It’s official. The Initial Public Offering (IPO) for SpaceX this week showed Elon Musk’s rocket company worth somewhere in the vicinity of $2.1 trillion dollars. Given that on Friday, June 12, the first day of trading, shares went from $150 and ended around $161, Musk’s majority share in the company (as well as Tesla) means that his personal wealth is now more than one trillion dollars.
Democrats and the left are mortified. As usual, however, their performative outrage doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense if you take their stated reasons for it seriously. Their reaction makes much more sense if you see them as motivated by personal envy and frustration at the fact that Musk made his wealth by making real things that benefit the country. He makes products that work, employs over 100,000 people (and many more through second-order effects) and has made thousands of them wealthy for their labor.
Forbes immediately published a collection of the most unhinged responses from the usual suspects. Senator Liz “Fauxcahontas” Warren (estimated net worth: $8 million) immediately lamented that the “typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth.” Senator Ed Markey (estimated net worth: $2.5 million) groused, “While working people struggle to get by, the billionaire class is becoming the TRILLIONAIRE class.”
Of course, there are many, many more examples of politicians and political activists who are multimillionaires but who, like Liz and Ed, are mysteriously no longer worried about millionaires but instead only billionaires and trillionaires. Never mind that these estimated net worths would put them in the top 10 percent (Markey) and top five percent (Warren) of Americans in 2026.
Representative Ro Khanna is perhaps the most egregious. He jumped in to wail that “Musk is worth more than South Africa’s GDP” and that “Wealth inequality is the moral failure of our time.” These complaints are better read as laments that the vulgar Musk, so clearly beneath them in their own minds, is worth more than they are.
One wonders if Khanna lashes himself in penitence at night for his own estimated $232.7 million fortune. Of course, even if one takes his claimed net worth of $27 million as more accurate (the sticking points seem to be how much his wife’s family fortune provides the couple), this puts Khanna firmly in the top one percent of Americans.
I have yet to hear of the Khanna family divesting their own wealth to others less fortunate as he seems to want Musk to do – or rather, as he wants the government to do to Musk. It’s a safe bet that he really is worried about “wealth inequality.” Yet the inequality he fears is that between himself, a one-percenter, and those in the top point-one percent.
That wouldn’t sound good, however. So, rich Democrats such as Khanna and Bernie Sanders have offered a proposal for a five percent tax on wealth that could in one year, Khanna insists, provide “free public college & trade school,” “$10/day childcare,” and “Special-needs education nationwide.” Markey claims taxing Musk alone “would fund every community health center in America for the next 26 years.” Going off the demagogue script, he intones: “I’ll say it again. Tax the rich.”
To those born yesterday, this no doubt sounds great. But two problems pop up for anybody who has any experience of the world.
The first is that our government doesn’t use our money very wisely now. Democrats really have no interest in stopping the massive fraud scandals now engulfing Medicaid, hospice care, and countless other federal programs. And what doesn’t go to fund the Somali “Learing Center” will no doubt go to some other boondoggle that doesn’t produce anything.
Anyone remember how Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s three years and $7.5 billion of work on electric vehicle charging stations only resulted in eight operational stations by 2024 out of a proposed 500 thousand to be completed by 2030? Nobody ought to trust the grandiose promises of Democrats about what they can do if they were to have more money. They, after all, are the ones who put up most of the red tape that then excuses their failure to finish anything they start.
The second, and bigger, problem with those braying to “tax the rich” is that they seem not to understand the nature of wealth today—and, especially, Elon Musk’s wealth. Democrats like to paint a picture of the “rich” as if they were Donald Duck’s uncle, Scrooge McDuck. Uncle Scrooge kept all his money in a vault, to which he would retire to bathe in his coins, paper notes, and jewels.
While Musk doesn’t likely sweat eating out on the weekend or traveling, he doesn’t keep his wealth in a vault. Nor is he “hoarding” the world’s resources, as so many leftists keep claiming. As Musk said in an X post in February about objections to his wealth, “My ‘net worth’ is almost entirely due to my ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. I have <0.1% that is cash.”
In other words, Musk would rather keep pouring his own money into the stocks that fund the amazing work he’s doing with electric cars, robots, satellites, rocket ships, and more.
Responding to a Bernie Sanders statement on the dangers to “our democracy… when one man, who contributed $290 million to get Trump elected, becomes $700 billion richer since Trump’s election,” the X account @tetsuoai replied that this one man is: “a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.” He concludes, “You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.”
Americans can be grateful to Musk for all these developments that enrich us. They can also be grateful monetarily. In that February post about his wealth, Musk said that “Tesla and SpaceX employees all receive stock/options and Tesla is >80% owned by retail investors and index/pension funds, so value increases apply >80% to them.” That list means that ordinary people like you and me with 401k and 403b plans that invest in Musk’s businesses all benefit. It also means that Musk’s employees benefit the most of all.
SpaceX employs about 22,000 people. Among all his companies, Musk is responsible for over 127,000 jobs. Given that these employees receive stock options and can opt to buy more with their paychecks, Musk has done far more to improve the lives of the blue-collar workers Democrats claim to love.
Indeed, mainstream outlets reported that the SpaceX IPO minted at least 4,000 new millionaires among current and former SpaceX employees who took stock options, including welders, machinists, and cafeteria workers. Another 400 employees are now centimillionaires—they crossed the $100 million threshold.
An economy isn’t a pie of fixed size. It’s something that can be grown. Elon Musk has increased the size of the pie, allowing countless people to eat much better. It’s no wonder Democrats are eating their hearts out.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.
