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- Photo by Aslam Sha on Unsplash For ages, the idea of anyone being worth a trillion dollars sounded like a four-year-old throwing out a big number for the sake of throwing out a big number. It was mind-bogglingly insane to think that one person could have a net worth greater than the DOD budget.
And yet, Elon Musk got there.
This is pretty momentous, and I’m absolutely tickled this happened in the United States. Yeah, Musk is an immigrant, but he’s an American citizen, built his wealth in America, and broke a threshold for wealth that is absolutely staggering.
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Unfortunately, as we’ve seen over the last week, a lot of people on the left have absolutely no idea what the hell that means, and they resent Musk for having that kind of net worth.
It’s pretty clear that many of them picture him with a vault like Scrooge McDuck, where he dives in and swims in his trillion bucks, hoarding it all to himself, and keeping it away from the people who rightly deserve it or something.
And that’s more than a little troubling .
That there exists a major American party ruled by such abject economic and historical ignorance not only boggles the mind but constitutes a clear and present danger to the country. Yet Sanders came within a hair’s breadth of locking the Democratic nomination for President in 2020. He had to be torpedoed by panicky party leaders, and replaced with a dimmer — eh, more deceptive — leftist zombie. And a recent poll put AOC as the Dem favorite for President in 2028.
I could waste my time arguing why the Democrat attacks on Musk are Marxist hogwash. That Musk’s wealth is tied to company growth which has created more than a million jobs, boosting the economy. That his technological innovations, like Starlink , help protect America by surpassing those of her foreign enemies, like China. And that he saved the country from Orwellian repression by rescuing free speech, pre-X under attack by the government — as it still is across the Pond. But, like Orwell, I’m a fictionist, who prefers storytelling to lecturing.
I’m also a realist. I know Hollywood elites hate Musk’s guts for helping reelect their antichrist, Donald Trump. The fact that he advanced their dream of gasoline-free cars means nothing by comparison. Absent the Trump factor, they would be making movies and miniseries about the greatest technological pioneer of this century. Now, the Financial Times calls him a real-life Bond villain.
Now, I can get the Bond villain thing. The dude has his own space program, after all, and enough money to build a literal private army to protect his interests. The fact that he’s joked about a volcano lair hasn’t been lost on me, either.
But the thing that so many people fail to understand is that Musk doesn’t actually have a trillion dollars. He’s got companies and investments that, all totaled together, have a value on paper of over a trillion bucks.
It’s like having a very expensive house that you bought in the good times, thus technically being a millionaire, even if your car is getting repossessed because you couldn’t afford the payments. That’s entirely possible, after all, and it’s how net worth works. It’s the accumulated value of your property and money owed, minus your debts.
So, if you were to peek inside his checking account, I bet you wouldn’t see as much there as the left seems to think.
Oh, I have no doubt there’s more than I’ll ever have in mine, but it’s also probably below the FDIC limit.
Don’t get me wrong, Musk has the wealth to do almost anything he wants. I’m pretty sure he could fund a supercarrier and have it named the USS Elon Musk and gift it to the Navy if he wanted. I probably would just because I could, but then again, there’s probably a reason Musk is worth more than a trillion dollars, and I’m scribbling on Substack.
What they don’t get, though, is that while Musk is now richer than probably anyone in history, he didn’t do it by hoarding money and doing nothing with it. He didn’t follow the financial advice one might obtain from Ebeneezer Scrooge at the start of the story. He created companies and created wealth for thousands.
He started with a company that created licensed city guides for online newspapers, then moved from there into online payment processing, electric cars, solar energy, reusable rockets, social media platforms, and a host of other businesses. He’s created a satellite system that makes it so you can access the internet from pretty much anywhere on the planet. He’s achieved a whole lot, and all of that has made him insanely wealthy.
But it’s made others wealthy, too. There was a report about a welder at SpaceX who is now a millionaire himself, all because of what Musk did with the company’s stock. Welders make good money, but having a net worth of millions usually isn’t in the cards for most of them.
He’s given farmers in the third world a chance to use the internet to discover more efficient farming techniques and to look at weather forecasts that had been out of reach beforehand. He took electric cars and made them much more viable, a lot cooler, and a lot more likely to be purchased than any company before Tesla. He’s putting payloads in space for a fraction of the cost of NASA. He’s personally taken it upon himself to get the human race to Mars, which is essential in keeping humanity from going extinct. Share At every step of the way, he’s improved the lives of others, even if that wasn’t the goal, and he’s been handsomely rewarded for it. To pretend he’s the villain is beyond ridiculous.
I’m not saying that Elon Musk is an angel or anything. I don’t personally know the guy, and I suspect that some people who do think he’s an ass, and others think he’s an amazing guy. It doesn’t actually matter to me, not on this, because the simple fact of being worth a trillion or more doesn’t have anything to do with it.
He got that net worth because he simply created companies that made money because they offered services people wanted and were willing to pay for.
Meanwhile, let’s not forget that many of the people who are so spun up about this are actively trying to protect Somali fraudsters who bilked the government out of billions for services that weren’t being rendered.
That’s not a problem, but someone legitimately becoming the person with the highest net worth ever is.
I’d love to say this was surprising, but it’s not.
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