That the word 'trillionaire' has entered a lot of our casual conversations is bizarre, to say the least. Financial analysts predict with clinical detachment that Elon Musk will cross this threshold within years — if we're unfortunate enough, maybe sooner. These headlines arrive, and we quickly scroll past them. We are somehow skilled enough to absorb such projections without collective outrage. This reveals something deeply warped about our sense of what is 'normal'.
A trillion dollars. Stop and just think about that figure. Maybe you've heard it being broken down to understandable terms before, like I'm about to do now, but read it anyway: If you earned $10,000 every single day, it would still take you close to 274,000 years to accumulate a trillion dollars. That sounds insane. Yet, we're meant to accept that one individual amassing this wealth is not only possible, but also inevitable. This is projected as a marker of innovation, ambition, and even inspiration. Everybody is supposed to see this and be determined enough to follow suit as mini-Musks in their own worlds. When did we collectively agree that this made sense? When did extreme, civilisation-distorting inequality become a spectator sport instead of a call to action?
The absurdity sharpens when you realise where Musk came from. He's a product of apartheid-era South Africa, raised in a country built on institutionalised inequality. The same structures that enabled extreme wealth accumulation for a white minority while millions suffered now get reflected in his new trajectory towards a trillion dollars. From Pretoria to Texas, not much has changed.
Consider South Africa's water crisis today, documented with clarity by Al Jazeera's Capturing Water. In a country still reeling from apartheid's legacy, access to clean water has become a luxury determined by geography and income. Affluent neighbourhoods enjoy reliable water supply while informal settlements endure the indignity of dry taps and contaminated water sources. Corporations extract water with minimal oversight, protected by laws that prioritise profit over the most fundamental human need. The documentary exposes a brutal truth. That in South Africa, and increasingly across the world, corporate rights have become sacrosanct while human rights turn negotiable.
Musk may have left that world behind geographically, but he carries this logic forward economically, wherever his business expands. The inequality he grew up benefiting from hasn't been challenged in his success. But it surely has been globalised, digitised, and celebrated as disruption. Not a single eyelid bats at the sheer obscenity of this show.
This is emblematic of today's moral incoherence. Nowhere is it more visible than in America itself, where the same economic system that produces trillionaires also produces crisis after crisis for ordinary people. The numbers tell a rather unsettling story. As of 2024, more than 27 million Americans lack health insurance, with the uninsured rate rising as pandemic-era protections expire. Hispanic adults face particularly dire circumstances, with nearly one in four lacking coverage. Meanwhile, more than 100 million Americans carry medical debt – this figure includes many who nominally have insurance.
Americans' life satisfaction, in 2024, plummeted to its lowest level since 2011, with less than half reporting being "very satisfied" with their lives. In 2025, the percentage of Americans considered "thriving" has fallen to 48.9%, projecting to 27 million fewer thriving Americans than just four years ago. Americans' average satisfaction across 31 aspects of society is at 38%, matching record lows. The United States has fallen to the 24th place in the latest World Happiness Report, its lowest ranking yet, with experts pointing to political polarisation and declining young adult wellbeing.
Into this vacuum stepped the right-wing, presenting themselves as the commoner's messiah. They promised to drain the swamp, to fight for the forgotten, to make things great again. But their playbook has been devastatingly predictable — they build false narratives, manufacture enemies, and pin every problem on the 'other'. Immigration has become their primary weapon, with Trump inventing the term 'migrant crime' despite evidence suggesting these are unfounded claims. The 'great replacement' conspiracy theory (which was once a fringe racist fantasy) has become mainstream Republican rhetoric today, being used to explain everything from elections to economic anxiety.
This scapegoating is not accidental, but a deliberate misdirection. By focusing rage on immigrants, on the 'foreigner', on anyone who can be easily othered, the right-wing ensures that attention never lands on the actual troublemakers who institute the systems that nurture inequality. The billionaires whose fortunes grow while wages stagnate. The corporations that extract wealth from communities while contributing absolutely nothing in return. The systems that I just mentioned, allowing one person to accumulate a trillion dollars while millions go without healthcare, clean water, or even basic dignity.
The silver lining that history points to is that such systems built on inequalities are bound to eventually collapse. This often happens not because of moral awakening, but because they become too unsustainable. The contradictions will grow stark, the pressure too immense, and the suffering widespread. When this happens, the centre cannot hold anymore, and it falls. The rich and powerful will flee then. It leaves people with the daunting task of rebuilding from scratch, making others unlearn decades of complacency, and stepping into the real, hard work of active organisation to construct something new, something beneficial for millions who have been suffering for way too long.
We might be approaching this crossroad. The normalisation of the abnormal can only continue for so long before the facade cracks. The question isn't whether change will come, but whether we'll shape that change deliberately or watch it happen catastrophically around us.
Everything that should make our eyes pop out with shock now barely merits a second glance. Children go hungry while food is destroyed to maintain market prices. Ecosystems collapse while fossil fuel subsidies continue. Families turn bankrupt by medical bills in the world's wealthiest nation. The super-rich launch themselves into space while Earth burns. Each story arrives only to briefly trend and then vanish into the doomscrolling dump. We've mistaken documentation for action in this process. And that means accountability gets replaced by a mere awareness.
When abnormality becomes ambient, we lose our capacity to imagine alternatives. The first radical act, therefore, would be to refuse to accept that the current arrangement is natural or inevitable. And then insist that a world producing both trillionaires and water crises is, in fact, utterly insane.
As we move through 2026, there's a fragile little hope that some collective sense might begin to reassert itself. Not all of it, perhaps. Revolutions of consciousness are, after all, gradual. But maybe we can start recognising obscenity for what it is. We can reclaim our shock, anger, and most importantly, the ability to imagine how things could be and should be. The road to a trillion dollars will then start showing you warning signs instead of markers of progress. What waits on the other side is the difficult work of organising, unlearning, and building new, better systems that serve human needs instead of hoarding wealth.
