Thou Art the Man
Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire. I don’t want to be that man. So we built the platform that refuses to make me, or anyone else, one.
The headlines this week named Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, at least in agreed value. A thousand billion dollars. The number is so large it stops meaning anything. It’s not money anymore. It’s become something entirely else.
When I read it, I thought of the prophet Nathan, and King David, and a poor man’s one little ewe lamb.
The parable lands hard if you read it slow. There was a rich man, said Nathan, with very many flocks and herds. And there was a poor man, who had nothing — save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. A traveler came to visit the rich man. The rich man, instead of taking from his own abundance, took the poor man’s one lamb and dressed it for his guest.
David, hearing this, was outraged. As the LORD liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die. Whoever did this — whoever could be so without pity — deserved the worst punishment.
Then Nathan said unto David, Thou art the man.
I read this while building. I had been carrying this idea since 2003 — earlier, really since long before that, in sixth grade, when a newspaper article ran a photograph of me demonstrating in a pool a floating city design for the ocean, calling it the wave of the future. I am the child of missionaries in Africa, then raised in children’s homes back in America while my parents fostered other people’s children. I joined the ARNG in Montana when I was 16, and by 2004 when I was building what would become Liana Banyan, I was standing in a parking lot for hours on the one day a year a dentist gave free care, waiting to have an infected tooth pulled because it was making it hard to breathe. I was considering buying dog antibiotics at the pet store because I couldn’t afford to take my daughter to the doctor. I was, by every measure, salt of the earth — a common man with common purpose: to do better than just eking by. Crewman #6.
But that passage stopped me anyway. Because the parable is not just about David. It’s a warning about the trajectory you or I can be on without seeing it. About the man you can become if you build a system that rewards you for being the rich man who takes the poor man’s only lamb. About the slow, almost imperceptible compounding of advantage that turns into a structure that turns into a fortune that turns into — at some point — an indictment. That could have been avoided otherwise.
I don’t want to be the man with no pity. I have never wanted to be that. Nor do I believe most of the men who become billionaires set out, in their twenties, to become billionaires. I like to think that most of them set out to build something they thought the world needed. And then the system rewarded them so disproportionately for building it that the reward itself became the problem. Money isn’t the issue. It’s the love of money.
The reward is the problem.
So we built a platform that refuses to give that reward.
Liana Banyan is the Capitalist Cooperative. The word capitalist is intentional: we are not opposed to markets, to ownership, to reward for work. We are opposed to the structural compounding that turns reward into extraction. And we did not stop at refusing extraction. We built in sixteen charitable initiatives, because the mandate is not merely to do no harm: it is to Do Good Unto All Mankind. Help Each Other Help Ourselves. The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself. That is Leviticus 19:34. For He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. That is Matthew 5:45. For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in. That is Matthew 25:35. That is the inclusion clause: repeated three times over — of many more. Everyone gets the rain. Everyone gets the sun. Nobody is gatekept from prosperity because of who they are or where they started.
The Cooperative Corporate structure refuses it four ways, each written into the bylaws in plain English, pledged for the life of the cooperative.
Creators keep 83.3 percent of every dollar — not as generosity, but as math. Muzzle not the Ox that treadeth the corn. For the laborer is worthy of his hire. On a $500 transaction, the worker/builder/creator takes home $416.67. The platform keeps 16.7%, twenty percent above actual cost, audited, transparent accounting, no more. That margin cannot compound into a trillionaire. The arithmetic refuses it.
Membership is five dollars a year. Not a tier. Not a trial. Not a pricing experiment that gets revised upward when the board decides the commons need funding. Five dollars. The dues fund the commons; they are not the revenue model.
The currencies cannot be converted to dollars. Credits, Marks, and Joules — the three coins of the cooperative — are explicitly non-fungible to fiat. There is no IPO path or exit liquidity that turns a founder’s equity into a billion-dollar payout. The structure refuses it by design, not by aspiration.
Influence is earned, not purchased. You cannot buy votes on what the cooperative does. You earn standing through demonstrated judgment. The plutocrat path is closed.
These are not aspirations. They are bylaws that will outlive me.
I am not pointing at Elon Musk and saying thou art the man. I am pointing at the structure that produced him and saying — no, thank you. It is refused. The cooperative refuses it on behalf of every founder who, twenty years from now, might otherwise be standing where he stands. The cooperative refuses it on behalf of the poor man’s one little ewe lamb. The cooperative refuses it because I have read the parable, and I know who is at risk of being the rich man. Me. And you. It is every one of us.
I studied how 95% of lottery winners go bankrupt within 5 years. Worse than they started. Money doesn’t make us different. It just lets us be more of who we already are. My preacher father likes to quote Yoda, but about the devil. When Luke declared that he was not afraid of Darth Vader, Yoda told him matter-of-factly, as one who knows to one who does not yet: “You will be.” My children all would have willingly run into the street to get across it regardless of traffic when they were small — because they did not understand, yet, the danger. I only know a little bit of it in this arena, and I’m smart enough to keep it that way.
Without structure, it is Me. It is every one of Us. It is, always, Us.
So I built the structure. Out of self-preservation, and a sincere desire to actually help in the ways that only someone who has lived in the trenches can know how to, and how NOT to. At least, to the best of my ability, and the wisdom to turn it over to my betters as soon as possible.
You can join the cooperative for five dollars a year. Or you can read the bylaws and the math, and fork the whole thing, and build your own. The patents are free to those who use them for free. For freely ye have received, freely give. That is Matthew 10:8.
It rains on the just and the unjust.
That is the point.
— Jonathan “G.I.” Jones Founder · Liana Banyan Corporation Capitalist · Cooperative · Patriotic Interdependentalist For the keep.
Companion canon: Capitalist Cooperative / Rains on the Just · Universal Sustained Economic Prosperity · How to Save the World in Six Easy Steps · No Atomo. Superman!