12 March—With Tesla stock having lost about half its market value since the November election, good people can take schadenfreudian delight in an estimated $120-to-$130 billion decline in Elon Musk’s net worth. That might even make Donald Trump’s four-letter-word alter ego no longer the world’s richest man, at a mere $200 billion give or take. You’ve got to feel sorry for poor Elon. For now, anyway.

Depending upon how the broad U.S. stock market decline has affected the portfolios of second-richest Jeff Bezos, third richest Mark Zuckerberg, and fourth richest Larry Ellison, those weasels may at this writing outrank Elon Musk on the world wealth scale. For now, anyway.

(Bernard Arnault, founder and boss of LVMH—Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy—which controls some five dozen luxury brands, is thought to be the fifth richest person in the world. But he’s a foreigner, so he doesn’t matter.)

Trump’s tariffs and his reluctance to rule out to a possible recession are the proximate causes of the monumental market plunge. After all, his admirers consider him a successful businessman who knows all about that stuff.

But let’s dig a little deeper. Trump is a notorious self-dealer. And his cronies in and out of his Second Cabinet of Unqualified Misfits are pretty good at that sort of thing, too. So consider this: Trump intentionally conspired to drive the market down in order to short stocks for all the bad guys. Just saying.

The common market strategy in anything is to take a so-called long position, hoping that the value of an asset rises. On the other hand, taking a short position, also known in stock trading as shorting stocks and selling short, involves borrowing shares and selling them with the intention of buying them back at a lower price—and thus profiting from a stock price decline. So you’re selling something you don’t really own and unless you can actually buy it for less than you had paid, you’re screwed.

Shorting is illegal in some countries, but not the United States, because it’s essentially benefiting from the problems of others. That’s ridiculous, of course, because it’s what capitalism is all about. Profit is the only thing that matters and the end justifies the means. Human nature is human nature, after all.

So isn’t it just possible that Trump and his execrable brain trust have driven the market down for their own benefit? Everybody else be screwed . . .