Is it bad that Elon Musk has a trillion dollars? Yes, and here’s why

I t was bound to happen eventually: Elon Musk has become the planet’s first trillionaire . Until recently, economists who spoke about “trillions” were describing the GDP of the largest economies or the accumulated value of bequests on their way to the heirs of today’s billionaires. The term is not often used in daily conversation, let alone to describe the wealth of an individual. But now we have entered a new phase of the oligarchic era. Previously, when we described the wealth of the world’s richest billionaires, it was understood as a few hundred billions. Three years ago, the value of Musk’s total assets was estimated to be about $250bn. The pace at which it has increased is mind-boggling – and so is what it represents. We need to know two things about trillionaires: what a trillion dollars exactly stands for , and why this level of wealth concentration is dangerous. A trillion is $1,000,000,000,000 – or “12 zeros”. Macroeconomists may understand the significance of this number, but most of us don’t. That’s why, when I wrote about a book about the need for a cap on personal wealth, or “limitarianism” , I proposed the concept of “an equivalent hourly wage”, the wage that one needs to earn to accumulate a fortune. In other words, in the case of Musk, what wage would he have to be on to amass a trillion dollars? The answer is that, even if he worked 70 hours a week from age 20 to 75 and took no holidays, his pay rate would need to be about $5m an hour. …