🔒 The Myth of the Greedy Billionaire

Elon Musk briefly became a trillionaire earlier this year, and at some point we have to step back and think about what that actually means, and whether it realistically has any meaning at all.

 I think that most people are economically literate enough to understand that Elon Musk can’t go out and buy a trillion-dollar yacht, whatever such a thing might look like. Lotus silk sails and an antimatter engine, presumably. When we say that Elon Musk is a trillionaire, nobody really thinks that he can stop off at the bank, enter his PIN, and withdraw $1,000,000,000,000. And I don’t mean that as a physical limitation—the problem isn’t that there’s no ATM large enough that it contains around a third of the total amount of physically circulating currency in the United States.

 The problem is that, unlike you or I withdrawing every cent we’re worth from the bank, in order to run off to some hippie commune or whatever, Elon Musk withdrawing his net worth would instantly destroy the United States and send the world into some kind of horrible dystopian depression. And I say this with comic flair to provoke in your mind a theoretical Hollywood comedy scenario starring, perhaps, Keanu Reeves as an incompetent trainee genie working for a naïve billionaire played by Ricky Gervais (Hollywood, please buy my screenplay) because, in reality, Musk literally can’t do that even if he wanted to destroy the economy. Nobody would or could give him that cash.

In a bureaucratic sense that can be written on paper, Musk is (or was) a trillionaire, but in any practical sense, it is meaningfully the same as calling him a “squillionaire.” After a certain amount of billions of dollars in net worth, a single individual’s relationship with the economic system fundamentally changes. Net worth becomes an imaginary number.

 We put men like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Larry Page on a leaderboard curated by Forbes, watching them swing dance with each other as though their net worths are meaningfully different. This time last year, Larry Ellison was the richest person in the world. Today, Elon Musk is ostensibly worth about three times as much as Ellison. But this is wordplay. These people have surpassed “wealth.” In the real world, the amount of money that Elon Musk has can be expressed as both “infinity” and “zero” depending on how you come at the question.

Elon Musk probably doesn’t carry a wallet, and it’s plausible he doesn’t have a bank account. If he does own a wallet, it probably only contains photos of himself and maybe a company credit card for tipping at restaurants. Tipping is ritualistic and really the only thing that multibillionaires need money for. Otherwise, food is given to him, transport is given to him, the bills for services he personally uses are paid for him, and the money for these expenses comes from the same source as the salaries of the people who deliver his food and fly his jet—a company’s bank.

It really is hard to imagine, let alone describe, how fundamentally alien the experience of being inordinately wealthy must be. To be unable to remember the last time you bought something. To never think to check how much liquid wealth you have on hand, because the concept of liquid wealth is meaningless to you.

 A mistake that a lot of leftists make when they are talking about multibillionaires is that they are “hoarding wealth,” or even less accurate, that they are hoarding money. They don’t have any money to hoard. Their wealth is how much their banks and investors (other people’s banks) will lend them based on speculation about how much return they can get for it.

 I titled this piece “the myth of the greedy billionaire,” I admit, partly as bait, but I will defend the thesis: Certainly, greed is a driver for immense wealth accumulation, but at some point, wealth accumulation becomes literally meaningless. Past this point, when men continue to pursue wealth, we can no longer say that greed is the primary sin that they are committing.

 Elon Musk is not sitting around in a cold sweat because his on-paper net worth Is fluctuating between five-point-seven trillion dollars and nine-hundred-and-twenty billion dollars because even an idiot like him knows that these are nonsense numbers that both equal infinity. I don’t say any of this to defend or rehabilitate the image of the multibillionaire—much the contrary. When we charge these people with greed, we are doing them a service, because what they really are is much worse.

For free subscribers, this is a preview. Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 18-September