What I usually hear from progressives, when the question comes up of why it's problematic for people like Elon Musk to have a trillion dollars, is that this means he can buy his preferred political outcomes. I think this can be argued against, but you do have to argue against it.
It wasn't the central focus of this piece but I do get at that here: "If we had a system where Elon was still CEO of SpaceX and Tesla but simply had to redistribute more of his shares and make many more billionares, would that really change how much political power he has? I doubt it. He’d still get to decide whether Ukraine or Russia gets Starlink access."
Basically, I'm skeptical that Elon Musk's political power has gone up at all before/after the SpaceX IPO.
Maybe. But the IPO itself was an expression of power. You and I are now buying shares in this money-losing company because Musk strong-armed the indexes into changing their rules to include him and only him. Also, McDonnell Douglas doesn't get to decide whether to sell planes to Russia or Ukraine. Musk having that kind of power is pretty extraordinary.
Yeah, I found that an odd point for her to make given the current political environment. It may be true that this IPO would have made Musk a trillionaire regardless of if he had dropped a quarter billion to help Trump get elected, but to see Musk become $600 billion richer since the election while receiving choice federal contracts and gutting federal programs he dislikes (and now forcing federal employees with TSP retirement accounts to invest in his company) understandably has made inequality politically salient.
Trying to convince Americans not to believe their lying eyes when they can plainly see that our politics have become an unabashedly mask-off pay-to-play graft scheme is tonedeaf. Economic growth is good, but most Americans aren't feeling the benefits. Instead, they see tech CEOs on the dais at Trump's inauguration, accompanying Trump to China, and openly threatening to destroy the labor market with data centers paid for with tax-breaks and resource costs on the American voters' dime.
I really don't understand this reply. If we redistributed Musk's shares, of course he would have less ability to unilaterally decide to cut off Ukraine or Russia.
I don't think it went up much because of the IPO but that's because his wealth did not actually meaningfully increase with the IPO, the price is only up about 20% compared to recent private market trading.
If you're saying that if SpaceX lost half its value then Elon wouldn't have any less power, I think that's implausible.
Furthermore, while it might be true that Elon has maxed out the power available from money, that doesn't really say anything about inequality, since the amount of power he has by having 50+ billion dollars is a huge amount relative to even ordinary rich people, even if he doesn't have 20 times as much by having 20 times as much money.
This is the first poorly thought out piece I’ve read in the Argument and I’ve read almost all of them. Sure, we aren’t going to curtail Musk’s power over his companies by sharing his distended dragon-horde of wealth with more people. That’s not the point of the critique! That straw-man has nothing to do with the question of whether one person should have so much material wealth that he becomes capable of exerting power over people who did not elect him to office. Whether you want to listen to Lincoln “that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent” or to Kanye “no one man should have all this power” the point is not about his companies it is about his money granting him access to the halls of power that were meant to be reserved for The People’s Representatives. The fact that “DOGE” goes unmentioned in this piece is a condemnation of its drafting.
I think it is viscerally unpleasant for musk to have a trillion dollars in value that really has little to do with inequality.
Then people will then say well he doesn’t have a Scrooge Mcduck vault but he has a trillion dollars in. Well sure but the result you’d want is all of that stock in the hands of ordinary people’s retirement plans not hoarded by a founder. Then the cash value of the sale redistributed. We’d want them to be well paid employees paying a large part of that in income tax not gods amongst men.
I don’t want people to have hordes of resource of any kind.
I mean the point I usually hear from left leaning coworkers is exactly that: It's not fair that he has a trillion dollars is his dragon hoard while some of us have so little. I agree that it's unpleasant for him to be a trillionaire for many other reasons besides inequality too but I don't think that's the most popular argument out there. Hence this piece
Writing a blog post that ends on a reduction ad absurdism should be embarrassing. But to argue in good faith, Elon used government subsidies to gain wealth, used that wealth to wreck havoc on systems that are designed to check wealth inequality, and then used his political popularity in some circles from doing so to become the world's first trillionaire. If you don't get why both the means and the outcome are problematic, I don't know what to say.
I subscribed because I was triggered by this logic. the criticism of Elon doesn't even address the millions he has killed by throwing usaid in the wood chipper. yes he hasn't gained much marginal power and your point about the valuation going down on SpaceX doesn't make sense when Tesla is already propped up as a meme stock and he has installed his puppets in government and trying to take over more governmentsnto buy his services.
he dropped $250 million to get trump elected and has had a great return on that.
I don't understand the point of the argument if you can't even call out someone for their straight up crimes.
your piece also excludes the possibility that he continues to install anti union or workers rights governments which does directly increase inequality.
in the past marginal tax rates were higher and union membership was too.
I agree that people are not materially deprived because Elon Musk is a trillionaire (mostly on paper). However, the fact that he is a trillionaire raises outrage and may lead to poor policy down the road when our politics are motivated by revenge on the wealthy. Not suggesting that there be a cap on anyone's wealth but the outrage is real.
