Every Billion Elon Musk Adds to His Wealth Is An Insult to All of Us
The Tech-Fraud’s Endlessly Growing Lump of Monopoly Money Is a Case Study for Why Western Institutions are in Terminal Collapse.
Elon Musk’s fortune continues to rise so quickly that multiple outlets seem unable to decide how much it actually is. Or is it that they simply can’t keep up?
In mid-December, a sequence of estimates unfolded across major financial outlets, each revising the last almost as soon as it appeared. On December 15th, Reuters reported that Musk had become the first individual to reach a net worth of $600 billion, noting that he had crossed the $500 billion threshold only weeks earlier.
Then, on December 16th, Fortune placed his wealth at $638 billion—more than double that of the next richest person alive, which, for anyone understandably not keeping up with the wealth of tech oligarchs, is currently Google’s cofounder Larry Page.
The revisions continued. On December 20, Fortune reported that Musk’s net worth had risen to $679 billion after the reinstatement of a $55 billion compensation package that had previously been blocked by the Delaware courts. That same day, Reuters put his personal wealth at more than $700 billion.
And then, the very next day, Fortune revised its estimate again, this time to $750 billion.
It is worth noting that Musk recently offered his own gloss on his wealth and value. Responding on X to a post claiming that money is “a proxy for expected free energy,” and that artificial intelligence therefore represents “an infinite money glitch,” Musk replied: “Energy is the true currency.”
If you don’t understand how that exchange makes sense, don’t worry, you’re not actually missing anything. Nonsensical declarations like these are common among the ultra-wealthy and Wall Street’s other useful idiots who spend a significant sum of their waking hours cultivating their brand on social media, somehow oblivious to how they sound to anyone whose feet are still planted somewhere on Earth.
All of these wealth surges initially came on the heels of SpaceX hitting a $800 billion dollar market cap.
First reported by Reuters on December 12th, SpaceX’s preparations to go public included a secondary share sale that valued the company at the absurd $800 billion mark, “largely driven by the rapid expansion of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet business, including plans for direct-to-mobile service and progress in its Starship rocket program for missions to the moon and Mars.”
And that $55 billion dollar pay package Musk won back from Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick? On December 19th, CNN reported it as actually worth $139 billion.
And while the initial 2018 decision was based on the complaint of a Tesla shareholder who felt that his pay package was unfair to shareholders, shareholders would later vote in favor of the package, because of course they would.
Because the twisted, neurotic ‘logic’ of Wall Street is the very same as that of any confidence man, a con who manipulates others emotions to make a buck: they know that Musk, despite his endless failures, public gaffes and outright deceptions is a face that simply means money to the gaggle of schizophrenic speculators that are big-money shareholders, hedge funds, investment gurus and other capital hungry parasites.
Speaking of Wall Street, let’s ask how any one individual be so wealthy in any case? Much of the reporting on Musk’s fortune relies on a familiar but slippery term: net worth. It is used so routinely in our late-capital, hyper-financialized Western economy that it is rarely interrogated. Yet for readers unaccustomed to the internal logic of modern finance, the concept is easily misunderstood.
I say this because Musk’s net worth is not the same as how much money Musk actually has. It is an estimate derived largely from the market value of assets he controls, particularly shares in publicly traded companies, calculated at prevailing stock prices.
In other words, it is not ‘money’ he possesses in the sense most Americans understand their own finances. Not even close.
And this distinction matters, especially when financial life is experienced very differently for most people. Earlier this year, a national survey found that nearly 60 percent of Americans would struggle to cover a $1,000 emergency expense.
For the majority of working households, economic reality is understand through the lens of their next paycheck and an infinite series of debtors from the financial world who want them to own nothing and rent everything, from their computers to their cars to the roofs above their head.
Yet, at a time when we are collectively facing multiple existential and material crises, Musk is on his way to being the world’s first trillionaire, despite it being wildly unclear what actual value his enterprises produce.
Indeed, a huge chunk of that monopoly money is just Musk’s stock in his own company, Tesla, comprising about $200 billion in that aforementioned ‘value’ to Wall Street, that force that has sucked every bit of human decency out of the world that it has been able to package and sell for our entire lives.
Musk is ‘worth’ this much money, apparently, to people who undoubtedly don’t know anything of that struggle of daily working class life in America, aka people who might as well be living on Mars (no doubt, they hope, via a SpaceX rocket).
He’s worth that much money to a system so utterly corrupt, so wildly devoid of human values, contact with the natural world, or even really just contact with ‘real’ economic activity of the kind that actually makes up most people’s day-to-day lives.
And that’s the point. We could dive into further specifics of how his imaginary wealth somehow constitutes itself or get into the purposefully-complex and mind-melting financialized sorcery that creates these illusions. But why? That’s simply not what’s important to that average working American trying to get from one paycheck to the next.
What’s instead critical, I argue, is that we all collectively take a few massive steps back to see how it is all such a ruse as to be outright criminal fraud. How the foundation of our economic world, the economic swings and downturns that we have no power over yet which nonetheless hold the potential to devastate our material security, is in total an institution that needs to simply be done away with for the sake of human health and happiness moving forward into a deeply uncertain 21st century.
Let’s return to SpaceX’s valuation. Part of why that SpaceX’s rocket program is so valued has to do with growing speculation on the feasibility of extraterrestrial mining so that we can finally get one up on China and find rare Earth metals on the moon to bring back to Earth to keep killing one another.
