Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe
What can you buy for $348 billion?
Last week, in the wake of favorable election results and a boom in the price of Tesla stock, Elon Musk’s net worth hit $348 billion. Numbers this large tend to fade into meaninglessness, so far outside of normal human experience that people have no real way to grasp their size. How can we think of a single person worth $348 billion?
John D. Rockefeller’s net worth peaked at an estimated $1.4 billion in 1937. That would be about $30 billion today—less than 9% of Musk’s net worth. Rockefeller, however, lived in a time when the total US economy was much smaller. His peak net worth was estimated to represent 1.5% of total US gross domestic product. Today, Elon Musk’s net worth represents close to 1.3% of total US GDP. Even accounting for the growth of the US into the richest nation in the history of the world, Musk’s personal portion of our economy is approaching that of the man who has symbolized plutocracy for the past century.
The US federal government took in $420 billion in total corporate income taxes in 2023. Elon Musk could pay 3/4 of America’s entire corporate tax bill out of his own pocket.
Next to the US, China has the largest annual defense budget on earth, at $296 billion. Musk could pay the entire Chinese defense budget and still have $50 billion left. Or, he could pay the total combined annual defense budgets of India, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and Germany—the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh biggest defense budgets on earth—and still have more than $40 billion.
The JPMorgan Chase bank is worth $332 billion. Elon Musk could buy it out of pocket. He could buy the entire Coca-Cola corporation, give it away, and still be one of the 20 richest people in America. He could buy all of Goldman Sachs, give it away, and still be one of the five richest people in America. He could, by himself, buy McDonald’s and Citigroup. Or he could buy Nike, Starbucks, and Boeing. Or he could buy UPS, Anheuser-Busch, and Dell. Or he could buy the Rio Tinto global mining conglomerate, tobacco industry leader Altria, and Spotify. With ample money left over. You get the idea.
The average NFL football team is worth $5.7 billion. Elon Musk could buy all 32 of them, give them away, and still be richer than Warren Buffett.
The median sales price of a home in the US is $420,000. Elon Musk could personally buy 829,000 median-priced homes. For context, that is 100,000 more housing units than there are in Philadelphia.
The average new car in America costs $48,400. Elon Musk could buy 7.2 million new cars. New York City residents own a total of about two million cars.
The City of New York’s total budget for fiscal year 2025 is $112 billion. Elon Musk could pay the entire New York City budget for three years, and still have an eleven-figure net worth.
In 2019, billionaire hedge fund mogul Ken Griffin paid $240 million for a Manhattan penthouse—the most expensive home ever sold in America. Elon Musk could buy 625 of these penthouses, set them on fire, and still be the richest person in America.
Last year, the median full-time, year-round worker in the United States earned $61,440. Assuming that this worker spent no money and piled up their income in a vault, they would have to work for 16,276 years to earn one billion dollars. In other words, they would have had to start saving ten thousand years before people formed permanent agricultural settlements on the Nile River. To earn ten billion dollars, the median workers would have to start saving all of their earnings around the time that two adults and one child of the subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu died in Herto, Ethiopia, to be dug up 160,000 years later by archaeologists. To save up as much money as Elon Musk has today, the median American worker would have had to start socking away their total income right around the time when an unknown ancestor was leaving the earliest known example of hominin footprints in western Crete, 5.7 million years ago.
The most expensive hotel suite in America, at the Palms in Las Vegas, retails for $100,000 a night—including a personal butler, bartender, and driver, as well as $10,000 nightly casino credit. Elon Musk could live in this suite 365 days a year for less than the amount of interest that his net worth would earn sitting in a high yield savings account for one day.
What I’m saying is that Elon Musk does not just have a lot of money. Elon Musk has too much money. All of these examples are cute little illustrations of how much money $348 billion really is. But there are more concrete, and scarier, ways to think about it as well. Here is perhaps the most relevant: The sum total of spending on the 2024 presidential election race by the candidates, the parties, and all outside interest groups combined was $5.5 billion. For all federal elections in 2024—Congress plus the White House—total spending was about $16 billion. Elon Musk spent well over $100 million backing Donald Trump in the 2024 election, making him one of the nation’s biggest Republican donors. But that (successful) investment is a tiny fraction of what Musk could spend on politics, if he gets motivated. The total cost of all federal elections this year amounts to less than 5% of Musk’s net worth. The median American’s net worth is just under $200,000. That means that the cost to Elon Musk of, in essence, buying every national election in America—or, assuming he donated only to Republicans, doubling the campaign budgets of every Republican candidate for federal office—is the equivalent of the median American spending less than $10,000. (And for Musk, of course, the money means much less, since he has so much left over.) The potential returns on that sort of political spending by someone like Musk are inestimably high.
It is natural to be worried about what Elon Musk has already bought himself with his donations to Trump’s campaign. He is now in a position to shut down federal investigations into his companies, to put a thumb on the scale to award himself lucrative federal contracts, and to use his connections to escape enforcement of federal labor, environmental, and other regulations. All of these possibilities are the straightforward wages of buying political influence, and they are all very bad. But they are not even the thing that should scare us the most. The thing that should scare us the most is embodied in a comment that an anonymous Trump advisor made to ABC reporter Jon Karl last week. Speaking about the battle to confirm Trump’s cabinet choices, the advisor said, "If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.”
