His own class is going to betray him because he is the dumbest motherfucker alive.

The billionaires will regret giving him power, because they’re subtly giving up their own levers of influence over him.

When you could buy a politician or an election, you held some sway over those politicians in those seats. When you pay lobbyists who will do the work of writing specific regulations that help you, and then have them try to get those regulations actually enacted, you had influence over how the government could wield power over you.

But the Trump movement has been about consolidation of power in one man, who doesn’t feel constrained by laws, or by other politicians. The billionaires are down to a single tool: trying to pay off one man, who doesn’t keep his word.

The question becomes, at what point does it go from money buying power, versus power buying money? It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one for those who currently have money and who want to derive power from that.

Trump and Elon want to make it so that they can singlehandedly destroy any business that doesn’t bend the knee. At the same time, they want to be able to shape the rules in an arbitrary way to only help those they like, and hurt those they don’t. They’re not quite there yet, and I’d say that the rich still have some power independent of the government. But the plan for those in charge is to consolidate power as quickly as they can, to where that’s no longer true.

There’s a substantial chance that this goes down the same way that scene in The Dark Knight Rises, where the financial backers who enabled Bane’s movement insist that they should still have influence over that movement, once it takes power.

Or if you actually want a historical parallel, the oligarchs who funded the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, only to find themselves in concentration camps themselves.