Following the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of SpaceX stocks on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, owner Elon Musk was declared to be the world’s first trillionaire. The event saw investors rush to buy up stocks of the corporation that Musk had previously owned privately, with the demand pushing the value of each stock sky-high – and also the estimated net worth of majority stockholder Musk.
One trillion USD, or 1,000,000,000,000, is difficult to conceptualize, as the median U.S. household bank account holds a median of $8,000, or 0.0000008% of a trillion. To many reading this, even $8,000 would seem like a lottery prize in these times. A trillion is roughly three times the total number of stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy. It is enough money to make one million people millionaires. It is enough to rebuild the entire Gaza Strip after Israel’s genocidal destruction of it 14 times.
But to understand the true value of $1 trillion, it is important to imagine it out of the hands of Elon Musk and put into the service of humankind. The amount is greater to the gross domestic product of the world’s 92 poorest countries combined, according to IMF data.
It has become exceedingly clear that the hoarding of this much wealth under capitalism translates to not just financial power, but political power. During the 2008-2009 global recession, Moody’s analytics estimated a loss of $2 trillion in global economic growth. Today one man, Elon Musk, holds hostage half of that amount in his own accounts.
This translates to unimaginable amounts of leverage over the lives of humanity, whose accumulated labor this money represents. Claiming that capitalism represents a free and democratic society, while allowing Musk to hoard more wealth than the poorest 46% of the world’s population, is simply a joke with no punchline.
In the United States the federal minimum wage has not increased since 2009, standing at a disgraceful $7.25 an hour. But imagine if you made $1 every second, or $3,600 an hour, 24 hours a day. In 12 days, you would have $1 million; in 32 years you would reach $1 billion, but reaching $1 trillion would still take you 31,710 years. That would take you from the Upper Paleolithic period, around when humans first began forming complex societies, to today in order to accrue that wealth.
For workers living under capitalism, they are told by the capitalists that their paycheck and net worth is their value to society. In many ways, it is one’s ration card that determines whether you eat or are clothed, whether you are healthy or sick, whether you will live or die. The existence of a trillionaire forces an ever greater majority of people to call this fundamental rule into question.
For Elon Musk to be the first to claim this shameful title, someone that is already seen to be one of the most repugnant, gross, and pathetic contemporary figures in the eyes of everyday working people, only drives more people into total disbelief that capitalism represents anything but a dictatorship of the rich – totalitarian rule over billions of workers worldwide.
Data centers are using up our communities’ water and land, the Pentagon is destroying the lives and homes of millions daily, and oil companies are driving our climate into terrifying new forms of crisis. For a trillionaire to exist, that means billions and billions of workers across the world are denied a real future beyond the indignity and exploitation of capitalism.
No individual should be allowed to accumulate a billion dollars worth of wealth, much less a trillion. That wealth is created by working people, and it is our right to put that wealth under the democratic control of working people.