Is there any concentration of wealth you would find objectionable? If one person owned 99% of all capital, would that be fine as long as GDP kept growing? If not, well then why is a concentration larger than the Roman Empire's* acceptable?
My view is pretty simple. Even if you buy that CEOs are all great visionaries who really do produce 300 times the value of the median worker, and even if you don't think tycoons threaten democratic self-government, still: the amount a CEO should be paid is the minimum required to incentivize them to do the work instead of something else. Any more than that is waste. Since CEOs are being paid many multiples of that value, what we have is a market failure, and market failures should be crushed - er, addressed - by the state.
Does Milan actually believe that his piece documenting the leftward swing of the party means that a centrist Democrat can't win? Then he's (fortunately) badly mistaken. Democrats want to win in 2028 far more than anything else. A centrist Democrat that can demonstrate they're the most likely to win (which should be eminently doable since it's true) will win the primary.
The fact that left wing Democrats can win in New York and California simply doesn't tell you much.
Yeah, I do actually believe that. I agree that the winner of the 2028 primary might well be the person who makes the best electability argument. That is what happened in the 2020 primary. But it’s also true that Joe Biden took positions well to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2008.
Right now if you go by the polls, Democratic voters think that Gavin Newsom is the most electable 2028 candidate. If you ask the pundits and DC types, the emerging consensus seems to be that Jon Ossoff is the best person to nominate. It is true that neither Newsom nor Ossoff are quite so left-wing as AOC. But they’re not moderates either. They’re both firmly to the left of the median voter, in a way that Bill Clinton or Al Gore or John Kerry were not.
Fair enough. Though I will say that it's not unheard of for publications to run provocative headlines that don't fully jibe with what the ensuing article actually says. And your piece, while including lots of interesting polling responses, was ultimately incredibly squishy in its conclusions.
Here was your final paragraph--
"When you’re in the minority of your own party, your optimal strategy changes. You become the supplicant. You can’t run roughshod over your factional rivals anymore. You have to meet them where they are — not where you wish they were."--
and I have no idea what operationalizing that conclusion would even mean.
In any case, I think smart candidates will basically ignore that type of advice. The way to be a successful Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 is not to try to triangulate yourself to the policy preferences of Democratic primary voters, almost all of which are lightly held. The path is to be the kind of politician who convinces voters that he or she is person of substance who can win.
What I usually hear from progressives, when the question comes up of why it's problematic for people like Elon Musk to have a trillion dollars, is that this means he can buy his preferred political outcomes. I think this can be argued against, but you do have to argue against it.
It wasn't the central focus of this piece but I do get at that here: "If we had a system where Elon was still CEO of SpaceX and Tesla but simply had to redistribute more of his shares and make many more billionares, would that really change how much political power he has? I doubt it. He’d still get to decide whether Ukraine or Russia gets Starlink access."
Basically, I'm skeptical that Elon Musk's political power has gone up at all before/after the SpaceX IPO.
Maybe. But the IPO itself was an expression of power. You and I are now buying shares in this money-losing company because Musk strong-armed the indexes into changing their rules to include him and only him. Also, McDonnell Douglas doesn't get to decide whether to sell planes to Russia or Ukraine. Musk having that kind of power is pretty extraordinary.
Yeah, I found that an odd point for her to make given the current political environment. It may be true that this IPO would have made Musk a trillionaire regardless of if he had dropped a quarter billion to help Trump get elected, but to see Musk become $600 billion richer since the election while receiving choice federal contracts and gutting federal programs he dislikes (and now forcing federal employees with TSP retirement accounts to invest in his company) understandably has made inequality politically salient.
Trying to convince Americans not to believe their lying eyes when they can plainly see that our politics have become an unabashedly mask-off pay-to-play graft scheme is tonedeaf. Economic growth is good, but most Americans aren't feeling the benefits. Instead, they see tech CEOs on the dais at Trump's inauguration, accompanying Trump to China, and openly threatening to destroy the labor market with data centers paid for with tax-breaks and resource costs on the American voters' dime.
I really don't understand this reply. If we redistributed Musk's shares, of course he would have less ability to unilaterally decide to cut off Ukraine or Russia.
I don't think it went up much because of the IPO but that's because his wealth did not actually meaningfully increase with the IPO, the price is only up about 20% compared to recent private market trading.
If you're saying that if SpaceX lost half its value then Elon wouldn't have any less power, I think that's implausible.
Furthermore, while it might be true that Elon has maxed out the power available from money, that doesn't really say anything about inequality, since the amount of power he has by having 50+ billion dollars is a huge amount relative to even ordinary rich people, even if he doesn't have 20 times as much by having 20 times as much money.
