Economist Justin Wolfers told MS NOW on Saturday that Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire signals

JUSTIN WOLFERS: I’m not going to start with Musk being worth a trillion. I’m going to go back to 2024, when he invested $ 250 million in the American election. That was almost certainly enough to win Donald Trump the election. Trump’s winning margin across the three swing states was only 230,000 votes, so you needed to switch 115,000 voters. If Musk’s money, even if he was so inefficient, it cost $ 1,000 per vote switch, Musk’s money won the election for Donald Trump. That’s scary. Fact number one: We’ve already got an oligarch who put a billionaire in charge of our country. Let me blow you away with fact number two. This is where you need to understand the difference between $ 1 trillion – that’s what the bloke’s got – and $ 250 million, which is what he spent. It’s not 1% of his wealth. It’s not 0.1% of his wealth. It’s 0.025% of his wealth. Musk bought one American election and has enough money left over to buy another 3,999 elections. So this, I think – we could do the politics of resentment. You know, I don’t like a bloke having that much money. He makes me feel bad. But we don’t need to. What we really need to do is talk about protecting democracy in an age of this sort of concentration of wealth. EUGENE DANIELS, MS NOW: Well, Justin, this just made me very angry talking about that, actually. Not at you, but at our country and the fact that this is even possible. I want to pull up some stats from Inequality.org and the Federal Reserve from last year. The top 1% in the United States has 31% of the wealth share. The bottom 90% have 32.6% of the wealth share. And on Musk specifically, SpaceX and the reason that he became a trillionaire, it seems, is because he was taking on business that used to be in the public’s – that used to be public, that used to be done by the federal government, right? Like space exploration used to be something that, in partnership with private companies at times, but that the United States government led on. And other than the issues with democracy, which are huge, what does it say that one person in this country and on this planet could be a trillionaire, when you look at the kinds of wealth inequality that we have in this country and around the world? WOLFERS: Yeah. So it’s a funny thing, inequality. Wow. So much here this morning. He is sort of a – it’s got this sort of end-of-the-looking-glass feel about it. So sometimes you’ll look at the top 10%. You’ll say, Oh, the top 10%, they’re so much richer than the other 90%. Then you look inside the top 10%, you discover the top 1% are so much wealthier than the next 9%, the rest of the top 10%. Then you look inside the top 1%, you discover the top 0.1%, and so on. And so we have this extraordinary right tail to our wealth distribution. I’m going to try and be as economist-y as I can, and sort of on the one hand and on the other hand to it. You ask the question: Musk is doing a lot of stuff that used to be done by the federal government. I think the fundamental question is, is he doing it more efficiently? And I think that’s a very real question. There are some things where we think the federal government does an incredible job. There are a lot of things where, for instance, a lot of our health research, the federal government basically pushes that out to the universities, and it does that through funding. And Musk is basically bidding against them for a lot of these contracts. So if you go over to Europe, one of the things they don’t have is any of this incredible concentration, but also they don’t have any of our incredible companies that are inventing the next century. JONATHAN CAPEHART, MS NOW: Justin, we spent a lot of time talking about the fact that Elon Musk, by buying elections, becoming a trillionaire, the gap, the yawning gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. I’m going to put up this approval rating, Trump’s approval rating on the economy, and it hits an all-time low. This is from YouGov/Economist from earlier this month: a disapproval of 63%. Only 30% of the American people approve of the president’s handling of the economy. I’m trying to craft a question here to marry the fact that we now have the world’s first trillionaire, and behind him are a bunch of billionaires and multimillionaires, and then there are millions more Americans – and if you want to put in the rest of the people around the world who are not living that way and actually are living tougher, harder, more expensive lives – do you think that the anger that’s out there about what’s happening in the economy among the rest of us is going to bubble up and maybe not affect Elon Musk, but might affect not just the president, but his party that’s been in control here in Washington? JUSTIN WOLFERS: Right. So I spend a little bit of time going and giving speeches to rooms full of very rich people – Wall Street, blah, blah. I shouldn’t have admitted that. Can you – this isn’t live TV, right? And there’s a sense that they understand the system has served them very well, and therefore they need to ensure the stability of the system. But there’s also a sense in the last decade that some of our elites have given up on that game, and I think Musk is one of them. I mean, one of the things I’ve actually always admired about the United States is the super-rich here feel that it’s their role to give back. There’s tremendous philanthropic giving, much more here than in many, many other countries. And so we actually have an enormous number of incredibly admirable billionaires who’ve really taken their responsibility seriously. And then you’ve got clowns. And at the moment, Musk is a clown. This bloke has walked into our federal government, ripped it up without any understanding. He ripped up USAID, a decision that may have cost literally hundreds of thousands of lives of the most vulnerable, and sort of jokes about it as if it doesn’t matter, and who has reshaped America’s immigration policy in explicitly racist ways. So maybe the inequality is here to stay. But maybe what we can ask for is a class of responsible billionaires. Again, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? [HOST]: Yeah. The admirable billionaires list is getting shorter and shorter.
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