The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'

Why there is currently an Iraqi Most Wanted-style deck of cards with Elon Musk's address for sale online

Last weekend at Coachella, the singer of the punk band the Circle Jerks called for “an army of Luigis,” in reference, of course, to Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The statement, which implied the band would like to see more assassins murdering more CEOs, made a couple headlines, but not as many as one might expect in the wake of an encouragement of mass violence issued at the nation’s premier music festival. There’s a lot going on, sure, but this seems to speak to a normalization of the sentiment: Polls have shown sympathy, and even support for Mangione, especially among young people. The pop singer Ethel Cain posted #KillMoreCEOs to Instagram, suggesting the ultra-rich should be made to “fear for their lives.” Meanwhile, three men have been arrested for firebombing Tesla dealerships in protest of Elon Musk’s role in the federal government.

The Overton Window appears to have shifted with regard to the acceptability of political violence against elites and their property, in other words. And in this climate, an artist and freelance writer is selling an Iraqi Most Wanted-style deck of cards with the home addresses of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, John Roberts, Marc Andreessen, and 48 others printed on them, through a website online.

Justin Caffier classifies his “America’s Most Powerful” cards as an art project. It’s a parody of the infamous playing card decks that the US military once handed out to soldiers in Iraq to help them identify top members of Saddam Hussein’s government during the war for capture and/or assassination.

The Iraqi Most Wanted playing card deck. Photo via Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

Saddam was pictured on the ace of spades, his sons on the aces of clubs and diamonds, and so on.

Caffier’s deck features individuals he has deemed “most powerful” players in the United States; tech titans-cum-oligarchs like Musk and Thiel. Supreme Court Justices. The BlackRock and Goldman Sachs CEOs. Defense tech contractors like Palantir’s Alex Karp. Zuckerberg, Bezos. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The list goes on. Each card features a portrait of the individual, their name, and their home address. Caffier made 53 copies of the “art” decks, he told me, and he is selling them online for one million dollars each. (In addition to the “art” decks, he is also selling “merch” decks for $25, with publicly listed office addresses.)

It is, let’s say, quite a provocation. (And I’ll state here clearly that this piece is not in any way an endorsement of this project.) When I first heard about it, it was because I overheard someone at a party talking about how their friend was “about to self-immolate,” which caught my ear, and prompted me to ask who was due to go up in flames, and why. Why would someone pursue such an inflammatory project—for politics, for attention, for notoriety, for money? Out of genuine rage? All of the above? And what would it say about ~these times~ that producing a deck of cards with the addresses of the megarich printed on them, bounty hunter-style, might be seen as a viable means of achieving any of that? Does this signal the rise of the death drive influencer?

Caffier is (was?) a freelance writer and reporter; he’s written for publications like New York Magazine, VICE, and Mashable. He says he honestly doesn’t know if he’s done with that life, or what will come after this.

“I was out on a run in the summer, in 2023, and suddenly the idea of doing a parody of the Iraq's Most Wanted cards with corporate ghouls came to me fully formed,” Caffier said. There had been a spate of troubling Supreme Court rulings, and Caffier believed that the root of the world’s problems was the amount of power concentrated into the hands of a few. “I've always maintained, ‘y'know, it's really just 10,000 terrible people out there making life miserable for the other 8,000,000,000,” Caffier said. “And they have addresses and need sleep like the rest of us. This isn't as impossible an issue to solve as we're led to believe."

Caffier made a list of names of the millionaires and billionaires and power brokers he would include in such a deck, and turned the skills he’d honed as an investigative reporter towards tracking down their apparent home addresses. He located each of the addresses by connecting the dots laid out in publicly available information, he says. As a rule, he didn’t use any paid services to obtain the addresses.

“It was hardly as simple as putting ‘Jeff Bezos home address’ into Google,” Caffier told me. “I had to get creative with my methodology to find leads and then double back to cross reference once I think I found a hit. There were many red herrings and many hours spent on stuff I just wasn’t able to confirm.”

Caffier unveiled the cards at a Los Angeles art space in late February, with an accompanying statement distancing himself from violence, and suggesting that the buyer of a $1 million deck could, if they wanted, simply destroy it to make a statement of their own. The less incendiary “merch decks” have since begun to circulate; both versions have been seen by journalists, influencers, and podcasters. At least one high profile streamer has a loaner “art” deck (with the home addresses) that they’ve been using for in-home poker games.

