It happened on Friday, June 12, 2026: Elon Musk, sooner than almost anyone expected, became a trillionaire. With so much written about this, it may not be necessary to say that a trillion dollars is one-million millions. But if you can agree with me that $50 million is “enough” for any one person to have, Musk has 20,000 “enoughs!”
Since you may be more interested in soccer this month than SpaceX, think about this: the soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, the highest paid athlete in the world with a salary of $235 million and $65 million in endorsements, would have to play nearly 4,000 seasons to accumulate Musk’s fortune.
Bringing this down to earth, the average teacher or fireman would have to work more than 17 million years to earn enough (pre-tax) to equal Musk’s wealth!
If basketball is your thing, LeBron James, who is no slouch with over $1 billion, has 1/1000th as much money as Musk. With James’ salary at $50 million, it would take nearly 2000 seasons to catch up. LeBron earns roughly $20,000 per point scored. That’s already a little outrageous. But assuming Musk annually earns 10% from his wealth, Musk would have to hit 21 three-pointers every second of every game to justify his income! He probably can convince too many people that he can.
Let’s face it: Musk is the greatest snake oil salesman in U.S. history. He recently said that “money won’t matter” in the future (as long as he has it all) because Tesla and SpaceX would develop robotics, AI and rockets so powerful that no human would ever have to work again and would receive a “universal high income,” and live on Mars. Given his role in cutting international aid and electing the President who is dismantling healthcare, the environment, and a long list of other societal needs, one must ask which humans he is talking about, or if they’re even human? Musk describes this as utopian. Dystopian is more accurate. And Musk–who has never invented anything but rather packages the work of others–expects to have $10 trillion within five years!!
I suppose if you are one of the 100 millionaires and 15 billionaires created by the SpaceX IPO, you might drink the Kool-Aid. But how’s that working out for everyone else? The short answer is: heightened status anxiety. Just having billionaires has ramped up status anxiety among all Americans, leading to a long list of societal problems (see The Philanthropy Issue). But now think about poor little Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and the second richest person in the U.S., who only has one-fifth as much money as Musk. And he’ll never catch up!
It reminds me of the great segment in Molly’s Game, written by Aaron Sorkin: “There was a track star from Pasadena in the 1930s named Matthew Robinson…who shattered the Olympic record in the two-hundred at the Berlin Games in 1936. Absolutely shattered the Olympic record…and came in second. The man who came in first was Jesse Owens. Owens went on to be a legend. Matthew Robinson went on to be a janitor.” Sergey, get out your mop.
As I wrote about in my May blog on the BBGB’s, there are those who still think there is such a thing as a “good billionaire” and by implication good “trillionaires.” I get it. Some billionaires are really nice people. Some, while hoarding enormous sums of money, even do good things with some of that money. One might even unconvincingly argue that someone who has a billion dollars but does not strive for more (the money just fell into their laps, but hasn’t fallen out), is not personally greedy. Nonetheless, considering not only the poverty that exists but the struggles of the middle class, excessive wealth is inherently unethical–a form of societal greed.
When reading through some of the 1400 comments on an op-ed by Ankush Kardori about Kathy Ruemmler’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, it was clear that I am not alone in having strong feelings about those with excessive wealth. For example, Michael from Brooklyn wrote: “The major takeaway from this saga: to become extraordinarily wealthy or powerful in the 21st century, you have to be an objectively bad person: obsequious, flattering, craven, greedy, amoral, disloyal to the interests of your own community or your own country. There’s a threshold beyond which no virtue can survive. And nearly all of our elites … are far on the other side of that threshold.”
I don’t know who Michael is, but he may be channeling Plato. Dr. David Lay Williams, a professor of political science at DePaul University, wrote “Elon Musk Confirms Ancient Concerns About the Superrich.” He concludes that “[o]nly by teaching the evils of extreme greed can society begin to restore the healthy balance of wealth necessary for a thriving republic.” Dr. Williams points out that “Plato grew up in Athens, a city that once was nearly torn apart… by the ‘disparity between the rich and the poor [which also was a major contributor to the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty, and the Classic Mayan civilization, not to mention the rise of Hitler].
“For Plato, the source of inequality was a disease of the soul that the Greeks called pleonexia — a kind of insatiable greed…. Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, ‘a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,’ because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth…. Plato wrote, ‘it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.’”
Impossible or not, we must make it a top priority to curb excessive wealth. The California Billionaire Wealth Tax, which will be on the ballot in November, would be a giant step in that direction. Sergey Brin has already contributed at least $80 million to defeat the initiative (that’s four dollars per eligible voter and equal, for example, to the amount of money the State of California is spending to strengthen safety and preparedness at nonprofit and faith-based organizations). For him, it is an investment. For us, it is pleonexia.