This is the first poorly thought out piece I’ve read in the Argument and I’ve read almost all of them. Sure, we aren’t going to curtail Musk’s power over his companies by sharing his distended dragon-horde of wealth with more people. That’s not the point of the critique! That straw-man has nothing to do with the question of whether one person should have so much material wealth that he becomes capable of exerting power over people who did not elect him to office. Whether you want to listen to Lincoln “that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent” or to Kanye “no one man should have all this power” the point is not about his companies it is about his money granting him access to the halls of power that were meant to be reserved for The People’s Representatives. The fact that “DOGE” goes unmentioned in this piece is a condemnation of its drafting.
I think it is viscerally unpleasant for musk to have a trillion dollars in value that really has little to do with inequality.
Then people will then say well he doesn’t have a Scrooge Mcduck vault but he has a trillion dollars in. Well sure but the result you’d want is all of that stock in the hands of ordinary people’s retirement plans not hoarded by a founder. Then the cash value of the sale redistributed. We’d want them to be well paid employees paying a large part of that in income tax not gods amongst men.
I don’t want people to have hordes of resource of any kind.
I mean the point I usually hear from left leaning coworkers is exactly that: It's not fair that he has a trillion dollars is his dragon hoard while some of us have so little. I agree that it's unpleasant for him to be a trillionaire for many other reasons besides inequality too but I don't think that's the most popular argument out there. Hence this piece
I mean the response that it’s not cash just doesn’t seem reasonable. The idea that ownership of a company makes it better is weird.
Writing a blog post that ends on a reduction ad absurdism should be embarrassing. But to argue in good faith, Elon used government subsidies to gain wealth, used that wealth to wreck havoc on systems that are designed to check wealth inequality, and then used his political popularity in some circles from doing so to become the world's first trillionaire. If you don't get why both the means and the outcome are problematic, I don't know what to say.
I subscribed because I was triggered by this logic. the criticism of Elon doesn't even address the millions he has killed by throwing usaid in the wood chipper. yes he hasn't gained much marginal power and your point about the valuation going down on SpaceX doesn't make sense when Tesla is already propped up as a meme stock and he has installed his puppets in government and trying to take over more governmentsnto buy his services.
he dropped $250 million to get trump elected and has had a great return on that.
I don't understand the point of the argument if you can't even call out someone for their straight up crimes.
your piece also excludes the possibility that he continues to install anti union or workers rights governments which does directly increase inequality.
in the past marginal tax rates were higher and union membership was too.
I agree that people are not materially deprived because Elon Musk is a trillionaire (mostly on paper). However, the fact that he is a trillionaire raises outrage and may lead to poor policy down the road when our politics are motivated by revenge on the wealthy. Not suggesting that there be a cap on anyone's wealth but the outrage is real.
Is there any concentration of wealth you would find objectionable? If one person owned 99% of all capital, would that be fine as long as GDP kept growing? If not, well then why is a concentration larger than the Roman Empire's* acceptable?
My view is pretty simple. Even if you buy that CEOs are all great visionaries who really do produce 300 times the value of the median worker, and even if you don't think tycoons threaten democratic self-government, still: the amount a CEO should be paid is the minimum required to incentivize them to do the work instead of something else. Any more than that is waste. Since CEOs are being paid many multiples of that value, what we have is a market failure, and market failures should be crushed - er, addressed - by the state.
*https://phys.org/news/2025-04-economic-inequality-roman-empire-han.html
Does Milan actually believe that his piece documenting the leftward swing of the party means that a centrist Democrat can't win? Then he's (fortunately) badly mistaken. Democrats want to win in 2028 far more than anything else. A centrist Democrat that can demonstrate they're the most likely to win (which should be eminently doable since it's true) will win the primary.
The fact that left wing Democrats can win in New York and California simply doesn't tell you much.
Yeah, I do actually believe that. I agree that the winner of the 2028 primary might well be the person who makes the best electability argument. That is what happened in the 2020 primary. But it’s also true that Joe Biden took positions well to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2008.
Right now if you go by the polls, Democratic voters think that Gavin Newsom is the most electable 2028 candidate. If you ask the pundits and DC types, the emerging consensus seems to be that Jon Ossoff is the best person to nominate. It is true that neither Newsom nor Ossoff are quite so left-wing as AOC. But they’re not moderates either. They’re both firmly to the left of the median voter, in a way that Bill Clinton or Al Gore or John Kerry were not.
Fair enough. Though I will say that it's not unheard of for publications to run provocative headlines that don't fully jibe with what the ensuing article actually says. And your piece, while including lots of interesting polling responses, was ultimately incredibly squishy in its conclusions.
Here was your final paragraph--
"When you’re in the minority of your own party, your optimal strategy changes. You become the supplicant. You can’t run roughshod over your factional rivals anymore. You have to meet them where they are — not where you wish they were."--
and I have no idea what operationalizing that conclusion would even mean.
In any case, I think smart candidates will basically ignore that type of advice. The way to be a successful Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 is not to try to triangulate yourself to the policy preferences of Democratic primary voters, almost all of which are lightly held. The path is to be the kind of politician who convinces voters that he or she is person of substance who can win.