Who’s Afraid of a Trillionaire?

Early this year, we learned that Elon Musk may become the first trillionaire in world history.

My friends on the left of the political spectrum have been fuming about this story as the ultimate example of the rich getting richer and the poor getting crumbs.

When I appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” not long ago, Bill questioned me about the prospect of Musk becoming a trillionaire. “Isn’t that excessive?” he asked.

Similar questions about the super wealthy have been asked throughout American history. The first multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, amassed his fortune in the fur trade and in Manhattan real estate in the first half of the 19th century.

The first billionaire in America was John D. Rockefeller – arguably America’s greatest business mind. As the owner of Standard Oil in the early 20th century, he brought access to cheap energy to the masses. Yet the government sued him and broke up his company.

The first centibillionaire – someone with a net worth of $100 billion – in America was Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft in the 1970s and supplier of the world’s first dominant computer operating system. The government sued him too, as the price of computer software fell by 90%.

In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon and went on to become the second centibillionaire by selling and delivering things to Americans online at very low prices.

Progressives are horrified by the news of billionaires and the imminent arrival of trillionaires. Calls for imposing a steeply progressive wealth tax on billionaires (and trillionaires) are getting louder every day.

Notice that all the men of great wealth, and almost all of America’s other super wealthy throughout history – the Vanderbilts, J.P. Morgans, Andrew Carnegies, and Henry Fords – built spectacularly successful companies out of nothing, and even invented whole new industries.

They didn’t inherit the money. They earned it themselves. Yet still they are disparaged as robber barons. They revolutionized and democratized energy production, railroads, cars, steel production and financial services.

Now the new multibillionaire class is making the digital age accessible to everyone. It’s no accident that we all have access to computers, AI, search engines, smartphones, MRIs and the like. Even the poorest among us have access to more goods and services.

Thanks to the genius of people like Musk, in a few years each of us will have our own robot who will do our bidding: Make the bed, fix our dinner, drive us to the movies, rake the leaves, and buy the groceries.

One of the most influential economic studies of modern times came from economist William Nordhaus, who estimated that consumers capture about 95% of the economic benefits from innovation – the social “surplus” – while inventors and entrepreneurs capture less than 5%.

In other words, for every billion dollars that Musk earns from his satellites and electric vehicles, everyone else in society is a combined $20 billion richer over time. Michael Jordan, Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift are billionaires, but the value of the joy they have brought to the citizens of the world is in the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars.

So just who owes whom money?

Someone show me any social welfare government program in American history that produces those kinds of benefits to mankind. Even Gates has a $100 billion charitable foundation, but the impact of its gifts and initiatives is dwarfed by the value added by his creation of Microsoft.

Here’s another way to think about it: Who do you think would put a trillion dollars to better use: Musk or the blowhards in Congress and bureaucrats in Washington? The question answers itself.

Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.

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