Of course it won’t, but they’re incapable of thinking it through that clearly.

Hierarchical systems like capitalism effectively reward and thus select for psychopaths who are laser-focused on their short-term, shallow self-interest, since they have the fewest constraints on the choices they’re willing to make. Anyone else might refrain from an otherwise effective course of action if they recognize that it’s ultimately destructive or self-defeating or immoral or unethical, but the psychopaths who only think in the short term won’t, so all other things being more or less equal, they have an advantage.

That’s a lot of what we’re seeing right now. Trump and Musk are making so much headway toward destroying the United States in large part because people are having a hard time working out how to even respond, since their actions are so corrupt and so destructive and so self-serving. They’ve jumped right past any ordinary notion of corrupt and self-serving and destructive to a brazen and egregious level that for many really is, in a simple, practical sense of the term, “unthinkable.”

And yes - crushing the common people in order to maximize the wealth that can be extracted from them and the privilege granted to the wealthy few is self-defeating in the long term, since the common people are the ultimate source of that wealth. But that won’t stop people like Musk and Trump, because they’re quite simply neither sane nor rational enough to let it.

I liken it to people living in penthouses in apartment buildings cannibalizing the lower floors to expand their penthouses. Not only are the buildings eventually going to collapse under the weight of the penthouses, but they’re actually hastening that by weakening the lower floors.

But Musk and Trump and the like just aren’t equipped to see that, or to restrain themselves if they do. So that’s not only what they will do, but what they are doing, right now, this minute.