechanics institute, also conceived by Chisholm and paid for by the local mill so that there would be a space for working people to improve themselves mentally, morally, socially, and physically for a low cost. So that was corporate America, roughly a century ago, back when the elites actually cared about the country. 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Head to GOPvotes.org, make your plan to vote early today, paid for by SLF PAC, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Imagine if Mary Barra, rather than taking a nearly $50 million in compensation, built a community center in a library and hired a talented architect to build housing for her workers. Of course, she's not doing that. She's not a visionary when it comes to the product or how to manage people. She is stupid and so she's just laying them off and replacing them with AI. Good luck to her when the revolution comes. To the extent America's richer generous, they're giving to awful causes. The conservative hedge fund manager Ken Griffin just donated $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon. For reasons that aren't remotely clear, he's decided to fund the university system that's destroying the country, apparently because he holds a very misguided belief that he can fix the institution. Carnegie himself, of course, endowed Carnegie Mellon. I'm not attacking the idea of funding schools, but Carnegie had no idea what higher education would become. It wasn't that back when he endowed the school, but now it is. If you look at these institutions today without exception, or with very few exceptions, they're rife with censorship, propaganda, moral panics like the deranged behavior that's currently underway at Cornell, so no, we shouldn't be funding institutions that despise this country. Instead, we should be allowing as many Americans as possible to invest in the companies that are actually trying to build new technology and create more jobs. Last week in a nebriated Indiana Democrat named Jamie West, who we spent some time on talking about over the weekend, and a lot of fun to laugh at her, and we should, but she drunkenly made a point, one good point about how tech companies should have to invest in the communities that they want to put their data centers in, and that's totally correct. Why not? Now, that's the kind of thing Republicans would be insane for opposing, but many of them do. Why shouldn't a company worth a zillion dollars be required to meaningfully invest in a community where they want to build their infrastructure? That's not socialism. That's just common sense. That's rational. That's America first. That's caring about American communities. And if you're a town manager or a county bureaucrat, and you watch that video, before you agree to let wind turbines or solar panels or data centers, especially come to your town, why shouldn't you get every cent you can out of these companies to build yourself a mechanic's institute, hire an award-winning architect to do it? Why not? Though most people don't realize it, America is richer today than it was a century ago, so there's no reason they can't do that. Somewhere at the top is somebody like Mary Berra or Scott Kirby, surely they can afford it. 10 years ago, the corporate class was much more interested in social governance scores and donating to the vast black hole of inner-city nonprofits. And today they're not even interested in that. What we're seeing now from our AI overlords, including Sam Altman and people like him, is this idea that in the future, nobody will have a job. And so instead, we'll all be completely dependent on big tech. And some people are excited about this. This is a representative post from somebody calling himself a futurist, for example, and there's a lot of this in social media right now. It says, quote, two years from now, you will not work and you will not worry about money. You will get your cash payments from all the major AI labs. Think of it like three to five companies giving you $1,000 check every week. And this is the idea you hear a lot now. So the AI companies in the near future, supposedly, this is the idea. We'll give us all stipends and we will become dependence of Sam Altman. This is supposed to be an optimistic vision of the future. Actually, it's deeply horrifying. And it's not what we mean, at least it's not what I mean when I say that these CEOs should be contributing to their community and to their country. This sounds like a dystopian nightmare. I don't want to live off of handouts from my big tech overlords. The fact that anyone sees that as some heavenly vision of the future is extremely depressing. Living as serfs with our hands out, going to big tech, can I have my, can I have my stipend this week, please? Lord Sam, can you give me my stipend? This is not the kind of a future we should be trying to build for ourselves and our children. And there is another way. It involves providing the right incentives and giving people a clear sense of the stakes that are involved, which is what Toyota did with those GM employees. And if you do that, support for socialism plumbets. You know, we can't do anything to change the minds of the Somalis and the other foreign scammers who have come here to plunder our treasury. All we can do with them or about them is deport them and we should. But we can reverse the trend we're seeing among native born Americans who are now entertaining the single most destructive ideology the West has ever seen in record numbers. We can take a cue from the guy who's building flying cars and catching rockets in mid-air instead of the 85-year-old whiny socialist from Vermont. We can return to the sense of genuine excitement for the future, which was so dominant in this country in the middle of the 20th century when people were thrilled by everything from moon landings to shopping malls. That is objectively a much better place for the United States to be. And in the long run, it's also a much better outcome for even the most useless CEOs, the Scott Kirby's and Mary Barrow's of the world. Under their system, you know, the system that they're advocating for, that Kirby's advocating for, the CEOs get sent to the gallows. For the other system, the CEOs invest a fraction of their company's vast wealth to help create a country with many more Elon Musk's and his few Scott Kirby's and Mary Barrow's as possible. That's the best way to prevent a Bolshevik takeover in this country, you know, voluntarily end the comically absurd pay packages and give Americans a stake in the success of the American economy. Elon Musk has started this campaign. Now