The world’s richest man thinks he’s not rich enough. Fleet Street Fox asks what he’s going to spend it on, exactly
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of all the money and power in the world will always want more of both.
That’s because wealth and clout have never, in the history of mankind, made anyone wiser or prettier. One look at Jeff Bezos is proof enough, and if you need a second opinion check out his wife.
And so today Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with a personal wealth of £380billion, has won the approval of that Tesla shareholders for a pay package that could turn him into the world’s first trillionaire within the next two years.
The question is not just whether he’ll manage to hit the corporate milestones needed to qualify, but what exactly the point is. After all, this is not a man for whom anything on Earth, or even within near-Earth orbit, is currently out of reach.
Musk has ALL the money. He could buy countries. In fact, he pretty much has bought and paid for control of the largest economy in the world. By donating a few hundred million to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and distracting everyone with ketamine quivers and slashing parts of government, Musk ensured that his multi-billion government contracts were safe. He also shut down the unhelpful investigations into his firms which exposed them to regulatory risk. Then he stepped back from public life to concentrate on his businesses, as though that wasn’t what he’d been doing all along.
He’s not worrying about whether he can afford another child, or paternity suit. He’s not turning down the heating, totting up the weekly shop, or wondering how he’ll pay the mortgage, like millions of us do every day. He built a suburban enclave for his families in Texas, isn’t talking to many of them, and in any event reportedly sleeps most nights alone in a prefab studio apartment that he rents from his own company. Value: about £38,000.
He has spent some money on himself, of course. He went bald and then magically grew all his hair back, and his face isn’t quite how it used to be. But it’s no fun being rich, because everybody is out for a piece of it. It’s safe to assume, for example, that somewhere along the chain of providing Elon with clothes, food or services, someone is putting a little bump for themselves on top of the bill.
This is a man so rich that he could afford to eat all the cake in the world, and then pay for someone to suck the resulting fat from his bum. With their mouth, if he felt like it. He could own any car, any home, any business, go anywhere and do anything. He could walk into palaces uninvited. He could buy King Charles, and all his geraniums, about 1,000 times over. So what could he do if he had more?
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Well, he could liquidise all his assets, put the money in a big pile, and swim around in it. Of course the rest of the world economy would have collapsed and the Earth’s crust would be dangerously thin because he’d have had to mine all the ore to create cold, hard cash, so he and the money would soon be consumed by lava. So perhaps not a good idea.
Musk is the first man whose personal wealth has been enough to propel him – or at least his interests – into space. Oh, Bezos has floated around at the top of the stratosphere, and Richard Branson had some zero-gravity. But Musk alone has a personal network of satellites capable of swaying the course of wars and the flow of information. He has rockets that can reverse into a parking space. He could, with more money, get to the Moon, and has ambitions about Mars. Were he to go, there’s a very good chance he’d either die or never return, and all his money could be recycled.
That would be handy, for he is pretty reluctant to let anyone else share the benefits. Sometimes he pays income tax, and sometimes he doesn’t. His businesses rely on federal grants and have at times paid zero federal taxes in return. As his wealth is mostly on paper – in the form of stocks and shares – he has to pay only when he cashes them in. If he eats Pot Noodles in his little one-room prefab, he doesn’t need to spend much at all.
So the trillion dollars he wants to be worth isn’t real money. It’s conceptual, an idea of personal wealth based upon what portion of a business he owns and what that business is thought to be worth if it was ever sold, which it won’t be because that would make Musk a) liable for tax and b) less powerful. And that fact, right there, is the key to the whole mega-rich psychodrama.
The deal Musk has demanded would not see his income rise one cent, because it will be mostly in the shape of Tesla stock. It would double his holdings from 15% to about 30%, and give him effective control. It depends on him creating a future world dominated by Tesla – a million robots, 20 million self-driving cars within 10 years, massive profit margins, robotaxis, and a firm big enough to qualify as a significant global economy on its own. He would be king of the world, but none the happier for it.
And this at a time when Tesla cars are about as sexy as Donald Trump in a nappy. When sales are slumping worldwide, legislators aren’t backing his products, and he’s past middle-age, with well-documented drug use and what seems to be a deeply unhappy personal life, putting him at high risk for a heart attack. If only he had spent a tiny portion of his wealth helping others to live in cheap, affordable homes. Or making Earth survivable. Or paying his taxes, so that there was no need for mass lay-offs and economic catastrophes which are impacting saner, less successful people worldwide.
For if he gets that trillion, he’ll only want a quillion next. It is that thirst which made him who he is, and which has arguably been mankind’s biggest downfall – the constant search for economic growth, and more power, when contentment and longevity lie in knowing when you’ve got enough. Musk is the embodiment of the idea that, if anyone builds it, everyone dies. If he can’t say no, and the shareholders won’t, then perhaps it’s time for the rest of us to tell this man that our concept of all his theoretical wealth and power is that it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.