We have the first trillionaire

On June 12, 2026 Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and a bunch of other companies and entities, reached the first recorded status of trillionaire of a single person in the history of modern finance. Or for that matter, any finance as far as I can tell unless we are counting the combined net wealth of entire countries which were headed by monarchs in the past and consider the entire net value of those countries as a singular holding of said monarchs, which nobody really does.

Musk’s estimated wealth of 1.1 trillion USD, largely due to his shares in newly IPO’d SpaceX valued at about 2 trillion dollars, of which Musk owns 47%, is roughly 3% of the US GDP. In comparison, the world’s first recorded billionaire, John D Rockefeller, reached that milestone in 1913 and his net worth at that time was about 2.3% of the US GDP.

Elon Musk is now worth more than the combined net worth of approximately 3.9 billion people and could comfortably purchase the economies of the majority of the 195 sovereign nations on the planet and still have plenty left over to buy a Tesla or two. The estimated combined GDP of the planet Earth is roughly (depending on who is doing the estimating) between 100-120 trillion US dollars, so Musk single handedly represents over 1% of the entire planet’s net worth. If his entire fortune was liquid, which would be a horrendously bad bad bad day for everyone on Earth, he could comfortably be the wickedest, the baldest and the most impactful Moonraker Bond villain in history whom even James Bond would be powerless to stop. His lair would surely be made to rise straight out of the sea and via a gold-plated elevator reach the surface of the moon, from where he will send himself via a Falcon heavy rocket to Mars to colonize the Red Planet and extend the reach of humankind into the solar system. But I digress.

The fact that the financial system is able to develop a mechanism for someone, anyone, to reach a status where they are essentially worth more than 35% of the world’s combined population is a predication of the nature of the system of payments of debt and the mannerism through which such payment options come into existence. The possibility of the pure conjuring into existence of many hundreds of millions of multiples of single source assets backed currencies at the whim of individuals simply by asserting the implied value of said currencies to be at a level commensurate with their and only their interpretation of the value of the underlying assets is a betrayal not only of the potentially true value of the assets themselves but it opens all kinds of pathways for the deliberate misrepresentation of the asset categories of the world and the wildly unequal distribution of resources necessary for the preservation of life based on stated value of the currency as it relates to the value of the underlying assets it represents.

So if we all agree on something – lets say XYZ – to be of a certain value based on its usefulness in extending life, such as a crop, a food source, a water source or a source of clean air – all of a sudden is valued not only on a level that is defined by all living beings as necessary for the extension of life, but elevated based on a perceived value by an individual or a small group of individuals, above that of basic life source and is reclassified as an item that is somehow more deserving of a higher value, therefore only available to those whose power to purchase it with currency they deemed necessary for such a transaction, effectively removes that asset from being available to anyone but that group of folks.

What I mean by that is this. For example, lets say a group of people decide that a certain asset should be classified of a certain worth based on and purchasable with the equivalent portion of the amount of available currency in circulation that corresponds to the inverse scarcity of the asset compared to the amount of currency available. The scarcer the asset, the more of the existing currency it takes to acquire it. A ton of rice garners a price of X, a ton of corn Y and a ton of wheat Z. All these items take a certain amount of human effort to grow, harvest, distribute and form into edible form that can be used as sustenance so therefore the compensation for the labor to produce it is roughly equal to the perceived ability of humans to produce such items on a massive scale and where the cost of distribution bears the largest and most vulnerable portion due to the inherent risks posed by logistical challenges. On the other hand, a ton of gold, which is a substance that takes human sacrifice to bring into being and is not duplicatable with human effort such as rice is by utilizing nature and the ability of the planet to sustain a renewable growing season year after year, gold is once mined, refined and cast and that is it. Once gold is poured into a form that is it, you can’t go back, plant it and harvest more gold the next year. So the scarcity of the metal necessarily dictates a higher portion of the available currency in the world than commodities which are renewable with human effort utilizing nature.

If we now consider the example of a small group of individuals getting together and deciding arbitrarily the value of rice and contrast it with the perceived value of gold, they can, theoretically, decide that the factor of survivability of people dependent on the rice harvest and commensurate with the cost of labor to produce it is no longer the most important consideration in setting the price of the commodity. Going forward, the perceived value of another underlying asset, such as gold, will be the determining factor of what rice should cost because theoretically, both commodities must be shipped to customers therefore pricing the shipping of rice will now be set by the cost of the shipping of gold. Since gold is highly susceptible to theft during shipping and storage and extraordinary measures must be taken to protect it, the same level of pricing should be applicable to rice as well, therefore raising the final cost of rice many hundreds fold to the ultimate consumers regardless of the availability of the product. Artificial scarcity will be the natural outcome in that scenario were it to play out in real life.

