How is it possible to be worth a trillion?

[aurpod1980]

Is it just utter madness that one man can be worth a trillion dollars ? $1000 billion Wtaf

SpaceX: Pioneered reusable rockets, cutting launch costs dramatically. Starlink: brings massively improved internet to remote areas, trains, etc and made free for disaster relief, etc. Tesla: accelerated EV adoption and forced the car industry to electrify, addressing urban pollution and climate change. PayPal: helped pioneer online payments that e-commerce relies on, creating massive consumer surplus. Neuralink: helping paralyses people communicate with the world. OpenAI: realising the power of AI, set up the lab as a charity and later suing to try to keep it as a non-profit.

Where are you setting the bar for good done in the world, and who meets it?

This is nonsense.

80% of the rest of the world poorer? Poorer than when? How?

Musk raising prices on everyone else? That is the description of a rent-seeking monopoly. Musk has done the opposite: disrupted existing industries like space and EVs and bringing down costs, or creating entirely new products.

Not going well so far.

He hasn’t got that much money though. He has shares of businesses that are worth that on paper. There is no way he could realise that money without collapsing the value of those companies.

The argument is made that: why does he keep all that money, when he could be doing something valuable with it. It completely misunderstands what’s happening. He is using the money. If you want to know whether he is doing good or not with his wealth you need to consider what SpaceX, Tesla are doing and whether you think that’s positive or not.

Why is it disgusting? He’s worked for it, runs successful companies and that’s the value based on market valuations of shares in comps it’s he owns /works at,

free market and open to all

surely you should be encouraging your children to aspire to greatness through hard work and intellect and entrepreneurial mindset

He’s really not.

he buys up innovative companies then employs innovative people after kicking out the original innovators. He personally hasn’t invented anything.

Now in some ways that’s its own type of innovation but also look into how he runs his companies.
he’s not someone you want running public sector. Yes there are efficiencies that can be made in the NHS but he’d plunder it like midwestern gold mine and fuck it up.

look back at the impacts of the DOGE activity when Trump came back into power. The impacts will be felt for a long time.

We need to bring back the Roman tradition of someone standing behind a general on a victory lap and whispering 'memento mori' in their ear.

In Musk's case, probably with his piss in bottles and a ketamine overdose, but this degree of concentrated wealth is an abomination however you shake it.

I say good for him. He’s not my cup of tea politically and I suspect he’s not great to work for, but we need more people like him who are creative and tenacious.

It’s not disgusting to earn money and (shock) turn a profit.

Agreed. I’m all for it. Nothing wong with making money.

It’s such an obscene amount of money. He should feel a deep sense of shame, this is no achievement to be proud of.

Do tell me what you do for a living if Musk's life is so easily attainable!!

And while there is much in your post I find slightly risible I think the implication that the NHS is not already fucked up takes the biscuit!

You see your view is so odd to me. To simply take Starlink as a single example. Bringing superfast satellite based internet to every spot on the globe at an affordable price for almost every family is, to me, a massive, positive, enabling innovation with huge humanitarian potential.

But you can't see the achievements. You can't see how potentially world changing that is. To me you seem mired in some sulky state of curmudgeonly envy.

Please tell me it isn't true! Up

I can’t say I have any deep feelings of like or hate either way. But I do think we need people like him who push technology in a way that he does. He’s rewarded for it, so what. He can’t take that money with him when he dies so in some sense it will be distributed later on and before that his successful companies employ people who will directly benefit.

Everyone started life with the same opportunity to thrive, rather than be jealous and grabby about a stranger build your own wealth.

He repeatedly risked everything to get new wealth.

We probably wouldn't have electric cars if it wasn't for him - think of the environmental changes that's brought about.

He's brought the internet to the most remote parts of the world via his satellites.

His AI has been helping medical companies cure diseases.

He brought free speech back to Twitter.

He helped being about the GPS mapping on our phones that we need if we need to get somewhere.

He's helped highlight stories of social injustice that the mainstream media wanted to ignore.

The man is brilliant!

It is appalling. Billionaires and now a trillionaire amass power in a way that is completely disruptive to democratic society.

Look at what happens - they buy the media, and they buy the politicians. Their wealth is such that it continues to grow exponentially, and they get richer far faster than the economies of the world grow. This is why their wealth becomes a larger and larger percentage of the total wealth of the entire planet. For that to happen there has to be a transfer of wealth - money is moving from everyone else to them.

We are all seeing the effects of that, like frogs gradually being boiled. When we feel that life is getting more and more expensive, when we worry that our children won’t be able to get a decent paying job, when we see home ownership become unobtainable for ordinary people - all this comes from the wealth of the planet becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

For the vast majority of us, standards of living are falling, but for a tiny minority their wealth accelerates faster than they can possibly ever spend it.

This situation won’t change unless we choose to use the one thing we do have, strength of numbers, to change it. Otherwise it will continue to happen, eventually they will own everything, and all we will be able to do is rent the things we need from them with our time and labour. Societies have been run like that before, there is nothing to stop it from happening again unless we exercise our right to make changes while we still can.

At the moment here in Ireland in the news there’s so many people looking for various drugs to come into Ireland and be but on the list of being available. There’s twins on my TikTok feed I can’t figure out if they’re uk or Ireland with duchenes (apologies if that’s not the spelling), and a girl with at ataxia and a dad trying to get his some medication for same. I think of all the billionaires that could solve problems like this.

There is honestly only so much wealth a person needs

Musk is a very dangerous person. He is poking his nose into politics, interfering, stirring up trouble, trying to manipulate.

He thinks his wealth gives him a platform to influence the world. Why else would he buy Twitter? It was to give him a platform to spout his ideas without any recourse.

Any political leader should be very wary of him. Trump needed his money and was stupid enough to give him responsibility but even Trump took a step back and distanced himself.

He is a neo-Nazi whose actions at DOGE have demonstrably killed tens of thousands of people

That depends how you That depends how you define benefit. Hilenhas stated numerous times that he intends to spend all his money getting a han colony on Mars. Which may actually save the human race in the event if a catastrophic event on our current planet.

This is quite literally the stupidest comment I have read on here in a while.
As if "everyone started with the same opportunity to thrive"???

Imagine what a world like that would look like - everyone starting life with the same opportunities?
People like Musk amassing obscene amounts of wealth for themselves is what actually stops everyone starting from the same point.

Surely you can see you are spouting nonsense here can't you?

It's all 'tied up in things'. He doesn't have an instant access account with 1 trillion in it! It is the value of the shares and the businesses that he owns, over inflated in my opinion. All wealthy people have huge assets. Wealth is assets not cash.

This is an excellent way to loop
at it.

That you, Elon?

I am grateful to Elon Musk for highlighting the child rape gangs and for standing up for the 13'year old Scottish girl vilified for carrying an axe.

It's impossible to ever have a sensible discussion about extreme wealth because people always boil it down to "envy" and then say things like "he worked for it, what's wrong with that?" or "Why don't you go and earn the same?"

Those simplistic views and arguments work when the discussion is based around the kind of inequality we see every day - people on six figure salaries and others on benefits.

But the discussion around very extreme wealth is entirely different. It's simply not good for the world for a small number of people to amass huge amounts of wealth because they also amass a lot of influence and power with it and that starts to skew the way the world works.

Musk, for example, is a man with dangerous views who is happy to get involved in world politics when he feels like it and can push his far right agenda - and no one will stop him because he's so rich.

Add to that the fact that it's just immoral and wrong for one person to have so much wealth & not use it for good.

And I think if he was giving a lot to charity we would know about it. He is not the type to keep anything quiet.