The world’s first trillionaire.

And he’s a Nazi!
 
Okay, he might take issue with that particular word. But between the fascism, white supremacy, and eugenics… y’know, if it quacks like a duck and all that.

There’s a coworker I have who was fond of saying tech CEO Elon Musk is a billionaire “on paper,” because all his wealth isn’t in the bank; it’s in the stock market. Musk currently owns 507.5 million shares of Tesla, and at $406 a share those shares are worth $206 billion.

…I know, I know; you didn’t expect me to throw math at you today, but you do realize when we talk economics, math inevitably gets involved. Part of the reason I dropped my economics minor was because of how much math gets involved; I was already struggling with algebra, and they expected me to learn calculus. My biblical languages minor was way easier. But I digress.

Anyway I was trying to explain stocks aren’t “just paper.” Both of us own stock in our company, and that’s not “just paper”—we can sell it whenever we like, and get precisely what that stock is trading for. In cash. As if we took money out of a checking account.

“Yeah but Musk can’t do that,” he said. Of course he can. He just won’t.

’Cause the instant you sell your stock—assuming it went up in value not down—you owe taxes on it. And if Musk sells all his Tesla stock, 507.5 available shares on the market are gonna make Tesla’s price drop, probably by a lot; and a lot of investors are gonna sell other stocks to gobble up all those cheaper Tesla stocks, making other stock prices drop, making the whole market drop, including Musk’s other stock holdings. He’s gonna lose money if he totally cashes in.

That’s why he doesn’t. He gets a paycheck from his companies, and lives on that. If he needs a billion dollars, like he did when he bought Twitter, banks will let him borrow money against his stock, with ridiculously low interest rates, and he can easily live like he has billions in cash. And if he ever needs actual cash, he can quietly cash in smaller amounts of his stock; just enough to not throw the market into a panic.

Then again, Musk loves to troll people for the evil fun of it all. So if he wanted to give the market a seizure, just ’cause, he could. He’d lose money, but he’d still be a billionaire.

Well, trillionaire now.

One of Musk’s other companies is SpaceX. You’ve heard of their space rockets for NASA. Maybe you know about Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink; SpaceX runs that. You might not know SpaceX also runs Twitter (which Musk persists in calling “X”), his problematic AI chatbot Grok, and a whole bunch of data centers which power Grok and are rented to other AI companies. SpaceX went on the stock market Friday. It offered 555.6 million shares to the public, at $135 a share. It’s trading at $165 as I write this. That’s not all the shares of SpaceX there are; other SpaceX employees have some, and Musk himself owns more than 6.45 billion of them. If they’re trading at $165, Musk’s shares are therefore worth $1.064 trillion. With a T.

Could he cash them? Again, of course he can. Creating a bigger seizure in the market than if he merely sold his Tesla stock, and it’d terrify his bankers, but yeah—he’d have $1.064 trillion in the bank. Till the IRS got ahold of him; then way less. But I think he wants to hold onto that trillionaire title for as long as possible, so he’s likely not gonna.

Is SpaceX worth its $2.11 trillion market capitalization? (That’s economics-speak for its total value in stock market shares.) Bluntly, yes it is. Because a company is literally worth what traders are willing to pay for its shares. Traders are willing to pay $165 a share; therefore all the shares are worth $2.11 trillion. Basic multiplication.

Should it be worth $2.11 trillion? Absolutely not. SpaceX has never turned a profit. It’s massively in debt—that is, it was massively in debt, but thanks to the stock market they have tons of money now. Its businesses are unethical: The rocket launches apathetically do untold harm to the environment, and I’m not just talking about the rockets which blow up, or the Starlink low-earth satellites which fall into the atmosphere and burn up every day. (Seriously, every day.) Twitter, which has few to no guardrails, enables hate speech, disinformation, and trafficking. Grok, which likewise has few to no guardrails, does the same. The data centers consume electricity and water, often to the detriment of the communities they’re in. And Musk, who oversees them all, doesn’t care about anything but what affects him personally. Critique him on Twitter and y’might get banned. Say any other violent, provocative thing on Twitter and he’ll shrug and say them’s the risks of free speech.

But capitalism doesn’t care whether you’re ethical. It cares that you make them money. SpaceX itself won’t make you money… but frenzied traders, who imagine SpaceX shares are hot commodities, will make money on those shares when they trade ’em just right. It doesn’t matter what the company does, or if it’s any good, or if Musk is running it properly. It’s whether you can profit off its existence. And you can.

And Musk gets the bragging rights of saying he’s the world’s first trillionaire. Well, in American dollars. If you’re going off Indian rupees, which are 95 to the dollar, he was a trillionaire already. So are a few other billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg’s $220 billion equals ₹20.9 trillion.

