A Trillion Dollars Isn’t Worth It If You Have to Be Elon Musk

Search

Sign In

Menu

Search

Log In

Hide menu

About

The Magazine

Team

Pitch Form

FAQ

Subscribe

Issues Archive

Articles

Animals

Shop

Podcast

Donate

This is a search field with an auto-suggest feature attached.

There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

A Trillion Dollars Isn’t Worth It If You Have to Be Elon Musk

Despite all his wealth, Musk’s existence is a cautionary tale.

Alex Skopic & Nathan J. Robinson

filed 19 June 2026<br>in

Personages

“What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

— some homeless Palestinian

Elon Musk is, at least on paper, the world’s first trillionaire. He reached that milestone on June 12, after SpaceX debuted as a publicly-traded company on the U.S. stock market at an initial offering of $150 per share. At the time of writing, that price has risen to about $185, taking Musk’s estimated net worth to $1.4 trillion as the company becomes bigger than Amazon. Depending on how you evaluate the historical Malian emperor Mansa Musa, Musk may be the richest person to ever live.

Among pro-capitalist pundits, Musk’s ascension to trillionaire status has been the occasion for a round of sycophantic applause, as they all rush to tell us why it’s good for one individual to control this much of the world’s resources. At Fox News, we’re told that Musk “earned every penny,” and is living proof that “capitalism continues to reward individuals who create extraordinary value.” Similarly, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times tells us that his SpaceX fortune is “a testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success and American greatness.” The National Review offers “Three Cheers For Elon Musk,” calling criticism of his hyper-wealth “revolting. Repulsive. Grotesque. Un-American.”

Now, there are all kinds of political and economic reasons why these claims are wrong, and we’ve discussed them at some length elsewhere. Two of the most important are that by hoarding wealth, billionaires and now trillionaires are actively keeping other people in poverty, making the whole thing monstrously unethical, and that their vast fortunes allow them to buy political power and make a mockery of the word “democracy.” Both of these things are true of Musk, who has bragged about using his wealth to get Donald Trump elected and likely killed hundreds of thousands of people across Africa with his “DOGE” aid cuts. (If you start to count the lives Musk could save if he put his money to good use, the numbers get even more staggering.)

But another, morbidly fascinating aspect of this whole moment is that, despite possessing wealth that rivals the emperors of the ancient world, Musk’s existence is a bizarre and cursed one in many important ways. His personal relationships with the people closest to him, by all appearances, are dysfunctional and abusive to varying degrees. He desperately wants to be adored by the public, but with every attempt, their approval slips further from his grasp. Instead of enjoying his money and leisure, he spends his waking hours obsessing over racist conspiracy theories and paranoid fantasies about the end of the world. And to add the final insult, he doesn’t even have a trillion dollars in any real sense; he just has to spend a lot of time and energy keeping up an elaborate fiction that he does.

In a way, Musk’s fans are right: he’s a perfect example of capitalism at work, with its relentless drive for growth and acquisition at the expense of everything else. It’s just that those are terrible principles to base a human life on.

You Can’t Buy Human Connection

It’s an old truism that money can’t buy the things that truly matter in life. This is only sort of the case. Money can certainly buy you a lot of the necessities that make it easier to be happy, like stable housing, leisure time, and better health, and research suggests that up until you hit about $100,000 per year in income, money can indeed improve your life satisfaction. But it’s also true that just because you’re wealthy, it doesn’t mean anyone will like you, especially if your money and status corrupt your ability to have healthy relations with other people.

Elon Musk’s first wife, Justine Wilson, has recounted what it was like to be married to him, and it was about as unpleasant as you might expect. Musk was initially charming, but she says that there was a disturbing warning sign when he told her during a dance at their wedding reception that “I am the alpha in this relationship.” Unfortunately, she said, “the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home,” and in their family “Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.” When she frequently reminded him that she was his wife, not an employee, he would apparently reply “If you were my employee I would fire you.” Despite their...