This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.

A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.

Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.

Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Last month, X blocked........

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