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Elon Musk Discovers What Hierarchy Actually Means | Techdirt
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Musk was worth something like 200 billion when he bought Twitter. Now he's worth possibly 500.
He's looking at 100b per year growth with those numbers. Although he may have $1t payout in the near future.
To put that in perspective he has more money than all but 55 countries, soon to possibly be only 30 countries.
He may bitch about his company losing a contract... But the guy soon will have enough money to sink entire economies because our idiocy.
Its not possible to be ethical with that much money.
Globally, the median household income is $3k. If you have $500B, you would have to lose - every single day - the combined lifetime income of a household over 500 generations, just to break even at 5% interest. Thats further back in time than writing, the wheel, rice, potatoes or chicken.
Thats a level of being shielded from the consequences of your actions that can only ever produce evil.
The thing to remember is that the money there isn't actually cash. It's all just value based on the companies he owns shares in. If the share price plummets, so does his net worth. Several of those public companies are massive bubbles.
SpaceX is private, and thus much more obscured, but it also is apparently profitable while offering services cheaper than the competition, and that was before Starlink and its public sales and profitability. They actually have spearheaded things that other companies are now trying to copy to stay relevant. And yes, I know there are other smaller startups doing similar work, that's not really who SpaceX is competing with however, they're competing with the likes of Lockheed and Boeing.
It's the other companies like Twitter and Tesla that are propped up by speculation, bullshit, and repetitive lies without consequences from shareholders.
That doesn't really matter. He uses money to influence outcomes. After reaching a certain networth, you do that simply by having it. You move whole markets just by entering or exiting them. The fact that it's tied up in specific things only means he's influencing those specific things.
And he still has yet to produce anything of value. Let alone worth anywhere close to the amount of money that was invested or granted publically in his ventures.