Europe and America Are Learning to Hate Builders

Europe and America are learning to hate the people who build things, and I’m sick of watching it.

Bill Ackman said it plainly on Mexican TV: if Musk had stopped after Tesla, there’d be no SpaceX and no Neuralink, a technology Ackman says “may enable my daughter to see again or speak again.”

Think about what that means. One man’s refusal to retire might give a father’s daughter her sight or her voice back. And the response from the loudest corner of our culture is to wish him dead.

That’s no exaggeration. This month Scott Galloway, an NYU professor with one of the biggest business podcasts going, stood on stage, called Musk “a traitor to the West” and reminded the crowd that America put the Rosenbergs up against a wall. The crowd applauded. He’s also told a live audience he defecated in his Tesla before selling it. This is a man who teaches business.

He isn’t alone. Tesla showrooms were firebombed in 2025. People were arrested for posting threats to kill Musk. A Network Contagion Research Institute survey that year found about half of left-leaning respondents could justify his murder. For building cars and rockets.

Free Stuff, No Agency Required

And it isn’t only about one man. In October, French protests over the cost of living turned into mass looting: more than 1,500 shops hit, 1,800 arrests, over 500 police and firefighters hurt. In Nantes a school was set on fire. In Madrid, protesters camped in Puerta del Sol for 38 days demanding that rents be cut in half, until police cleared the square. Strip away the slogans and the demand is always the same: free stuff, paid for by someone else, with no agency required.

Agency is the only thing that has ever reliably lifted anyone’s standard of living. You learn a skill people value, you build something they’ll pay for, you take the risk and live with the result. It can’t be handed out by a government, and it can’t be won by occupying a square.

In the US, the midterms produced a governor-elect in Texas who promised “a ban on all data center approvals”, and a congresswoman calling for a pause on advanced AI and a ban on superintelligence. The most important technology of our lifetime, and the first instinct is to stop it.

And the media keeps the whole thing running. Half of what I read about the people building the future is spin, and plenty of it is flat-out false. Builders get written up as villains, their failures as morality tales, their wins as luck or theft. A man who brings up the Rosenbergs when talking about Musk keeps getting booked instead of challenged. Say the same about a politician the newsrooms like and see how long you stay on air.

Envy Dressed Up as Morality

The modern left has turned envy into a moral system. Ambition gets called greed. Merit gets called privilege. Profit is treated as proof that someone, somewhere, was robbed. The founder who bet everything is the villain, and the official who risked nothing and spends what the founder made is the hero.

Strip off the language of fairness and what’s left is force. A wealth tax, a windfall tax, a “contribution”: each one ends with someone who built nothing taking what someone else built, backed by the state. That’s no moral system at all, and I’ve made the longer case against it before.

Europe keeps running the same experiment and getting the same result. France scrapped its wealth tax in 2018 after years of watching entrepreneurs leave, and some of its politicians want it back. Norway raised its own in 2022 and millionaire departures more than doubled. Britain abolished non-dom status in 2025 and topped the world’s millionaire-exodus forecasts that year. Builders don’t march or riot. They take their talent somewhere it’s wanted.

Build Anyway

So here’s to the builders. The ones who make payroll before they pay themselves, ship before anyone believes in them, and get rich doing it. Every job, every cure and every rocket started with someone who chose to make something instead of demanding something.

You don’t need anyone’s permission and you don’t owe anyone an apology. Build, earn, and keep going.