What Elon Musk’s Trillion-Dollar Payday Is Costing the Rest of Us

With this week’s IPO for Elon Musk’s tech megafirm SpaceX, he is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire, thanks to generous government subsidies, years of government-funded research, and government contracts. All these public-sector boondoggles have made SpaceX successful enough to make the world’s richest man even richer.

You’d think this might cause Musk to appreciate the value of what government does. Yet the arch-right mogul is dogmatically opposed to any such concession; indeed, his high-profile and stunningly ineffectual initiative to eliminate government spending, the Department of Government Efficiency, is the reason multiple crucial agencies and programs have been decimated, including a program that worked to prevent the deadly screwworm parasite from infecting US livestock.

As Musk’s wealth multiplies, he continues to prosper on the public dime. In 2018, Musk paid nothing in federal taxes, and because much of his wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, it can continue to grow without being taxed until he chooses to sell it. (In order to avoid taxation, billionaires like Musk sometimes take out loans using the equity they claim in their corporate properties as collateral.) The Securities and Exchange Commission settled with Musk for $1.5 million over charges that he failed to properly disclose his purchase of Twitter shares in 2022—a large civil penalty for the SEC, but chump change relative to the $150 million he may have gained through the late disclosure, much less compared to his overall net worth.

The Twitter agreement came after Musk had battled with the SEC for years, settling in 2018 on securities fraud charges, and generally thumbing his nose at any effort to restrain him. Given all of this, it seems fair to say that his overall orientation toward government is that it’s an entity ripe for plunder. In any instance when it does not contribute directly to his personal wealth, he is happy to weaken, if not destroy it. In a just world, someone who has benefited as much as Musk has from government resources would be compelled to put money back into federal coffers via taxation, but tax avoidance is the favored sport of billionaires.

What Musk has contributed to the public good is minimal compared to the scale of this pillaging. Years ago, I was a buy-side tech-equity analyst, and watched the net worth of many mediocre C-level officers balloon way out of proportion to their contributions. This was because the stock market often values companies based on things that have little to do with their fundamentals. And apart from these rampant market distortions, there’s simply no good explanation for why one person who runs multiple companies at the same time and cannot focus on any single one of them with his full attention should be rewarded with a potential pay package that’s the equivalent of around 5 percent of the country’s GDP. Under Musk’s chaotic and often immature leadership, his companies have grown primarily by selling a narrative that their successes have happened because of him, and not in spite of him. But even if he were an exemplary CEO (for whatever length of time he’s chief executive-ing and not cheating at video games, shitposting, fomenting racist pogroms in Ireland, or taking ungodly amounts of ketamine), his contributions as a single human could not possibly justify the level of wealth and power he has accumulated.

Musk’s cosmic-scale wealth-hoarding is particularly abhorrent when you place it against the backdrop of how much damage he’s done. It’s hard to quantify the scale of destruction and deprivation that he will never personally be held accountable for. How do you value the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who have died since Musk, in his words, gleefully “fed [USAID] into the woodchipper”? How do you value the lives of people who will die because DOGE cut major biomedical research funding? DOGE broke the government in countless ways. These costs go far beyond what you’re now going to pay for a burger because he and his army of swaggering and clueless tech bros thought the screwworm prevention program was stupid.

Worse, Musk appears to have no regrets for any of this. Like many of his ilk—wealthy tech barons who believe knowledge of their own domain is somehow transitive to any other—he believes he did a good job because he’s militantly ignorant of what a good job in the public sector actually looks like. All that DOGE actually generated was $21 billion of waste; if it generated any actual efficiencies, they cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Musk’s wealth is also obscene relative to what he’s given back. He is one of the world’s stingiest billionaires in terms of philanthropic giving. What’s more, the bulk of the tiny fraction of his wealth that he has donated he gave to his own self-serving foundation. In a podcast interview, he claimed, “The biggest challenge I find with my foundation is trying to give money away in a way that is truly beneficial to people…. It’s very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness. It is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness.”

This is the argument many technologists in Silicon Valley make to justify wealth hoarding and selective and narrow philanthropic efforts under the guise of “effective altruism.” That fatuous ideology, like most other entries in the wealth-hoarding catechism of the Valley, professes to evaluate charity prospects on a strict assessment of their effectiveness, but somehow always results in funding AI research or, you know, space colonization efforts. All you really need to know about effective altruism is that one of its most ardent apostles is the jailed crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now petitioning for a pardon from Musk’s partner in nihilistic wealth-hoarding Donald Trump.

If Musk really wanted to give his money away to actually benefit to people, he could spend more time thinking about the real causes of human suffering and less time doing cringey and expensive stunts like shooting a Tesla roadster into space or buying an entire social network to stifle critics and amplify dumb memes. But the lives of others have no meaningful place in his consciousness. They exist primarily as obstacles or more productive inputs to be used—labor to exploit, women to impregnate, online trolls to weaponize. For an aspiring space conqueror like Musk, they are all equally expendable.