Reams have been written about Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Most of it is wrong or besides the point.
Since the gigantic SpaceX listing on 12 June 2026, it’s been hard to avoid articles about its founder, Elon Musk, and his newly minted dollar trillionaire status.
A lot of it was sheer nonsense. More of it was just besides the point. The nub of the matter is far more stark, and far more damning.
In this two-part article, we’ll look first at the many flawed arguments that kick against Musk’s status as the winner of capitalism. In part two, we’ll consider reasons why his trillionaire status is unmerited.
Pang of envy
The political left experienced an intolerable pang of envy, and promptly wanted to confiscate Musk’s wealth and redistribute it. That’s because they’re morons.
They’re also greedy. They believe that people who do not produce much merit a share in the fruit of the labour of those who do. They do not recognise that rewarding people who produce little by giving them some of the wealth created by people who create a lot of it is not only morally unjust, but breaks the incentive structure on which economic progress is based.
In the left-leaning rag The Nation, Elizabeth Spiers ranted about “sociopathic wealth-hoarding”. On social media, she said, “Trillionaires shouldn’t exist.”
New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani’s first thought on Musk becoming a trillionaire was: “Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose personal net worth is about 40 times that of the median American, also posted a penetrating pearl of pansophy. She said, “The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth. We need a wealth tax.”
Days before the SpaceX listing, the socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders – a man of more modest means than Warren, but like her and unlike the vast majority of his countrymen a dollar millionaire – proposed nationalising 50% of the major AI companies (which would include SpaceX, as the parent company of xAI).
If you turn up to work with a clever idea, and complete in a day what takes other people a week to do, your boss might thank you and give you a bonus. Socialists like Warren, Mamdani and Sanders would punish you for being too productive.
Subsidy hog
Some of Musk’s critics make some valid points. One of the better critiques is that Elon Musk has sucked greedily from the government teat in order to establish and grow the companies upon which his wealth is based.
Musk is indeed not the ideal model of a free-market entrepreneur. With his electric-car-related businesses he has been heavily dependent on green energy subsidies and other taxpayer-funded incentives. His space business could not have got off the ground or survived without large government contracts.
The answer to that critique is to claw back the subsidies, or quit offering the incentives in the first place. Don’t hand out subsidies and then whine that someone took them.
Not all wealthy people are subsidy-suckers, which means that as a justification for a wealth tax, dependence on subsidies simply won’t do.
Besides, subsidies are intended to incentivise production that the government held to be desirable and in the interest of the people. Punishing people for responding to those subsidies by successfully producing what was subsidised is morally perverse.
Subsidies, tax breaks and contracts with big government are part and parcel of the modern crony-capitalist economy. It’s not ideal from a free market perspective, but very few people – I know of only one – are going to stand on principle and refuse to take money from the government when it is offered.
This isn’t a sound reason to begrudge Musk his trillion-dollar net worth.
Wealth is not income
In any case, the lefties are confusing wealth with income. They confuse shareholdings with realisable cash.
Billionaires (and now, the world’s solitary trillionaire) don’t sit on vast piles of ready cash. They don’t “hoard wealth”, like Uncle Scrooge from the Donald Duck cartoons.
Their net worth consists largely of shares in the companies which they founded, or to which they provided equity capital. They may own bonds of companies to whom they lent money. They may own government bonds if they lent a government money. Even if they just leave deposits in a bank account, most of that money is lent back into the wider market.
Very little wealth actually sits around doing nothing. You don’t get rich by letting capital sit idle. You get rich by investing it in productive economic activity.
Taxing assets
Absent large amounts of cash on hand, assets like stocks (equity) and bonds (debt) cannot be taxed, other than by either confiscating some of them to hold as government assets, or by forcing the owners to liquidate some of them to pay the tax collector.
The former is equivalent to nationalising private assets. It involves the state taking ownership of the means of production on behalf of the people. That is the definition of socialism. It transfers control of productive assets from the most efficient owner to the least efficient owner.
The latter transfers the ownership of liquidated tax portion shares to someone else, and confiscates the proceeds of the sale. There are few coercive government actions for which it is harder to construct a defensible moral case.
In both cases, the value of the assets that are being “taxed” will fall in proportion to the share being taxed. Taxing assets destroys the wealth that is being taxed, and starves companies of the capital they need to produce the things society demands of them.
It is destructive and counter-productive to tax asset holdings. It takes many years of studying at left-wing universities to become stupid enough to think that it is a good idea.
