Things You Should Know

The billionaire myth is one of the Monolith’s best magic tricks.

First, the public pays for the science, the roads, the labs, the contracts, the tax credits, the risk, and the failure.

Then some private prophet in a black turtleneck, cowboy hat, or launchpad costume walks onstage and says, “I built this.”

No, brother.

We built the runway.

You sold tickets to the plane.

Tesla got a $465 million Department of Energy loan. SpaceX grew through NASA contracts. Blue Origin got a $3.4 billion NASA lunar-lander contract. Amazon was built on the publicly created internet, then fed by state and local subsidies. Google grew out of publicly funded research. Moderna’s vaccine was accelerated by BARDA, NIH, NIAID, Operation Warp Speed, and public purchase commitments. The semiconductor industry was nursed for decades by defense spending, NASA, military procurement, and public research.

And Palantir?

Palantir is the mask slipping.

Its own 2024 Form 10-K says 55% of its revenue came from government customers.

That is not a scrappy little software company.

That is the surveillance state in a Patagonia vest.

Public fear creates the mission.

Public money funds the platform.

Public agencies feed it data.

Private power sells the operating system back to the government.

That is the Monolith.

It steals the public good, privatizes the reward, erases the receipt, and then tells the people who paid for it that there is no money for healthcare, schools, wages, housing, or dignity.

But there was money.

There is always money.

Money for rockets.

Money for lunar landers.

Money for electric cars.

Money for vaccines.

Money for chips.

Money for surveillance platforms.

Money for billionaires before they became gods.

So the next time some free-market preacher tells you government never creates anything, ask him who paid for the first miracle.

The people are not freeloaders.

The people are the investors.

And it is time we stopped clapping for men who got rich selling us back what we already bought.