every CEO who wants their company to exist in 20 years and it doesn't want their children to live under a Bolshevik rule for the next century should follow suit. As it turns out, Elon Musk, America's innovator and chief apparently understands that, you know, this is what we originally need and we need the noblesse oblige to make a comeback. That's an idea, which is long since falling out of favor, you know, that again, the nobility that is the rich and powerful have a basic responsibility to act honorably and generously and to care about and meaningfully invest in the future of their nation. It's not a government policy, not something that can be achieved through taxation. It's just a basic expectation of honorable behavior. An expectation that, of course, should fall on everybody of any income bracket in one form or another. And the point is not that the richest Americans, the ones with an enormous amount of equity, you know, in the largest companies on the planet should give handouts they shouldn't, instead they should actually invest in a meaningful way in the future of the country. Not because the government forces them to do it, but because they actually care about the future of the country. It's not like they need to be driven by pure virtue. and charity to care, if the country has no future, neither do the companies. So this is just a matter of, you know, rational, long-term planning. And Elon just announced his own plan to do exactly this, watch. Meanwhile Elon Musk vows to give away of one share of SpaceX to every child in the United States. And the social media post Musk says this gift will be the very first of many to come. This news comes a day after AI giant and traffic committed 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund. Live now to CBS News, Senior Business and Tech Correspondent, Joe Ling can't, okay, so Joe Ling, first of all, good to see you, my friend. Second of all, what's the why, especially for Musk here? Well, he was responding, essentially, to Anthropics saying that they are going to have this public benefit fund. He responds to the announcement on X, which, of course, he owns, and says, wouldn't it be better to give money directly to the public? And so he proposes this idea of giving shares of SpaceX to individual kids. And if you do the math, it's basically 72, 73 million kids. People under the age of 18 in the United States of America. Right now we have SpaceX stock at about, I'm just looking at the ticker here. It's about $148 a share. You do the math, and that's a pretty significant-- Now, as it stands today, a share of SpaceX isn't worth much, only around $150. But if you give a child a share of SpaceX today, it'll almost certainly be worth much, much more by the time he's 18, and certainly by the time he retires. By Musk's estimates, which are admittedly optimistic, that share could be worth more than $7,000 within the next decade. And the moral of the story is that it's very important for builders and creators, like Elon, to do what they do and get rich doing it. That's how the system is supposed to work. Those are CEOs who took on extraordinary risk, built massive corporations from the ground up. Elon just unveiled a flying car, which we're supposed to be angry about. Bernie Sanders has never created a single job in his life, never had an original thought in his life. Never done anything, remotely interesting or inspiring, but he wants to destroy what Elon built, because if people see Elon doing amazing things, they might realize that the government is wasting their money, and then the whole scam falls apart. There are also corporate suits who are getting very rich and don't deserve to, and the cases of the vast majority of established companies, CEO compensation, is totally detached from reality. There's no universe where married Barra is worth $48 million a year, which comes out to around $184,000 per work day, which is nearly triple the annual salary of an American worker, triple the average American salary in one day. It's obscene. And what makes it obscene is not the amount that Elon Musk is worth astronomically more than her. Mary Barra is closer to being below the poverty line than she is to being anywhere near Elon Musk's net worth, but again, he's a builder, he's an innovator, a great man of history. Guys like him should be rich, they should be rewarded. Barra is a talentless, non-achieving HR manager who floated her way to the top on the wings of DEI. She doesn't inspire anyone, she does the opposite. And if she's ever fired, everyone knows she'll get a massive payout just like the CEO of every other failed company. So the incentive structure doesn't make sense to most people because it's a ridiculous system. And therefore, in increasing numbers, young Americans, not just foreigners, are thinking that socialism is the answer, which it isn't, you know, that's not a rational conclusion, it's not smart, it's a disaster for the country and the entire human race. socialism is one of the most evil systems ever devised by mankind, but that's what they're doing. Now, Elon has earned his money because he's actually creating meaningful new products, including self-driving technology that people can use on a day-to-day basis. No question that his net worth is earned, which by the way, is not stored in some bank vault. You know, it's not a checking account. His net worth comes from his stock and Tesla and SpaceX. And if any American wants to share in that wealth and to see the same gains and losses that Elon sees to a smaller degree, obviously, they can buy the stock as well. Now, they're publicly traded, that's how it's supposed to work. And ultimately, the goal is to create a lot more Elon's and no more merry bearers. We need to be a country that facilitates and rewards builders and innovators again. That is the best way to prevent the coming socialist revolution. And in fact, it turns out, it's the only way. Now, I'll do the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Professor. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Let me out! You will remember your duty. This isn't heroin, let me. You're useless, SOT. You sit there and shake because you're dependent on drinking your sick is all over you. [MUSIC] Have you ever seen a child start a death professor? No. I have. [MUSIC] There are a few things I love more than good ranchers, but there are not many. I'll tell you that. I think it might make it on the top five of all things in the world. It's just the best quality meat at the very best price from the very best people. 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