Ex-Trump Chief of Staff Claims Elon Musk Was ‘Born Poor’
NewsNation contributor Mick Mulvaney claimed that generally speaking, billionaires – including Elon Musk – “were born poor.”
In his farewell address from the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America,” stating it “literally threatens our entire democracy.”
On NewsNation on Thursday, Mulvaney – a former White House chief of staff to Donald Trump – dismissed concerns about growing wealth inequality.
“I don’t think people care that much about wealth concentration,” he began. “I think they care about two things, which is their standard of living. Is it going up? They don’t care about somebody else as long as they feel like they’re doing ok. And they care about whether or not they and their kids can move up. It’s that social mobility that worried me.”
Mulvaney went on to say that wealth inequality would only be an issue if the country’s policies were yielding a landed gentry, such as the Walton family:
If you are creating a permanent landed sort of gentry class, that would be a problem. But all the people we’re talking about who are super-wealthy, were born poor for the most part. Now, the Walmart family’s different. But Jeff Bezos didn’t have any money when he was born. Elon Musk didn’t have a lot of money when he was born. We still have some of that. These are new wealthy people. And that’s still healthy.
Musk was born in apartheid South Africa in 1971. His mother Maye Musk is a former model and his father Errol Musk owned a lucrative stake in a Zambian emerald mine. The billionaire has amassed the world’s largest individual fortune thanks in large part to government aid Tesla received during the Obama administration.
Regarding the aforementioned Walton family, as head of the Office and Management and Budget in 2017, Mulvaney and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had a clash where Mulvaney defended the repeal of the estate tax, which, according to Sanders, would give the Waltons a $52 billion tax break.
Watch above via NewsNation.
