I am not a huge fan of Elon Musk as a political activist or commentator. I think he’s made Twitter – sorry, X – worse. His support for the nationalist right in Europe has been ugly. His tenure leading the Department of Government Efficiency mostly amounted to a missed opportunity and often descended into little more than performative vandalism. His personal life is not exactly consonant with my preference for bourgeois family values. Though, one can hardly accuse him of being a deadbeat dad.
On the other hand, I am a huge fan of his accomplishments in business and engineering. He helped create the foundations of the digital economy with PayPal. At the helm of Tesla, he made the electric car into a viable industry (something climate activists once lionized him for). Starlink, his internet satellite business, has been transformative. And, finally, there’s SpaceX, which went public last week. It’s a testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success and American greatness, on a scale that is hard to describe.
If Musk is successful in his ambitions, he will be more responsible than any other human for making ours an interplanetary species. That would mean that long after nearly every name of every politician and businessman you can think of has been forgotten, people will still remember Elon Musk.
But none of that is very relevant to the explosion of outrage over his status as the world’s first trillionaire. I offer my opinions about Musk only because a remarkable number of people think if you defend the morality or legality of him being so rich you must be on Team Elon. I am not. I am on Team Capitalism.
But the confusion hardly ends there. If you followed the reaction on social media to Musk’s shattering of the trillionaire barrier, you’d think that he now has a trillion dollars in the bank. Indeed, indignant politicians rushed to propose taxes on Musk’s wealth as if it was a suddenly discovered treasure ship (with laughably questionable math). Many people talked about Musk “hoarding” dollars that rightfully belong to the poor, the people or perhaps Social Security beneficiaries.