Realisable cash
A net worth on paper is not realisable in cold, hard cash. As soon as Musk starts to turn his shares into cash (by selling them), the stock price will begin to fall. If he sells a lot of shares, the price will fall a lot. If he sells even more, he’ll run out of willing buyers, leaving behind a bankrupt shell of a business.
Wealth taxes don’t work, for reasons I have explained before. (The same argument goes for taxing land and fixed property, and particularly residential housing, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
Trite comparisons, such as that Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune equals “72% of all the tax revenue collected by South Africa since 1997,” as the perennial fighters against capitalism and prosperity, Oxfam, claimed in left-wing papers such as the Mail & Guardian and business papers that ought to know better, like Business Day, are effective as sensational headlines and populist rhetoric.
However, since Musk’s trillion dollars does not consist of realisable cash, they betray a gross misunderstanding of economics that disqualifies them from being taken seriously on economic policy.
Still, we haven’t found a sensible basis to claim Musk’s trillionaire status is problematic.
The American Dream
On the other side of the fence, you have those who hold up Musk as the epitome of the American Dream; of the idea that capitalism rewards successful entrepreneurship.
Ted Jenkin wrote along these lines last year, when Musk reached the halfway mark, and accurately predicted: “Soon enough, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., won’t be able to use ‘billionaires’ in their stump speeches. Instead, it will just be a steady dose of ‘Tax Elon Musk.’”
He thought Musk would hit the trillion mark “before 2030”, or five years from the time of writing.
In fact, the milestone came only eight months from the time of writing. And in principle, it is true that nobody gets rich lawfully without producing an even greater amount of value for other people.
Jonah Goldberg correctly pointed out: “To some, it’s just not right that anyone be so rich when others are so poor – or feel so poor compared with Musk. This is an aesthetic complaint masquerading as a policy position. In objective terms, no one was made poorer by Musk getting richer.”
That’s much the same view that I’ve espoused for decades. Back when Bill Gates became the richest person in the world during the dot com boom, I’d say I didn’t care how rich he was; he earned it. What I care about is whether I can feed myself and my family, and what public policy should care about is the absolute living standards of the poor and of society in general.
Neither is negatively affected by exactly how rich the rich are.
Goldberg described Musk’s wealth as “a testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success and American greatness, on a scale that is hard to describe”.
To at least some extent, that is true.
On character
Some commentators went even further. South African radio personality Gareth Cliff posted: “The one thing you can say about everyone who’s unhappy about Elon Musk’s new trillionaire status is that they’re the same bitter and resentful people who would hate you if you had more than them.”
He went on: “They make terrible friends / You shouldn’t do business with them / Never lend them money / Never marry them / Never give them any responsibility.”
This strikes me as a rather mean-spirited attack; a petty culture-war salvo instead of a fair and perceptive journalistic observation.
It is especially mean to people who begrudge Musk his success on the grounds that he is a truly awful human being. His own AI chatbot, Grok, declared Musk to be “one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X since he acquired the platform”.
He supports far-right political parties and white nationalist activists around the world.
He encourages a frat-like workplace culture in which casual racism and sexism thrive.
He works his employees like slaves, expects some of them to sleep at the office, and on more than one occasion has had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates – some of them decades younger than him.
He has treated at least one of his more than a dozen children (by at least four different women) abominably.
He, and his products, have actively spread disinformation about South Africa, which has contributed to a policy shift by the US government that is harming South Africa’s economy, will drive it further into the arms of China, and will kill some of its most vulnerable citizens.
He has – rightly – been described as arrogant, impulsive, erratic, narcissistic, antisocial, vengeful, mean and incurious. He considers empathy to be a threat to civilisation.
Elon Musk is by all accounts a terrible person, and a hypocrite, with blood on his hands. Even his own AI agrees.
Unlike Gareth Cliff, I don’t think it reflects poorly on people’s character that they are repulsed by the thought that this particular person is the first to become a dollar trillionaire. It could certainly have happened to a nicer person.
And yet, his political views and his many grievous character flaws – except insofar as they affect the profitability of his companies – are beside the point.
They’re nobody’s business except his and the people he interacts with.
They are most particularly not a reason why Musk does not merit his trillion dollar net worth.
Cause for concern
So, if the problem with his trillionaire status is not his personality, nor his behaviour, nor his politics, nor his family affairs, nor his abuse of staff, nor his exploitation of corporate welfare, nor concerns about wealth inequality, then what is a good cause for concern?
I’ll explain in part two.
[Image: Time lapse photograph of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch in 19 June 2026, showing stage separation, the first-stage boostback burn and its re-entry burn. The payload was NROL-179, consisting of unspecified US government surveillance satellite(s). Photo: SpaceX]
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