I’m less interested in the fact that Elon Musk is now a trillionaire than I am about the response.
I mean, wasn’t it inevitable that there’d be a trillionaire soon and that Musk, who sees the future as a personal asset, would be the first to get there?
The giant SpaceX IPO will be remembered not just for the obscene amount of money it made Musk — or even for his “Mars” trilogy-like plan to populate the red planet — but for setting a trend for future trillionaires, whose wealth is not just beyond imagination but also a threat to the future of American democracy.
(Asking for an editor: Do I use that “threat-about-the-future-of-democracy” line too often these days or not — is this possible? — often enough?)
Look, there was a time — and I know this dates me — when some people still asked the question whether it’s possible to have too much money, and the right answer would be yes.
You see, I still think the right answer is yes, but that may make me either an outlier or maybe just a Bernie-Warren-AOC-style leftist. OK, Warren Buffet did give away billions, and Jeffrey Bezos’ former wife, MacKenzie Scott, has gifted more than $26 billion. So, I guess, all is not lost.
It’s hardly a new story that the rich, whether born to riches or self-determined, want to be richer. And then richer still. Bruce Springsteen wrote the lyric: “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king and a king ain’t satisfied until he rules everything.”
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In the U.S., we not only have a Gilded Age-level wealth gap, but we seem eager to widen it. The original Gilded Age led to the national income tax, a reasonably effective estate tax and then, with the Great Depression added into the mix, to New Deal programs like Social Security.
This time around, it led to Donald Trump becoming president and the GOP tradition of brazenly lowering taxes for the rich. It’s not just Republicans who think that way. In Colorado, as an example, Gov. Jared Polis wants to eliminate the state income tax. They all promise that doing so will somehow enrich the rest of us. Doesn’t anyone remember when supply-side, trickle-down-economics were exposed as a fraud?
So it may not surprise you that the first thing I thought when Musk’s wealth officially reached 13 figures — a trillion, if you didn’t know, is 1,000 billions or a 1 million millions — was that this is the same guy who once tweet-bragged about spending the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
That was Musk back in his DOGE days in the White House when he got the job of recklessly cutting government programs because of his Silicon Valley talent for moving fast and breaking things — qualities that Trump, uh, treasures. And it didn’t hurt that Musk had spent $250 million — or 0.025% of a trillion — to help get Trump elected in 2024.
Oh, and he helped himself, too. According to a Public Citizen report last year, Musk had direct business interest in more than 70% of the government departments and agencies targeted by DOGE.
But the conflicts of interest are the least of it. What was the cost — in, you know, human terms — of USAID’s trip to Musk’s woodchipper?
According to an analysis from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), the discontinuation of USAID led to 762,000 deaths, more than 500,000 of them children, since USAID was first discontinued and then folded into the State Department. And that was just for the first year of the gold-plated Trump Restoration.
It’s a human tragedy of such a scale that, shockingly, hardly anyone even talks about it.
That’s where we are today. And where Musk is.
He became the richest man in the world, according to the Forbes list, in 2021, at a mere $185 billion, most of the wealth in Tesla shares. Since then, he bought Twitter, eventually turning it into a money-losing site he renamed X and made it a place where hate speech could flourish.
In the process, he changed the scales of wealth. By one measure, John D. Rockefeller’s wealth accounted for 1.5% of the U.S. Gross National Product. By the same measure, Musk’s wealth is 3% of GDP.
SpaceX has actually done some remarkable things, in changing the way we see space travel. And on the day the SpaceX IPO was launched, so were 29 Starlink satellites.
But he didn’t make that trip by himself. You and I helped the passage as the government, using taxpayer money of course, accounted for $38 billion — according to a Washington Post analysis last year — in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits. Who wants to bet that the number hasn’t jumped, just like a SpaceX rocket, in the past year?
You think having connections helps? Also on Friday, the Justice Department cleared the way for the $111 billion media merger that will give a Donald Trump friend control of CNN.
Where does Musk go from here? Nobel Prize-winning economist and former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman describes the SpaceX IPO as a Ponzi scheme and wonders how many investors — including the passive investors whose IRAs and 401Ks are likely invested in index funds — will get hurt.
A New York Times article, meanwhile, explains how Musk himself will come out OK. He was resistant to taking his company public because, in doing so, you generally lose some of the control that’s given instead to stockholders and corporate boards and the like. But it won’t work that way for Musk.
In January, the Times writes, Space X gave Musk a pay package that would total 1.3 billion restricted shares. To get those shares, he would have to meet his goals of putting high-powered data centers into space and a colony of one million people on Mars. And yet, he is allowed, under SpaceX’s offering prospectus, to be able to vote with shares he hasn’t earned and probably will never earn.
“I have never heard of this,” Ann Lipton, a University of Colorado law professor, said. “He basically found a way to hack the normal rules of corporate organization.”
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And still they buy his stock — and in record numbers. He offers the usual Musk formula — chaotic vision, innovation, mad insights into the future and, as one pundit put it, the assurance that if you’re smart enough, you shouldn’t be restrained by pesky things like accountability.
Interestingly, Musk told investors Friday that he wasn’t confident when he started SpaceX, where the company’s failures have sometimes overwhelmed its successes. Failure was always an option. Musk himself said he put the chance for success at 10%.
And now the company is worth over $2 trillion and Musk is the world’s first trillionaire.
But the question of how much is ever too much remains unanswered. History says it was ever thus.
That doesn’t mean, though, we can’t keep asking.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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