Over two dozen protestors gathered outside of JP Morgan Chase’s headquarters on Friday chanting “No Billionaires, No Trillionaires” as CEO Jamie Dimon threw a party to celebrate Elon Musk’s company SpaceX going public.
Present at the rally were representatives from Americans for Financial Reform, Stop Funding Billionaires, New York Communities for Change, and local community activists. These groups came together to represent working people, who are experiencing the effects of a rising cost of living.
“Our grocery prices are rising, our utility bills are going up, our rent is going up and these billionaires are toasting champagne,” Jonathan Westin of Stop Funding Billionaires told WBAI Pacifica Radio. “While the billionaires make profit on deeply skeptical investments with our money, working people’s retirement money is going to be forced to be invested in SpaceX.”
The consumer price index rose at an annual rate of 4.2% in May with energy prices accounting for more than 60% of the monthly increase, driven by the US-Israeli war on Iran which has disrupted global oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices are now up more than 40% compared to a year ago.
Rally participants chanted “SpaceX Sucks, Stop Musk” and “No Nazis on Nasdaq”, while holding signs saying “Stop Funding Billionaires” and “Elon is Stealing your Pension”. Others wrote “Elon is stealing your 401(k)” and “Stop Musk” in chalk on the sidewalk next to the protest.
SpaceX is a merger of three companies: X (formerly known as Twitter), xAI, and SpaceX, the rocketship company, and it is currently operating at a loss of $4 billion. To ensure early investors still get their payout, SpaceX is going public, thereby socializing the loss of the company’s huge investment into AI, which currently has no clear path for profitability.
When a company goes public it’s called an initial public offering, or IPO, for short. The contentious aspect of this IPO launch is that Musk found a way to force everyday people to make an investment in SpaceX through adding it to index funds, which are among the most common investments for retirement accounts. Customarily, new companies have to wait up to a year to be included in one of the most popular index tracks, the Nasdaq-100. However, with pressure from Musk, Nasdaq changed their rules so that SpaceX stock will now be in index funds in as few as five days. This shapes trillions of dollars in retirement savings.
The valuation of SpaceX as it goes public is based largely on Musk’s promise to launch and operate data centers in space to power AI technology that’s not yet been proven, meaning it is an incredibly risky investment that working people now have no choice but to buy into.
“When the [AI] bubble pops, it’s our 401(k)s, our pension funds, our college saving plans, that are going to be left holding the bag,” said Olivia Leirer of New York Communities for Change. “Working families are struggling to put food on the table, to make ends meet, to pay their rent week after week, and that’s not an accident … Our food, our light bills, our rent, every single thing we buy is more expensive because of AI.”
Natalia Renta of Americans for Financial Reform expressed outrage at shifting rules that allow billionaires, and now trillionaires, to gamble with working people’s savings.
“SpaceX is taking advantage of legal and policy changes across the state and federal levels that shift power from regular shareholders like workers saving for retirement to corporate insiders like Musk,” said Renta. “The Trump administration’s SEC and Texas lawmakers have bent over backwards to rig the rules in ways that benefit Musk and other wealthy corporate insiders at the expense of everyone else.”
She went on to highlight the urgency of the matter as SpaceX is the first of three mega companies planning on going public in the coming months.
“If Anthropic and OpenAI are allowed to go public with similarly draconian provisions locking in founder control and restricting lawsuits, just a few insiders will have a say on what AI tech is, how it is deployed, and how any gains or losses are distributed,” said Renta.
During the rally, the news broke that Elon Musk became the world’s trillionaire. Rally goers stood their ground to express disgust at working people bearing the brunt of the risky investments of the wealthy, demanding attention be brought to the fact that as the richest people consolidate their money, millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet.
“We are in a lose, lose situation where the billionaire class is going to take their money and run. And no matter what happens, we working class people are going to suffer for all of it,” said Stop Funding Billionaires’ Westin.
