Fantastic Economy Forged by College SWAT Team
Nobody is sure how it happened, but news recently leaked that Elon Musk is now the planet’s first trillionaire. There was jubilation in the Elon bunker.
Reaching this long-awaited milestone doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Human beings love growth. Bigger, better, faster, smoother, tougher, smarter. Finding the dumbest turtle or the slowest bumblebee also delights human populations. Take beloved Moo Deng of Thailand. Not only is she a pygmy hippo, she’s a baby pygmy hippo, making her the smallest hippo of all, probably. She’s so cutely tiny — for a hippo — that she’s become a viral sensation, which is kind of scary for a seven-month-old creature that can’t get away from the adoring mobs, but no matter. Kheo Kheow Open Zoo has installed CCTV cameras to be sure to capture the moment Moo Deng gets trampled by stampeding fans.
Another sensational focus of extremes is, yes, the hot dog: eating more of them than ever before. Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest draws massive audiences every July 4. Twenty zany male contestants are training at this very moment to take a crack at besting 2024 champion Patrick Bertoletti, who shoved in his mouth, swallowed, and kept down 58 hot dogs (in buns) in 10 minutes. Happily, hot dogs are shaped somewhat like esophagi, lending themselves to gorging as some hungry spectators at tense football games participating in no contest of any sort have found out.
So it’s not all that surprising that our champion and Earth’s favorite son, the man of X, Space X, and so many other Xs, Elon Musk crashed out of the billionaire class and intruded himself into the adjacent class, the trillionaire class, which was empty. Good job! We all knew Elon’s fortune had been increasing at a staggering rate for the past few years. Why wouldn’t it? When you have as much money as Elon does, people throw more at you. He even got his happy Tesla shareholders to hand him a $56 billion bonus, but some pesky judge with no sense of proportion struck it down. Rats!
Even still, Elon’s oh so rapid tripling of his already sizable fortune since just about November 2024 did come as a bit of a surprise. Where could so much money have come from? We do know Elon placed a cagey $250 million on Trump in an incidental U.S. presidential election — if they’re held every four years, how important can they be? — and scored. As promised, the president-elect granted Elon his wish: a department all his own doing what Elon loves doing, saving money.1
Obedient as always to dissent, Trump sort of rescinded funding freezes, leaving it up to Elon and his Doggy SWAT team to make things happen.
Elon’s leap into the oh so lonely class of trillionaires occurred at the strangest time, between 2 and 3 in the morning. Elon had been in the U.S. Treasury server room hard at work for several hours saving the American people money when the news leaked.
Now the reason Elon was in the U.S. Treasury server room saving Americans money requires some explanation. His promised Department of Getting Your Goodies,2 or Doggy (for phonetic purposes), was galvanized into action when Trump’s funding freeze to save the government trillions of dollars fizzled, blocked by a general uproar of the American population itself, usually so docile, and a dozen lawsuits. Obedient as always to dissent, Trump sort of rescinded the freezes in a kind of ambiguous way, leaving it up to Elon and his Doggy SWAT team of college grad programmer types to make things happen. And did they ever.
Except, well, there was that guy there who wouldn’t let them into the U.S. Treasury server room, saying something inane about no way did they have the security clearance to get in there. When four of Elon’s college grad programmer types attempted ever so gently to lever him out of the way, he started screeching they didn’t have any kind of clearance.
A single call to his pal President Trump took care of that embarrassment. With the distraught man cleared off the premises, Elon and his college grad programmer type SWAT team got direct access to the secret solution to all the U.S. government’s problems: that U.S. Treasury server room. Soon Elon’s programmer types were wondering where all those federal programs that were supposed to be frozen could be. To be truthful, there was a heck of a lot of stuff in that system. How could anyone expect some college grad programmer type to get this right the first time? But Elon was the richest man in the world, albeit at that moment only a centibillionaire,3 so they would do it anyway.
Within hours that server room was bustling, each college grad of that SWAT team possessed with a great deal of know-how that none of the other grads knew anything about, which made teamwork problematic. Nevertheless, the hum of those magical servers stopped as the grads plugged new code they had written their very own selves into the system here, there, and everywhere to implement all those savings Elon was keen on, along with a 70% reduction of the agency’s — any agency’s — workforce.
Even though they worked away with gusto, the SWAT team members were not too sure what would happen. Elon himself wasn’t too sure. But at least no one was blocking him or his grads from sifting through the hundreds of millions of records of Americans — masses of freeloaders who had been getting money from the U.S. government all along. Hauling in cots for minimal comfort, Elon’s programmer types dug in to work day and night to ferret out from the system’s $5 trillion payouts every single occurrence of fraud and waste. They could do it. They were sure they could.
News emerged that the government budget had shrunk 34%. Several useless departments had been fed into some woodchipper, and legions of federal employees were out.
Elon and his team were wildly effective. In a matter of days, news emerged that the government budget had shrunk 34%. Several useless departments had been fed into some woodchipper, and legions of federal employees were out. Ordered to stay home and not do home office, those employees were told that they weren’t employees anymore, that they were worse than useless, that they were the reason everything had gotten so expensive.
Americans may grumble that their Social Security payments have been docked, but we’ve all wanted to cinch our belts tighter for some time, haven’t we? Medicare recipients seem to think they no longer have coverage for what they thought they had coverage for. South Dakota Lutherans have freaked out because they aren’t getting anything while the U.S. Treasury call center assures them that they haven’t been denied anything because they’re not even in the system. In his gentle and enigmatic way, Elon has soothed those disgruntled Americans who ignominiously relied on government entitlements for years by telling them to deal with it. And they all cheered anyway to learn that Elon was our first trillionaire, albeit a lonely one.
But what’s this? The rumor mill now has it that Trump is on track to becoming the second trillionaire within a relatively short period of time, considering the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Yes, Donald J. Trump, to whom Elon owes just everything, like the keys to the U.S. Treasury server room, is not one to be left behind. He is on his feverish way to joining Elon at the top, and that’s where the matter is going to rest. No more trillionaires! Just room for two up there and won’t it be lonely.
Americans are proud of facilitating the success of the two greatest achievers of all time, two men who have promised to make our country strong, efficient, and great again, a process that, they keep reminding us, will be a little painful. But don’t we have a huge reason to be grateful? Through great sacrifice, our duo of trillionaires has made our country more economical than ever one dreamed a country could be. Why, the government hardly spends anything at all now because Trump and Elon have cut out all the fat, all the waste, all the garbage, which turned out to be us. But fret not, America. As Elon and Trump console us, it will only hurt until we die, which — on the bright side — may be a little sooner than we expected.
Especially good graphic this time!