As you’re probably aware, Elon Musk had an IPO (initial public offering) of SpaceX stock that made him the world’s first trillionaire.

Making the rounds on social media shortly afterwards was a meme entitled CAPITALISM WINS AGAIN. The text reads: “Juan Hernandez took a $28/hr welding contract job at SpaceX in 2015. Didn’t even know what the company was. They gave him $10k in stock and let him buy more through payroll. The stake just made him a millionaire.”

Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Hurrah for Juan! Great feel good story.

But … there’s a lot to unpack here. Indeed, it’s kind of breathtaking how much… I’ll call it narrative here, has been stuffed into a few short sentences.

So let’s engage in some critical thinking. We’ll start by asking some questions. (For the purposes of this piece, I’ve assumed the basic story details, widely reported in the media, to be true. Whether anyone actually vetted the story is a topic for another day).

Why does the story focus on Hernandez and not the 4400 others who also received stock? Well, Hernandez is a Mexican immigrant, and “immigrant success story” is a cornerstone of US mythmaking.

Why does the meme mention his wage and job? To make sure you know he was a hard working blue collar guy with a “marketable skill.”

Why does the story specify that the company gave him stock and let him buy more through payroll? The company seems super generous just handing out stock like that, right? And the opportunity to buy more through payroll? Even more generosity, to set up that kind of easy buy in. And anyone taking advantage must be super smart.

And why does the post specify that the stake made him a millionaire? Because everyone dreams of having a pile of money and the freedom that would entail, and a million sounds like a lot.

Now here’s what the meme doesn’t say.

It doesn’t say that immigrants to the US have to spend years jumping through hoops to become citizens, and are often at the mercy of employers, counting on them to file paperwork properly and on time. Or that when something goes wrong with that process, they find themselves languishing in a for-profit jail for weeks and months at a time (over what amounts to paperwork issues), and are subject to terrible conditions and even sexual abuse.

It doesn’t mention that tens of thousands of so-called “unskilled” immigrants, documented or otherwise, end up working in agriculture, doing back-breaking work in the hot sun, and paid on a piecework basis, always under deportation threat, and that this is why Americans enjoy cheap food. Likewise they work retail or landscaping jobs, for minimum wage, which doesn’t cover living expenses anymore.

It doesn’t bring up that thousands of companies have “given” stocks to employees… in lieu of secure employment, higher wages, or health care plans, and that the stocks ended up being worthless when the company went belly-up.

And it certainly doesn’t mention that stocks offered under these plans can only be sold under certain conditions. Employees have to have owned them for a certain length of time, can only sell a certain percentage of their holdings at a time, and so on. By which point the stock value will have changed. Possibly higher, but much more likely lower, as other classes of shares don’t have similar restrictions. And of course, capital gains are subject to taxes, where as the big guys get to borrow against their stock portfolios to finance their lifestyles, so never pay those taxes, and they also get to deduct the interest on their loans.

So whether Hernandez and the others actually ended up being millionaires will depend on a lot of other factors, and you can bet we won’t be getting follow up stories.

Now I know what some of you are thinking, as I’ve seen it in the social media comments section already. That I’m jealous of Hernandez. Or that I must be some lefty socialist who’s on welfare, and that I don’t want to work to succeed.

Nope. I’m not on welfare, nor have I ever been. I’ve been employed, or been an employer, since I was ten years old. And I certainly don’t begrudge Hernandez his win.

But let’s be clear: that’s what it is, a win. A lucky break. This isn’t capitalism. This isn’t even trickle down economics. We’ve ended up with a straight up lottery system, with a scant few good prizes and thousands of really horrific ones. And the meme is marketing for the lottery scheme. It’s the dopamine hit that keeps people slogging away in a system that might someday reward them. This isn’t good for Americans, and by extension, the rest of the world, because American-based multinational corporations dominate the economy.

I’d love for everyone to live in a system where hard work does, in fact, pay off. Where someone who does a lifetime’s worth of honest labour can be assured that they won’t have to be bagging groceries in a Walmart at age 80 to pay off medical bills.

We have to be clear-eyed in our thinking to make things better for everyone. And that includes looking carefully at hype like this.