A Trillionaire to Celebrate

Commentary

Defending Elon Musk these days is taking a risk. You become the target of members of the envy-soaked opinion class who are absolutely certain that Musk’s new trillionaire status cannot have been earned, much less merited. It is surely coming out of the public’s hide, the very cause of others’ suffering.

All the politicians and pundits have said so. They are trying to diminish and tear down his achievement, putting scratches in his exterior the way activists were keying Teslas when Musk was campaigning for President Donald Trump.

Of Musk’s trillionaire status, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said the average household would need to work 11 million years to match Musk’s wealth, so she called for it to be taxed, revealing that she knows nothing of the idea of entrepreneurship. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) called his wealth “beyond sickening” and said Musk faces a low marginal tax, conveniently neglecting that Musk has literally paid hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes over his career because his capital gains are taxed like everyone else’s.

Mother Jones ran a piece titled “Elon Musk: The World’s Worst Trillionaire,” calling him a “racist conspiracy monger” who spreads “loathing, bigotry, and violence” and questioning how capitalism produced such a “dangerous lout.” The Guardian argued that extreme wealth such as Musk’s is harmful, enables “racist and xenophobic sentiments,” and fuels the radical right, suggesting a “wealth line” beyond which riches should be taken.

So on it goes.

Remember that most of this wealth is not his to spend. It’s stock valuations. That’s what put him over the trillionaire line. It’s not like he has 13 figures in his checking account. The figure fluctuates based on how investors price the worth of shares in his companies.

I cannot resist pointing out that his trillionaire status would be described six years ago as six-hundred-fifty-billionaire status; that’s how much inflation has eroded the dollar’s value.

In any case, he hardly lives like a trillionaire, whatever that would be. He is happy to crash on sofas, sleeps on the factory floor when necessary, works a ridiculous amount, rejects nearly all social invitations and accepts only those that are necessary for business, and is otherwise hermit-like in his fanatical focus on technical aspects of his businesses, which are many.

Don’t forget that he bought Twitter and turned it into X for the sole purpose of saving free speech in America and the world. He did that. He promptly fired four out of five workers and hammered the operations of the company into something viable and wonderful, expanded the features, and turned it into the most powerful media voice on planet Earth.

It’s not perfect, whatever that would be, but he achieved mighty things with his move. It was also a humiliation to every corporate CEO in America who has followed all the management books and bloated up their staff to absurd levels. Musk never cared about those stupid books. He manages the old-fashioned way: hiring the best, following his intuition, knowing every aspect of the business, and working unbelievably hard every day.

People complain that he gets billions of dollars in government contracts, and that’s true. I don’t like that either. But Congress says it wants to fund space things. Fine. It’s probably better that the projects are operated by actual competent people rather than those who are incompetent. Musk gets all the contracts because his companies do a better job.

In any case, his contracts with government hardly make him pro-government. When the COVID-19 lockdowns hit, he was the only corporate leader in America—the only one—who stood up and said no, he would not close his factories. He said publicly that he would keep them open and sleep on the factory floor to guard his workers and property against government intrusion. He somehow got away with it.

After that, he moved his Tesla factory from California to the desert mountains of the Texas southwest.

A few years ago, I was standing on a road in Marfa, Texas, looking at the famous and mysterious lights in the distance (a subject for another time), surrounded by other tourists. We struck up a conversation, and it turned out that many of those people worked for Tesla.

I asked about Musk. Every single person knew him and spoke in unfailingly good terms about him, about how he talks with all the workers on an ongoing basis. There is no distance between him and people on the front lines of the assembly lines, in the tunnels, and building the rockets.

It so happens that by distributing stock options to so many of his managers and employees, he has minted tens of thousands of millionaires, equalizing the distance between workers and investors.

Even today, he is the only top corporate leader to publicly support investigations into COVID-19’s origins and U.S. support for biolabs in 30 countries. He has been passionate and vocal and brave.

As for his politics, that has only made him more of a target of the elites. He has supported Republicans, which is highly unusual. He calls for more spending cuts. He wants fewer regulations. He headed the Department of Government Efficiency to gut the administrative state, which he later said was inscrutably gigantic and resistant to change.

He holds plenty of views I don’t like. His dabbling in transhumanist ideology is weird but typical of the geek culture that he inhabits. He has fallen for nostrums such as the universal basic income against which I’ve argued.

That said, he has spoken out openly and aggressively against the anti-population views of other elites and urged a massive repopulation of the world (and attempted to make a contribution to that effort himself). Truly, he is a celebrator of the human being and the human mind. He is not perfect, and no one is, and he has many personal foibles. As a businessman, he is someone to emulate.

What about his technocratic leanings? No, I don’t believe we will all have home robots, and I happen to think those are kind of stupid, even if they looked cool in the cartoon “The Jetsons.” Nor do I have the highest opinion of the far-flung uses of artificial intelligence (AI). Keep in mind, however, that even in this realm, he is not a kingpin but a challenger to the real AI oligarchs. He started Grok as a challenger to the market leader ChatGPT and went so far as to sue OpenAI in court. He lost but should have won on the merits.

There is a reason why many people think that his wealth has come at the expense of everyone else, like so many have said. It’s because that has mostly been true in history. Read the Bible and you discover that most of the rich people are characterized as corrupt. That was empirically true in those times.

And it is also often true in our times. I’ve been doing a deep dive into the international oligarchs who worked in secret for a decade to plot out the COVID-19 operation with a network of huge foundations, government agencies, intelligence officials, pharmaceutical companies, and nongovernmental organizations, to cobble together a globalist architecture of universal inoculations with an eye toward trillions in profits. The evidence is all there, but I don’t see the mainstream media reporting on it at all. It’s a scandal hiding in plain sight.

My theory is that Musk is being scapegoated for the perceived operations of the real oligarchs who receive no public attention at all. People today are rightly scandalized by the growing distance between the super rich and the middle class and the poor. Musk is not making that worse but better, not only with his companies but also with his advocacy of freedom in the marketplace.

Again, in most of human history, the well-to-do did indeed live at the expense of everyone else. The American experience attempted to codify a different way forward. It institutionalized meritocracy over aristocracy, practicing free enterprise and commercial liberty that was inclusive of the whole population.

Musk is not the perfect practitioner, but he does a darn good job of it. Hate on the oligarchs all you want, and you should, but be careful that you name the right offenders in this regard. There are miles of difference between Bill Gates and Musk, and he would be the first one to explain how and why.

The hate being directed against Musk today stems from his merits, not his offenses.

Too many countries have been made poor through the politics and culture of envy. Envy is not just jealousy; it goes beyond that to dream of destroying that which is good, eviscerating all signs of success because they are not shared equally. Heaven forbid that America go that way. Musk is a patriot and a champion of freedom—not a flawless practitioner but the best the real world has to offer us today.

This is a trillionaire to celebrate.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.