The Evil Twin of Richie Rich

 

To the extent one can be a contemporary of a comic book/strip character, it seems I'm a contemporary of Richie Rich.  Richie was the richest person--a boy I suppose I should say--in the world.  He was so rich his middle initial was a dollar sign.

Unlike most incredibly wealthy people, he was eager to make friends and spent his money helping those less well off. He was, in other words, entirely imaginary; the product of an imagination so vast as to entertain the charming belief that the exceedingly rich care about and care for the poor and unfortunate.

The actual person who is currently the richest person in the world bears no physical resemblance to Richie Rich. The child he insists on brandishing and parading before his friends and others, and before the cameras, looks a bit like Richie, though.  We must hope the child lives a normal and happy life despite his father's relentless efforts to put him on display.

So, Mr. Musk isn't Richie's identical twin. But in his arrogance, his disregard for those whose careers he's so eager to ruin, his blatant efforts to acquire power and more wealth to the injury of others, and eagerness to take advantage of the president who seems to have something of a crush on him, he qualifies as evil.

He comes from a wealthy family.  The very wealthy are very self-righteous as they've never had any reason to doubt their worth.  So they tend to believe that what they think is self-evidently true and those who oppose them are not merely wrong, but must be chastized if not "deleted" as he's suggested in his ominous way.  I can picture him saying his critics should be "corrected" in the way the ghostly caretaker of the Overlook Hotel told Jack Nicholson's character he had "corrected" his family in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Some of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age became philanthropists as they aged.  Perhaps they hoped thereby to buy absolution for their sins and into heaven as they bought so much else.  It seems Richie's evil twin is buying a goverment; perhaps more than one. Perhaps he thinks he can buy heaven as well.