Why? Why, in the face of such overwhelming national, international and existential threats, is bringing capitalism to the moon one of the most highly-valued ventures in the modern economy?
Because Wall Street and the corporations that comprise it in the era of late capital, a beast so depraved that it would steal indigenous people’s only water source off their own land or sell their babies contaminated formula and call all of that good business, is so untroubled by the wildly deteriorating state of the climate and human society that all it sees is new opportunities to be parasites. That’s all they see even if it causes mass death, even if it accelerates the very decline that will destroy all wealth, including their own.
No piece of recent news helps to sum this pathology up for me better than mega players like Chase Bank seeing an approaching 3C world as an opportunity to up the valuation on air conditioners: “Progress on climate change is likely to fall short of net-zero targets. We expect cooling – critical to human health and productivity in many climates – to be a potent long-term growth theme.”
That tremendous valuation of SpaceX and, by extension, Musk himself, is again something which we must firmly assert as imaginary. How do I know? Just using Musk’s own wealth as an example, on December 7th, 2025, an Investopedia report noted that Musk held the Guinness World Record for the greatest loss of personal fortune in history between 2021 and 2023, falling from a valuation of $320 billion to $138 billion.
This report was made two weeks before the entire news world exploded in reporting a variety of absurd figures on just how richedy rich the richest man who ever riched truly was now.
One might counter that this was due to market forces, so ‘naturally’ he could lose a ton of money when operating at that scale just as easily as he could make it back.
But that very notion that these hyper-financialized forces are in any way ‘natural,’ ‘common sense’ or otherwise dictated by rational forces is a form of hypernormalization. That’s Adam Curtis’s theory that in the wake of repeated global economic crises, financial crooks and tech utopians like Musk and his predecessors gave up on the ‘real world’ in favor of a ‘fake world’ designed to benefit multinational corporations through neoliberal governments.
It’s Baudrillard’s simulacrum, the myth that lies at the heart of our rapidly collapsing Western world dominated by monopoly money magnates who carry on as if we don’t now know that the Western Antarctic ice sheet is going to melt no matter what we do.
Because, again, what does Musk actually do? What does the world’s richest man actually make? Cars that are utter eyesores on American roads, and dangerous ones at that? The ongoing privatization of America’s once proud space program, and all so that the ultrawealthy can become space tourists, mine extraterrestrial minerals, and one day colonize a new world for them to destroy? Biotechnologies that would further dehumanize and commodify the few remaining shreds of human dignity we have to give up?
There’s simply too much. One could go on and on the failures and personal imperfections of who is supposedly the pinnacle of the modern man under our system of fictitious economic activity.
Like any capitalist, he’s quite the fan of intimidating and attempting to fire striking workers. Indeed, from his recent controversies surrounding Nazi sympathies to his entire family’s obscene wealth and ties to apartheid and Neo-Nazi movements to the comical yet incredibly devastating farce that was the now-apparently-non-existent Department of Government Efficiency, we can ride that train forever, for another 10,000 words, for a book series.
Truly, that people like Musk, Trump, or various other power brokers who visit incredible suffering and violence onto the world are in positions of power as they are is itself a demoralizing force on society.
Children see this, they see the embarrassing behavior, they see the total lack of accountability, and they juxtapose it with their positions of incredible privilege and understandably conjecture that, actually, nobody respectable is at the wheel. That being a ‘good person’ actually doesn’t matter, despite what they are raised to understand. This creates an incoherent, aimless worldview that I argue is impacting youth with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and depression.
The crisis of the
West’s institutions is also
a crisis of its leadership on a level so deep It’s spiritual.
But more important than attempting to point out all the ways in which Musk doesn’t measure up to the title one may have in their mind of the world’s richest man, or is himself an embarrassment or moral abomination, we must keep in mind that nobody should be this wealthy. Period.
That’s not merely because of the obscene inequality every billion musk adds to his fortune immediately suggests, but because we can all increasingly see that the very system that props up that wealth is itself an affront, an insult to the basic human decency of us all, to every human accomplishment of merit that we strive toward today as we attempt to live and love as ordinary human beings ought to.
In sum, Elon Musk is best understood not as an anomaly but as a product—one formed by a neoliberal political-economic order that normalizes extraction and is increasingly detached from any humanistic claim to responsibility or care.
That such wealth can accumulate at all is evidence of institutional decay. Modern Western systems have grown dependent on inflated valuations, opaque financial engineering and exploitative labor structures, even as they fail to respond meaningfully to mounting existential threats.
When viewed this way, Musk’s wealth is less a personal achievement than a structural symptom. Musk should have never been in a position for any of this to happen in the first place. If he were to disappear tomorrow, the machinery that produced him would continue to operate largely unchanged.
Because it’s not about the one evil man ruining your life. Life is not a screenplay driven by one antagonist or one disastrous presidency, whether Ronald Reagan or whatever other presidency you personally hold as the most abhorrent.
Our entire system is driven by incentives that reward excess, speed and domination, and by pathologies that do not self-correct, even as their consequences become unmistakable.
Meaningful change begins only when attention shifts away from monstrous personalities like Musk and Trump and toward the structural failures that make them possible. Until those failures are named, understood and confronted collectively, calls for accountability and reform will remain out of reach.
