PRESENTED THROUGH THE LENS OF BIPARTISAN AI ACCELERATIONISM
"Elon Musk wants our land. He wants our water,” Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico warned voters in Denton, Texas, yesterday. “He is trying to buy Texas.”
As Talarico accurately mentioned, the neo-space-Nazi Musk is on a gobsmacking industrial spree to turn Texas’s wildlife refuges, rivers, groundwater, and towns into a sacrifice zone for his mechaHitler AI hyperscalers, chip plants and moon-factory spaceports. Musk is now using a small fraction of his hyper-inflated fortune to try to buy the U.S. Senate race in Texas, controlling the Ken Paxton campaign with $190 million in outside spending (and counting).
Meanwhile, the lame-duck Congress plans to hand the neo-space-Nazi Elon Musk a trillion-dollar windfall with BAAJA, the data-centers-everywhere industrial-fast-tracking bill (S. 5653).
This is a bad idea!
As Bill McKibben has noted:
“It would be highly ironic if the first action Congress took after an election largely defined by opposition to data centers would be to make it easier to build them.”
Today, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) agreed:
Why is BAAJA such a gift to Elon?
BAAJA’s passage is critical to keeping the AI bubble—and Musk’s entire fortune—inflated.
If Musk’s companies had traditional valuations, his near-trillion-dollar fortune would be reduced by over 90 percent.1 Disregarding the risk of the bubble popping, the “permit reforms” in BAAJA are easily worth a bonus $50-$100 billion to Musk the moment of passage, protecting SpaceX’s construction projects, fast-tracking projects for Tesla’s storage systems, and shielding xAI from data-center infrastructure delays.
Musk is literally the case study of the tremendous cost of dirty data-center deals. In the Harvard Law Review’s “Building at the Speed of AI: Data Centers, Expedited Permitting, and Who Bears the Burden,” Olivia Ferdinand lays bare the toxic consequences of the “insane execution speed” (Musk’s own words) of fracking-powered xAI hyperscalers in Memphis:
“In August 2025, xAI—Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company—began installing gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, to help power its Colossus II data center across the state line in Tennessee. These turbines were installed without permits to construct or operate and without public notice to the surrounding community, which is approximately 40% Black. Nearby residents compared the noise to “roaring jet engines” that made sleep impossible. For one asthmatic resident, the pollution became so severe that she was forced to leave the home that had been in her family for generations. The turbines emit nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and formaldehyde into a county that already received an “F” for ozone from the American Lung Association. A health-impact study estimated annual public health damages of $30–44 million across North Mississippi and West Tennessee. Nevertheless, the Mississippi Environmental Quality Permit Board recently approved xAI’s request to install forty-one permanent gas turbines in Southaven, replacing the twenty-seven temporary turbines.”
Musk has been lobbying for expedited permitting and “light-touch regulation” for ages. BAAJA will hand it to him on a silver platter.
Musk's space-Nazi data-center expansion plans depend on BAAJA’s twin promise of expedited permits and project certainty to bulldoze people and places. He’s currently trying to borrow $40 billion to buy more chips. Maybe he’ll get to borrow the money from your pension fund!
The Democrats backing BAAJA are understandably motivated to protect the Democratic-aligned financiers invested in the AI bubble. The same patriotic compulsion to protect fossil-AI capital is driving the Very Serious People responsible for previous oil-driven military misadventures and mega-bailouts to come together in support of BAAJA.
To be clear, these are mostly structural, institutional motivations, though personal investments and relationships play a role.
Also: Global warming hates chocolate. Fossil-fueled Super Typhoon Champi skimmed Guam. Phonebank for Fern Leard. Forest Service greenlights Tongass old-growth clearcut. Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-Ill.) thinks Martin Luther King Jr. would back BAAJA.
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1 Tesla has a market cap of $1.45 trillion and a P/E ratio of 350. Musk owns about 20% of Tesla, worth about $290 billion. At a normal P/E ratio, Tesla’s market cap would be about $80 billion. Musk would have lost $270 billion. Tesla’s premium, to the degree that it is based on anything in reality, depends on accelerating demand for storage-powered data centers and AI.
Musk’s SpaceX-xAI blob has a market capitalization of $2 trillion, nearly half of which ($970 billion) is Musk’s. It’s wildly outspending its income, giving it a price-to-equity ratio of something like negative 1000 and a price-to-sales ratio of 79. For that P/S ratio to be justifiable, SpaceXAI has to grow at about a 50% annual rate every year. At a normal P/S ratio of about two, SpaceX would be worth only $50 billion, wiping out $945 billion in Musk’s paper wealth.
If the AI bubble popped, Musk’s fortune would collapse from $1 trillion to $50 billion or lower. Assuming there isn’t a bailout, because why would we expect that to happen!