This can be achieved in a scenario where most of the currency is already tied up and controlled by a smaller and increasingly smaller group of individuals and their ability to set the value of assets based on the available currency at THEIR disposal rather than the fair market value of what the products should demand. As the world moves closer to accepting the idea, indeed, in a lot of cases, actively worshipping the idea of hoarding more and more currency in fewer hands in vain hopes of one day joining the ranks of those few hands, it is simultaneously devaluing the faster and faster increasing pool of currency while seeing the amount of currency reduce in size from the vast majority of people into the hands of those who will be in a position to determine the value of pretty much everything as time goes on. This level of power, if it comes to pass with a more concentrated wealth level at the top, will theoretically exceed even the perceived deified status of kings and monarchs of medieval times, who presided over life and death with unlimited capacity and a self-declared source of knowledge directly derived from the creator of the Universe.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with anyone wanting to advance their financial standing in life and those of their families. The entire premise of the United States and the reason why we are the most prosperous country in the history of the world is due to the fact that men and women set out to become independently wealthy and be able to provide for their families in a manner that would alleviate most common finance induced ailments humanity suffered from throughout history. There is a vast level of deferred compensation that derives from such thinking in the form of advanced future technological advancements that lift people up and create a better life for all those who are lucky enough to participate in a society where such advancements are made available by those who seek to create a better financial standing for themselves by inventing mechanisms for the benefit of all. Seemingly simplistic advancements such as indoor plumbing and running water have reversed thousands of years of suffering in modern living conditions by preventing the spread of illnesses that killed hundreds of millions in the past.

The difference now is this. Whereas we previously set out to enhance our financial standings by understanding that such things come about as a byproduct of a development that serves humankind, now the creation of wealth is undertaken for the simple reason of worshiping the very mechanism of creating wealth for wealth’s sake. Now we are no longer content on having wealth come about as a result of hard work and the positive contribution made to society, now the adulation goes to those who are able to create wealth by the multiplication of wealth itself without providing any valuable or indeed, measurable benefit to either society at large or even considering any benefit that can be derived from their actions. There is even a perverse standard amongst a growing group of people that states that creating wealth while simultaneously deploying a potentially negative or even destructive measure of actions upon society at large is not only acceptable but commendable. It is no longer enough for a person to get rich, absurdly rich at that, but it is perfectly acceptable to tear down societal guardrails that would otherwise protect hundreds of thousand or millions of people from the harm that could come about should one person or a small group of people take control of an entity that everyone relies upon for their continued existence. Healthcare is the most perfect example one can point at to illustrate this point.

We used to think that we would get wealthy by inventing things to benefit society. That is no longer the case anymore. The difference between our past and today is glaring. When there were no billionaires, and few millionaires in this country, but a very robust and well-living middle class that one could aspire to and with relative certainty achieve at some point in their lives by positively contributing to society through vigorous work that benefited the world, ensured a comfortable and relaxed existence. As proof of that concept, we can point to the baby boomer generation, that largely built this country after World War II, that members of said generation are still today the wealthiest in the history of the world because of what they were able to accumulate during their working lives. They have had the most productive and the most value-driven life of any generation since the existence of humankind on this planet.

In the late 1970s and 1980s the concept of building wealth for the sake of wealth building – greed, if you want to call it that Mr. Gekko – took over the mindset of the US population. Since the SEC changed the stock buyback rule in 1982, the number of billionaires has gone from a handful to something like 3000 or more and 1 trillionaire and the collective wealth of those folks has far surpassed the net worth of 90% of the US population. We seemingly have accepted the rationalization that the American Dream can allow for anyone to become insanely wealthy and become part of the billionaire class even at the detriment of society at large. Thousands and thousands of individuals espouse this thinking with a combined level of arrogance and perhaps naiveite on every imaginable platform but statistically one has a better chance of winning the Daytona 500 in roller skates than to become a billionaire.

We, as a nation, willingly gave up and decided to forgo a somewhat guaranteed level of success and a financial plan that was available to tens of millions of us in the 1960s and 1970s at a dignified, comfortable and relaxed lifestyle that, if not wealthy, was certainly affordable and would have put us in the top one half of 1% of the wealthiest humans who ever inhabited this planet and we willingly gave all that up. AND why? Because we decided to actively work to DENY that option to hundreds of millions of our fellow Americans and to extend resources and riches to a select few who convinced us all that only they have the knowledge to parlay all that wealth into more wealth that they will only share with select few of us if we help them commit this act of sabotaging the American dream for everyone else in favor of a system where they get to decide who is rich and who is not and we would be their favorites. So, as we now start seeing a greater wealth development that is more concentrated than ever, we should ask ourselves who the bigger fool is. Those who convinced us to willingly forego that amazing system our grandparents used to build a very comfortable exitance that was the personification of the American Dream that was the envy of the world or us, for falling for the notion that we should trust a handful of people with all our nation’s wealth and entrust them that through their good will and saintly nature they will let the wealth trickle down to those of us who clamor the best at the outskirts of the golden troughs we build for them to engorge themselves at while we eagerly await for a few scraps to fall continuously believing the continued lie that if only we work hard enough, one day, we also, can have a seat at their table.

We are the greater fools. For throwing away a system that worked for the vast majority of us in favor of a system that works for a handful of us with the naive dream of someday joining them at the top with the added benefit of seeing millions of our fellow Americans suffer while we look upon them with righteous indignation and declare that they are not worthy. We are the fools.