This, then, is the situation that America finds itself in: A strongman president who demands utter loyalty who is backed by the nation’s richest man, who is willing to use his wealth to destroy anyone who opposes the president, and who is able to do so because of our nation’s awful campaign finance laws. I realize that none of this is news, but I am not sure that everyone has fully digested just how dangerous this situation is to democracy itself. Trump, a completely unscrupulous president who values only loyalty and cares nothing about corruption, will happily give Elon Musk anything he wants in exchange for Musk being the mightiest bank account in all of American politics, willing to overwhelm all political opposition with money that no other donors are capable of matching. These two men, by themselves, are in a position to dictate the course of federal elections and federal government policy for years to come. All it will take is for Elon Musk to remain willing to spend on elections at the level he is capable of—a level he has not even begun to approach yet.
Your initial instinct may be to think that this situation is bad because Elon Musk’s goals and motives are bad. This is true. But that is not the heart of the danger. Assume for argument’s sake that Elon Musk’s motives are completely pure and all he wants to do is make America better for everyone. Even if that were true, the very existence of one man capable of buying (and legally allowed to buy) all federal elections is the end of democracy. I mean, I know America has effectively been an oligarchy for a long time, but the level of wealth inequality has now concentrated power to such an absurd degree that one idiot can fucking buy the entire federal government! Consider the fact that if everyone on the left half of the political spectrum spent all of our time for the next four years raising money, it would still be a trivial act for Elon Musk to spend five seconds writing a check for more than the amount that we would raise. It is morbidly funny that the Democrats have gained themselves the reputation of the money party because of Hollywood and tech industry type rich people and meanwhile the Republicans have one single motherfucker who is so rich that he can wipe out the entire combined resources of all of those Hollywood and Silicon Valley fundraisers. Even with all of the hysteria about Elon Musk and what a disaster his Department of Government Efficiency could be, I do not think that it has fully sunk in how far into the dystopian hole America has already gone, and how much deeper we may soon go if one guy decides he wants to have every federal politician in his pocket.
This is why billionaires should not exist. Not only because many of them are rat bastards. Not only because nobody needs that much money and it could be put to much better uses. But also because the accumulation of so much wealth in the hands of a single person makes that person so ridiculously powerful that an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people cannot outweigh the influence of one.
If we want a democracy, we will confiscate their wealth. We are not going to be in the position to do it any time soon. But when Democrats regain control of the government, they need to take this seriously. If the only response to billionaires on one side is for the other side to desperately try to cultivate their own billionaires, all the rest of us get left on the side of the road, disempowered observers of the dumbest soap opera that has ever existed.
More
Related reading: Confiscate Their Money; Public Ownership of Public Goods; Speaking Plainly About Who Is Robbing You; We Have a Distribution Problem.
You may be wondering, “How can regular people begin to counteract the power of such great wealth?” The answer is “organized labor,” and I wrote a book called “The Hammer” about this very thing. You can order it wherever books are sold. I also have a couple of book events coming up—Thursday, December 5 in Baltimore at Red Emma’s, and Saturday, December 28 at The Lynx Books in Gainesville, FL—and I would love to see you at either one.
Part of the process of wealthy interests taking control of politics is wealthy interests taking control of the media. You may have noticed that the traditional journalism industry is currently falling apart. I may be biased, but I think that building a strong ecosystem of independent media outlets is incredibly important today. This publication, How Things Work, is 100% funded by readers like you who choose to become paid subscribers. It is your subscriptions that allow me to pay the bills, and to keep this site paywall-free so that anyone can read it, regardless of income. If you like How Things Work and want to do a little something to help it survive and thrive, take a moment to become a paid subscriber today. It’s cheap and it feels great. Thank you, my friends.
In the 1950's the CIA popularized the Gini Index (named after an Italian economist to describe the distribution of something among a population, where "0" means everyone has an equal amount and "1" indicates it it all concentrated in one person/unit's/country's hands) as a measure of a country's stability. They determined an index over 40 portended civic unrest. For years the USA hovered over 35 (close to Mexico) and far above the Scandinavian countries (e.g. Sweden is at 30 in 2024). Obama with his tax on stock transactions and the ACA was the first President since the 1960's to lower our Gini. Since then especially with the Republican minimization of estate taxes, caping income tax rates, and the Trump tax cutout, the USA Gini Index is now an estimated, unadjusted 48. One American is the richest man in the world - and you well described his opportunities. Three Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population. Beyond Musk's political power, both American families and American government are being starved. For the last 10 years, and on an accelerating basis, we are watching, playing out in real time, cvic dysfunction and disorder whose main engine is wealth inequality. OUCH! More than anything else this explains the panoramic dynamics of the MAGA movement. In the end the CIA was right, wealth inequality destabilizes a society. In the real world, each scenario will unravel in a unique way. Now, in real time, we are watching this great civic defect create its havoc.
Uuughhh I Hate (tm) this man. I've hated him since his ex wife's exposé in Vanity Fair all those years ago. I throughly enjoy telling fiscally conservative folks how many tax dollars he's taken, that he's the real welfare queen. Oh and the infrastructure bill also helps keep tesla afloat while maintaining poor labor practices and shady business dealings