There are some socialists who insist there shouldn’t be such a thing as a trillionaire. Or a billionaire. Their joke is instead of having a billion dollars, you get to keep your $999.9 million, you get a trophy which says you won capitalism, and the rest should go to taxes, to pay for lots and lots of necessary infrastructure and social programs. Or charity, but most socialists say taxes.

I don’t care if there are billionaires or trillionaires, but I do want them to pay their fair share of taxes, and currently none of them do. There are tax loopholes which only the very wealthy can access, and these guys use ’em to pay nothing. Sometimes less than nothing; sometimes the government actually gives them money. Sounds absolutely wrong, but if you’re a social Darwinist you’ll believe this is only right; why shouldn’t you be rewarded for being clever enough to outwit the government?

The national debt and deficit would be substantially lower if we taxed the rich. Our infrastructure problems would be gone if we taxed the rich. Our schools would be funded; our teachers would be paid; public colleges would be free again. We could also afford to fund public healthcare. Homeless people could be helped, and housed. The hungry won’t go hungry. The desperately poor won’t turn to crime, and fill our prisons.

But that’s not gonna happen so long that billionaires can buy votes, and keep politicians from ever passing laws to close those loopholes.

Elon Musk won’t be the last trillionaire, but he oughta be the last trillionaire to live tax-free.

The billion-dollar salary.

Economics lesson time, folks!

Last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY) made a comment about billionaires, in the context of a number of recently proposed billionaire taxes. I started to blog on it at the time, but got distracted and didn’t finish writing the piece. Figured I’d finish that thought now.

First the quote she made when she appeared on Ilana Glazer’s podcast, which I looked up ’cause I wanna be accurate:

There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that. So you have to create a myth that—since you didn’t earn that—you have to create a myth of earning it. So if you’re making minimum wage at a Walmart, and you’re making $7 an hour, and I mean, dang, with these gas prices, it takes you $7 to get to work. So as a result, we’ve kind of internalized this moralized system, right? “The people at the top are smarter, better, you know, more sophisticated.” And therefore, the people at the bottom are uneducated, lazy, etcetera.

Okay, lemme start by saying this statement, “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” isn’t true. I crunched the numbers.

Apple, which makes iPhones and laptops and watches and other gadgets, and sells and rents music and videos, made a net profit of $116 billion in 2025. They claim to have 166,000 full-time employees, but that doesn’t include all the “independent contrators” who do just as much for ’em, so I’ll include them and estimate they actually have 550,000 employees worldwide.

Now let’s take a little more than two-thirds that profit—$78 billion—and pay all those employees equally. Comes out to $141,818.18 a year. Realistically, new and entry-level employees would make a bit less, and top managers would make a bit more, but still: Not too shabby. Nearly all of them should be very happy with that; it’s better than they could get in union jobs. All the subcontractors making iPhones for ’em in China?—they’d be thrilled. And that still leaves Apple $35 billion to distribute between the shareholders.

Could they then take a billion of that, and give that to their CEO as salary? Of course they can. It’d be excessively more than the rest of the Apple employees make, and that might bother a few of them. They’d feel if he’s earning a billion, they oughta be earning at least millions. Even though $142K is a better-than-average salary. (Whether it’s a living wage in someplace as pricey as Cupertino is another thing.)

But in real life, that’s not happening. Subcontractors are still grievously underpaid, managers are still grievously overpaid, and Tim Cook made $74.3 million in 2025. Where’d the rest of the profit go? Shareholders. (Full disclosure: I’m one of them. Not a big shareholder, but still.) Cook’s one of those big shareholders, and made a lot more money in stock than in actual salary; nearly $700M. Pretty sure the shareholders want as much of those profits as possible going to them, not employees. Nor, even with as profitable as Cook has made the company, Cook himself.

There are plenty of big companies whose profit margins are so large, they could totally pay their employees a comfortable wage, pay their CEO a billion dollars, and have profits left over. You don’t have to break rules, nor abuse labor laws. We can also debate whether people, even though they’d now be paid very comfortably, still aren’t truly paid what they’re worth. But yeah, in some of the big companies, the person at the top can earn a billion dollars. It’s just the board won’t let them, because the board represents the shareholders, and a billion dollars to the CEO, and living wages to the rest of the employees, means money they won’t get.

Yep, boards and shareholders are the problem. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez needs to address that… and probably won’t, because quite a few working-class Americans are also shareholders, and kinda like getting their quarterly dividends, and would be pissed if anything interfered with them.

Now lemme tell you about another way Ocasio-Cortez is wrong about this. It has to do with those billionaires who are supposedly getting billion-dollar salaries. Except they actually aren’t.