How is it possible to be worth a trillion?

Seriously, you need to write a book. I'll buy it🫶

I don't actually think billionaires need to exist nor should exist. That's a thousand million & is more money than someone could actually spend in their lifetime.

But everyone's view of money is so distorted now that ordinary people seem to see being a billionaire as attainable for anyone so I do recognise that drawing the line there might actually be a disincentive - even though the vast majority have no hope of ever getting to that level of wealth.

TBF it's mostly calculated as his percentage ownership of his various companies based on the value others apply to those shares. So it's not all in $ bills. But he's rich yes.

But isn't he also the most remarkable person of his generation? Starlink and SpaceX are totally innovative.

If you ever get frustrated at how slow and inefficient the public sector is think about how better and quicker Musk would do it.

Yes he's earned money but he is also a phenomenal innovator and facilitator of tech for the planet.

The idea that the billionaire class are merely creating wealth rather than capturing it from others doesn’t match the reality, and sounds more like spin from the media outlets they control.

Go back to 1989 and look at the wealth held by the top 200 wealthiest families here in the UK, it was equivalent to 5% of the UK's GDP. Collectively, they could afford to buy 5% of all the goods and services produced in the country in a year.

Today the top 200 families hold the equivalent of about 25% of GDP in wealth. That percentage will keep growing.

The wealth of global billionaires has apparently increased by 40% in just 2 years.

Ordinary people like us will lose around 30-40% of our income to tax, and most of what is left is required to be spent just to survive day to day. If you’re lucky, a very small amount will be saved, or invested.

Billionaires grow their wealth in a system that is designed to protect it, meaning the percentage they pay in tax is far lower than the rest of us. They also can’t possibly spent it on living, even if they do buy themselves half billion dollar boats as toys. So the excess wealth gets used to buy up the things that other people need to use - they buy up companies, they buy up properties, not just residential but they buy the factories, the skyscrapers, the shopping centres, they buy up the natural resources. All the while as they buy up more and more of the world around them, more and more money inevitably flows in their direction.

As they use their wealth to accumulate more assets, the rest of the world is increasingly squeezed out. The rest of us own less and less. Classes of people who used to be able to afford a house now find they can only rent. People who would have owned some shares themselves find they can afford far fewer than before - their share of the wealth gets that much smaller.

People who thought they could live a middle class life wonder why they now struggle so much. Even the wealthy (by most people’s standards) are left wondering why private schooling feels out of reach, or why the skiing holiday has had to move from the French alps to Bulgaria!

It is like watching the gravitational pull of a black hole - the wealth of the billionaires is dragging more and more wealth upwards through society and relentlessly towards them. That is why it grows so much quicker than GDP - they are not just creating it, they are taking it.

It is going to happen at a faster and faster rate. I wonder at what point will the rest of us will decide that enough is enough, that society can’t function like this.

It’s not like he has it all in gold bullion stashed in a Swiss vault or owns an art collection to rival the National Gallery 🙄
It’s a made up valuation of his companies and as such it could all disappear tomorrow, Tesla very nearly went under a few years ago, it’s monopoly money at the whims of the stock markets.
He employs thousands of people and is a visionary at the forefront of the modern world.

You can’t underestimate the importance of Starlink, it accounts for 75% of satellites in orbit.
Musk isn’t a danger to the World like Gates is.

Where do you draw the line now?

I think one day in the future a line might be drawn, maybe not in my lifetime, but I don't think subsequent generations are going to revere and obsess about money in the same way as happens now.

I think societies will ultimately be organised differently as fewer and fewer people amass more & more of the wealth & resources.
People already talk about "end stage capitalism".
Something else will come at some point and will probably have to.

I understand that. My comment was in response to someone who seemed to be suggesting that it was ok to try and achieve things but that being a trillionaire was not ok.

I am trying to understand where people draw the line.

But he's not being "rewarded" in that sense is he? Not in the sense that you might get a bonus at work for a successful project?

The trillion dollar figure comes about because other people (for instance the people who are managing your pension pot) are buying shares in SpaceX at a price that (if you multiply the shares Musk himself already owns by that price) creates that number.

So this thread is all about Musk, but the trillion dollar figure is actually a product of what third party investors value his companies at.

Really?
No feelings of guilt at amassing such wealth in a world where deprivation and extreme poverty still exists? Even in your own country?

I would like to have it so I could do something very worthwhile with it and I would enjoy giving the majority of it away but I certainly wouldn't want to just sit with it.

Humanity needs people like Musk to push us forwards. What he is doing as far with SpaceX will lead to OffWorld colonies and asteroid mining. We can't stay on earth forever.

@cloudtreecarpet Also he isn’t ’just sitting’ with his money. This is a total misunderstanding of the wealth figure. He runs about five companies all of which he’s a major investor in. That’s what he is doing with the money.

He claims his cash is <0.1% of his paper wealth. That seems pretty plausible. It’s still lots, obviously, but it’s <$1bn.

The only fair thing that could happen to Musk is to die and be sent to hell where he has to earn back every dollar of his worth while working a minimum wage job and paying all his bills…

Well it’s not liquid, 99.9% is the worth of his companies (SpaceX accounts for about 75%, then Tesla and several other ventures). If he decided to cash out he’d cause a huge stock market panic and he’d walk away with about £100billion (according to some estimates). Not exactly chump change though…I hope he follows Bill Gates example and gives away most of his fortune to philanthropic causes. Gates would have passed the one trillion mark back in 2024 if he hadn’t sold so much of his Microsoft shares. He has given away over $100 billion and plans to give a further $200 billion over the next two decades.

If being rewarded is ok, what level of reward do you think is the right level? And what would you do when successful companies reach that level? Stop them trading?

Or do you not think being rewarded is ok?

Really?
No feelings of guilt at amassing such wealth in a world where deprivation and extreme poverty still exists? Even in your own country?

I would like to have it so I could do something very worthwhile with it and I would enjoy giving the majority of it away but I certainly wouldn't want to just sit with it.

https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-after-the-us-took-a-chainsaw-to-global-health/

https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=title&order=asc

He headed the Doge program that decimated USAID. This in turn caused these deaths.

He's got blood on his hands.