Caffier says he was driven to make the cards because the most powerful elites are destroying the fabric of American life, without any meaningful checks on their power at all. “They do the terrible things they do,” he says, because “they know the economic and judicial system they operate in will not only never punish them, but actively supports their behavior.”

“They can operate with impunity from the shadows because relatively few people know who they are or what they're doing,” Caffier says. “So the cards serve as a method for flipping over the America-sized rock over them and blasting everyone with sunlight while sending the message to them that they are very much perceived.”

I asked Caffier if he’s worried about the backlash an undertaking like this seems destined to ignite. He says he is, but he has consulted lawyers and legal experts, and made an effort to “stay within the letter of the law,” though he acknowledges that the project “seeks to explore where some uncharted legal boundaries are.” And he insists that he doesn’t want to see violence, or to see “a descent to barbarism.”

Instead, he says, “I'd like the cards to inspire people to dig deeper into who the people featured are, learn more about the awful things they've done and continue to do and how their crimes—legalized and sanctioned by America's institutions—contribute to the average person's life and the planet itself being increasingly miserable and futureless.”

There is rage in these words, and desperation, and the darkest timbre of hope. He continues:

I hope the shrinking of these titans onto small rectangles that show where they can sometimes be found helps to disempower that person in the eyes of whoever's holding the card. These are not gods on Olympus. They still (sometimes) have to walk among us.

What everyone does with this hypothetical new knowledge and empowerment is something I won't and legally can't advise further on, but I sure hope this helps move the needle on Americans not rolling over and resigning themselves to oligarchical dystopia for the empire's remaining years.

Look, the sources of this sentiment are not difficult to discern. We are witnessing the most nakedly oligarchic ruling class in recent US history. While working class Americans want for rent, groceries, and access to basic services like healthcare, the world’s richest man is firing civil servants by the tens of thousands. As retirees and veterans watch their savings and 401ks shrivel up, the billionaire president is capitalizing on world-historic crypto grifts. We hear a lot about the fear that this moment is supposed to inspire—via ICE agents shoving students into unmarked vans, the illegal forced deportations, the Republicans who say even they’re afraid to speak up—but we do not hear as much about the rage.

But clearly, that rage is there. The Trump administration is aiming to tamp down that fury by instilling more fear—his Department of Justice is pursuing the death penalty for Mangione, and officially treating Tesla vandals as domestic terrorists—but we may have reached a place where the genuine populist rage is simply too incandescent to be stifled that way. The Luigi avatars are as common as ever on social media, and this is a nation awash in guns and ammunition. As the Trump administration ignores due process and the Supreme Court, there is a growing attitude among dissidents that ‘if they’re not going to follow the law’, why should we?

And Overton Windows are shifting all over the place. Just this last week, the neoconservative Bill Kristol called to abolish ICE and the New York Times’ arch conservative David Brooks ended his column by quoting the communist manifesto. Last Tuesday, Bernie Sanders and AOC brought their ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ tour to Folsom—just a few miles away from my childhood home—in California’s Trump country. Nearly as many people turned out as did in Los Angeles.

When I think about Mangione, and Ethel Cain’s #KillMoreCEOs posts, and Caffier’s America’s Most Powerful deck, I can’t help thinking of the work of Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, and his 2017 book The Great Leveler. The volume is a lengthy and in-depth examination of how extreme inequality has been “resolved” throughout history. Disturbingly, Scheidel found that so far the only thing that has undone such inequality—the only great leveler, so to speak—is violence. Plague, war, or violent revolutions. “It is almost universally true,” Scheidel writes, “that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time.”

I do of course very much hope that we have not reached such a juncture—that other solutions are available to us beyond violence—but it would be a mistake to ignore the currents online, in pop culture, and in the streets. One explicit policy goal of reducing inequality in the past has been, if nothing else, to reduce the likelihood of pitchfork-wielding mobs. There is such a seething anger at America’s most powerful, our nation a tinderbox. Looking at our timelines, hearing evocations of this rage, and scanning the portraits on Caffier’s cards, it’s hard not to consider: has it come to this? What if it has come to this?