What Do You Think of Elon Musk Becoming a Trillionaire?
A Saturday Prompt
The legacy media was stuffed yesterday with reports of SpaceX’s massive initial public offering and the company’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, becoming the world’s first trillionaire. And the accounts did so with an air of celebration: What an achievement! Musk is the first to reach that incredible status! Wow! Breathless Fox News hosts said if you stacked all of Musk’s money in a pile it could reach the sun. Maybe one day his riches will reach Mars, his preferred destination.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, we learned this week that hourly wages had fallen by 0.8 percent over the last year when adjusted for inflation, which spiked to 4.2 percent. This is largely the result of surging energy prices, up 23.5 percent from a year ago, thanks to Donald Trump’s reckless war with Iran. The New York Times quoted an economist who succinctly stated the obvious: “Low-income consumers don’t have a lot of room to maneuver at this point.”
Gabriel Zucman, a French economist who leads a research group funded by the European Union, has calculated that the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires totals $20.1 trillion. That’s nearly a fifth of the whole world’s yearly output and nearly five times more than it was 15 years ago when these astronomically rich people possessed $4.5 trillion.
How great is the divide between not just the rich and poor, but the very richest and most everyone else? Data from the Federal Reserve shows that the top 1 percent of Americans own half of all stock, a principal source of wealth. And the top 0.1 percent—some 135,000 households—own stocks totaling $13.7 trillion, nearly double the amount ($7.1 trillion) owned by the bottom 90 percent, representing some 115 million households.
A chief reason for this growing concentration of wealth and escalation in inequality? Tax laws, particularly a significant reduction in the corporate tax rate, and other tax cuts benefitting the richest among us. As The New York Times rightly notes, this shift “increases the tax burden on workers, who pay both income and payroll taxes—two types of tax that barely scratch billionaire wealth. It also reduces the public revenue available to pay for health, education, defense, infrastructure and other public benefits at a time when governments are in deep debt.”
But Elon Musk’s new singular status cuts hard for another reason. It not only means he’s richer beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, he also has increased his power in the process. And we’ve already seen how this South African-born businessman, who grew up under apartheid, abuses his power.
With all his high-minded talk about turning humans into an inter-planetary species that can build a colony on Mars, Musk is the guy who bought Twitter for about $44 billion and proceeded to turn it into a hateful cesspool of right-wing extremist propaganda, including his own frequent white supremacist postings. He’s the guy who spent more than $290 million in the 2024 campaign to help Trump and other Republicans win, then could be seen on the day of Trump’s inauguration standing behind a presidential podium thrusting a Nazi salute—not once but twice.
He’s also the drug-addled sociopath who could be seen repeatedly beside Trump in the Oval Office—where he lied about the benefits of his DOGE operation to cut waste, fraud and abuse—while his young operatives without government experience dug through sensitive files to recklessly and illegally cut thousands of federal jobs and dismantle government programs. Most appallingly, this included ending funding for the U.S. Agency for International Aid, which has saved an estimated 92 million lives from the ravages of infectious diseases and malnutrition. The careless actions of Musk—who last year stood on a stage proudly wielding a chainsaw—was estimated to have caused the deaths of over 600,000 people in the first year, two-thirds of whom are children.
We are left to wonder how this man, who built his fortune with billions in government funding, will abuse his expanded power with dramatically increased resources. By some accounts, Musk’s personal wealth of more than $1 trillion exceeds the economies and annual budgets of more than 190 countries. This ensures that he will be pursued and feared in equal measure, with the kind of power that no one man should ever have. That’s the real story—the danger of oligarchic rule— that I think will continue to haunt us in the years ahead.
What do you think of Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire? What does it say to you about the nature of our society? How concerned are you about the concentration of wealth in general and the expanded wealth of Musk in particular? Is there any reason for optimism that he could actually use some of his wealth to address societal problems to make life better?
As always, I look forward to reading your observations and the opportunity for this America, America community to learn from each other. Please do be respectful in your remarks. Trolling will not be tolerated.
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“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” - Dorothy Parker
I think it is an abomination. At the very least he should pay taxes. Just think of all the monetary issues and needs that could be met just through taxation on wealth. That said, SpaceX should be nationalized. It would not exist except for government welfare to prop up Elon’s many failures and continued failures. Taxation on wealth or nationalization!