Think Elon Musk “the billionaire was bad?” asked Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. “Brace yourself.” After SpaceX made the biggest-ever initial public offering earlier this month, the 54-year-old tycoon saw his wealth rocket to $1.1 trillion, more than the GDP of all but 21 nations. How much is a trillion dollars? Enough to spend $1 million a day for 2,700 years without going broke. “You don’t have to be a socialist or even a liberal” to find it “obscene” that the U.S. minted the world’s first trillionaire when so many Americans are struggling to afford gas, food, and housing. But the worse news is who we minted. In 2024, when he was welcoming Nazis to X and returning an autocrat to the White House, I likened Musk to a “Bond movie villain,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. That was “far too generous.” Since then, this chainsaw-wielding sociopath has shredded the U.S. Agency for International Development—causing 600,000 preventable deaths, most of them children, in a single year—and is now busy on X, rallying Britain’s white population to “firebomb and assault their Black and brown neighbors.” That this racist “monster” is the first trillionaire is a perfect symbol of “our modern empire’s decline and fall.”
“I am not a huge fan of Musk as a political activist,” said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. But the South African–born tech savant’s colossal fortune is “testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success, and American greatness.” Just look at everything he’s built, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. With Tesla, he launched the electric vehicle revolution. His Starlink satellite network “helped Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion.” His Neuralink brain-chip startup may let the paralyzed walk again. And SpaceX could help humanity populate other planets. Musk is our first trillionaire because “American capitalism,” by its nature, most lavishly rewards the visionaries who “make all Americans better off.”
How quaint, said Robert Reich in The Guardian. Until recently, yes, the value of American firms, like the price of their products, was set by “supply and demand” in a relatively free marketplace. But Musk and his ilk have dismantled the “old rules of capitalism.” In our “second Gilded Age,” the value of companies like SpaceX is built through hype, government connections that provide lucrative contracts and favorable regulations, “and total, arbitrary control” of pricesetting forces. Musk’s companies do have real value. But he’s a trillionaire because the system now effectively lets founders decree what their shares will be worth, then forces average Americans— through rigged markets and index-fund-driven retirement accounts “automatically” tied to SpaceX’s fortune—to buy those shares “whether we want to or not.”
We’ve been here before, said T.J. Stiles in The Wall Street Journal. A century ago, the same widening chasms—between the superrich and everyone else, between the paper value of companies and their tangible assets—provoked Americans to demand a progressive tax code and antitrust reform. Musk becoming a trillionaire on fantasies of asteroid mining could be a similar “inflection point.” Why would Musk care what Americans demand? asked TC Sottek in The Verge. He now has more “wealth, media power, and government influence” than anyone in history, and will use it to do what he wants. It’s long been clear that Musk is “the wrong man to save the world,” as some liberals once hoped he might. It’s now the world that “needs saving from him.
He’s now the richest man in history
