How is it possible to be worth a trillion?

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.

Yes, someone like Musk is definitely going to use his wealth for the good of mankind.

No, he will use to leverage power he shouldn't have and to try to control the media as he has done by buying up Twitter for example & creating Grok.

He is not a good man.

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.

What children??

I’d be alright with it, too.

and look at what he's done with that power and influence.

Nothing good. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, mostly children.

Look at what he has achieved. That's how.

His politics I like not so much.

That's a rather weak response to his politics. His Doge initiative has been the cause of hundreds of thousands of children dying.

He's an abhorrent man. His Twitter AI Grok was producing child porn

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/01/10/when-grok-generates-childlike-sexual-imagery-turning-it-off-isnt-optional/

But he doesn't have a trillion sat in a bank account so people saying what it would buy are missing the reality. Most will be tied up in the companies he owns and his "trillion" will be the book value of the assets owned by the companies. It's not "real" money.

If he wanted to sell everything and bank the cash, he'd get a mere fraction of that - look at Gordon Brown selling off the country's gold - the price fell when he announced what he was going to do. You need people willing and able to pay "full" value for all Elon's businesses, which will never happen.

He's a guy that does something with his money, works hard and is creative.

He employs thousands, and probably keeps thousands more in jobs in his supply chains.

He's doing things to push society forwards and make the world a different place, like the transition to EVs from ICE vehicles.

His politics I like not so much.

But I don't think his wealth is disgusting or undeserved.

If we didn't have people like him around we'd still be living in caves.

I hope he finds new things to do with his new found wealth. Maybe find a cure for cancer, solve the nuclear fusion engineering problem or establish a Mars base.

Wonder if hes good for a tap 🤔.

Probably not because hes a bellend!.

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.

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?

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.

Is he happy though? So he owns a car and rocket company. Doesn't mean he can go down there and empty the bank.

All large company owners or bosses are psychopaths, I would have thought

His father who was an activist with the anti-apartheid Progressive Federal Party you mean?

Musk starting his businesses with generational wealth has been quite thoroughly investigated and debunked:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-mine/

He's the poster boy for narcissism surely, I watched a YouTube documentary on him and his life not too long ago, he's interesting character I also think he's quite dangerous

I don't think you understand economics.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 with $12 billion of investment including by Musk. Over the years further billions of investments were made by Fidelity and Google and particularly Ontario Teachers Pension Fund. Lastly many more billions of reinvestment came from Starlink.

24 years is a long time for the original investors to get a return on their original investment.

So if the original investments were say $100 billion why do you think that is an unacceptable return. If I invested £100 in some risky UK shares and got a return of £1000 some 10 years later- is that unreasonable?

Are you objecting to the rate of the return (if so it's not that unreasonable for a highly risk investment). Or are you objecting to the quantum (in which case are you suggesting that only small value low risk investments in businesses can be made?)

https://global.morningstar.com/en-gb/stocks/6-charts-spacexs-pre-ipo-financials

Apart from everything else in your post that is incorrect or unsubstantiated, you clearly don't understand wealth in this context.

The calculation of his wealth people are talking about is essentially based on the value other people (people like you and I basically) are putting on the shares in his various businesses multiplied by the number of shares he owns himself.

So the increasing of his calculated wealth that you refer to is directly down to others! So if you went and bought a SpaceX share today (you now can if you want to) at $150 and in three months it's worth $300 then you can have the satisfaction of moaning that Musk is worth $2 trillion (and you'll have made $150 profit.

Of course the shares in SpaceX might fall to $75 in which case Musk won't be a trillionaire at all (and you'd have lost $75).

The point, although I suspect you don't care, is that these headlines get misunderstood. His actual current cash assets (though no doubt enormous by any normal measure) are not a trillion or even a single per cent of that figure.

No, I mean from: his dad the diamond mining Nazi.

You mean generational wealth from selling Zip2, which he founded?

What?! Are you ok?

where did I say it was easily attainable? I said he didn’t invent anything.
nor did I say the NHS wasn’t fucked up. But that dude t mean Elon would save / improve it. Far from it.

i also didn’t say he hadn’t achieved anything.

As I said, are you ok? You seem to only see the ‘achievements’.

He didn’t invent anything. He took generational wealth and paid others to do it - and since his wealth has increased so fast I’m going to go ahead and assume there was some exploitation involved along the way.

But why is it? He’s built wealth by creating new things not capturing it from others. His wealth is in the value of his companies, which have that value because people want his products and believe in his companies.

A millionaire kleptocrat or monopolist is more disgusting than a billionaire entrepreneur.

I’m sure you can see a massive gap between ‘being rewarded’ and ‘being a trillionaire’. If you can’t see why the latter is problematic I can’t really help.