Elon Musk, the guy who owns Tesla, the Starlink satellites, and X just became the first person in human history to have a trillion dollars.
To understand how wild that is, think about a million dollars. If you spend $1,000 every single day, it would take you about three years to burn through a million. But a trillion? Now, if you spent $1,000 every single day, it would take you 2,700 years to spend a trillion dollars. That is the kind of load we’re talking about.
How did he get it? His rocket company, SpaceX, just went on the stock market today so regular people can buy a piece of it. The stock price went through the roof immediately. Because Elon owns a massive chunk of the company already, his bank account skyrocketed right along with it, officially pushing him past that $1,000,000,000,000 mark.
Not everybody is celebrating, though. A lot of people are pointing out that while one man has enough money to buy whole countries, millions of regular folk are struggling just to buy groceries and pay rent.
“Elon Musk’s rise to trillionaire status marks a new pinnacle of oligarchy.” — Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America
Basically, people are worried that when one person gets that much power and cash, it isn’t good for the rest of the world. But here is the real kicker: Elon himself claims he doesn’t even care about the cash anymore. At a recent tech summit, he told the crowd that AI and robots are going to make everything so cheap and automated that “money will stop being relevant” in the future.
Instead of dollars, he says the real power down the line will belong to whoever controls electricity and computer data. And since he owns the satellites, the AI, and the power centers, he’s already got a monopoly on the future.