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.
The intuitive case for your view of Musk's influence is strong, but the empirical case is very weak, so I appreciate that the authors did not spend much time refuting it.
I understand you would have liked the Demsas to address your view in greater detail, and maybe you need to hear it from her, but political scientists and social critics have studied this question closely for decades. I'd start with widely-respected writers like Mancur Olson or Steven Teles, who both conclude that power is incredibly fragmented and that Americans overrate the degree to which power is concentrated because we think on the wrong scale. When you look at influence and the exercise of power at a high resolution, you see that it's dispersed across bureaucracies, courts, local governments, donors, activists, media organizations, interest groups, and competing economic actors.
But even without going into that level of detail, the existence of billionaires does not eliminate political disagreement among billionaires. Take any of Musk's controversial priorities and you'll easily find equivalent amounts of money opposed to them.
Perhaps the first few months of Trump 2 would have turned out differently if he'd appointed someone else. But the (painful though it is to say) democratically-elected president wanted to inflict chaos: would we have been better off if Russell Vought or Stephen Miller had run DOGE?
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.
The thing about the indices is not really true. It would have been a problem if S&P had changed their rules for the S&P500 but they did not, so SpaceX will not be listed until 2027, and only if they have 4 quarters of positive earnings, same as it would have been in the past.
Russell and CRSP did change their rules. But most people are using their indices to get total stock market exposure. Because these indices are much wider and because not much of SpaceX is actually floated, its weight is only 0.1%.
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.
Not true. In the US shareholders have almost no ability to influence management. As long as Musk was still CEO he could do more or less whatever he wanted.
And yet, strangely, we don't see the CEO of Raytheon having private negotiations with Putin. But I'm an empirically minded person. Let's try the experiment and see how it goes.
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.
Is that what happened? Are Trump's most consequential polices Musk's preferred outcomes, let alone his doings?
If I was working backwards from that theory, looking at Trumps advisors, I would have to conclude that Stephen Miller is the trillionaire. His perferred versions of tarriffs, border enforcement and immigration enforcement are in effect despite their general unpopularity.
musk making , $600 billion dollars is pretty consequential.
and musk mostly agrees with Stephen miller on border and immigration enforcement. this is a silly comment to somehow claim Elon didn't get what he wanted.
Elon wanted tariffs, visa restrictions and green energy money clawed back?
Having any policy at all that a billionaire agrees with is hardly proof the billionaires are running the Government. If this billionaire theory is so useful, go look a the 10 richest people in the US, and tell me what policy preference of theirs that I can expect to be enacted shortly.
Elon making $600 billion dollars and having an anti workers rights administration is fine for him with losing money on green energy credits. the tradeoff is still hugely in his favor. Elon is also intensely transphobic and xenophobic literally pushing great replacement theory.
your top ten billionaire comment would make sense if the other billionaires had donated to trump directly as much as he did.
mark Zuckerberg has cozied up to the administration and is advocating for section 230 reform to block competitors. the billionaires want to crush workers rights. keep taxes low and score government contracts.
I could also point to the literal billionaires in government appointed by trump. yes some left. but like Elon still talks to trump.
What is the connection between SpaceX's IPO and Elon's involvement in politics?
The logic seems to be: Elon does bad things, Elon donated to Trump, Elon is a billionaire, therefore bad billionaires control the Government. What is the proposal here, make the Elon is Bad Bill that says he can't donate or advocate political causes?
Actions > Outrage. Everyone is outraged about everything but no one has an realistic proposals, or any useful predictions from their theories to act on.
"I just don’t think material inequality is a good way to organize one’s political thinking."
Exactly right. Because it's not based on real concern for anyone's wellbeing, but on envy, or specifically in the case of Musk, political partisanship.
Let's not forget that Musk was once thought of as the wonder boy, and not coincidentally a registered Democrat and a significant donor to Democratic candidates for most of his early career.
Then he got involved in right wing politics, taking over the Twitter propaganda machine and supporting Trump. Suddenly, he was considered a threat to democracy and a clueless business owner. An amazing transformation!
But how many of the same people who now clutch their pearls over Musk do the same about George Soros, who has spent over 2 billion dollars on elections and political advocacy? Or Tom Steyer who has spent half a billion on his own political campaigns, including more than $200M in his recent run for California governor? Did anyone wring their hands over the fact that 83 billionaires financially supported Harris in the 2024 presidential election?
Except for a handful of economic wonks, complaints about inequality are not about inequality. They're about who the rich people are and who they support. The filthy rich are A-OK as long as they wear the right political jersey.
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 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.
Elon Musk was able to use his power to change IPO rules around index funds essentially forcing me to own it before the waiting period was over and also was able to use his political power to take a successful company, and allow them to merge with a much less successful company, xAI, without any scrutiny.
You are way underestimating the way Elon uses his power.
Focusing on Musk and billionaires is a symptom of liberals and the left not having the courage to argue that higher taxes on the middle class is a valuable thing that the middle class should want to do because of what it gets in return. Effectively they've agreed with the rightwing demonization of taxes and government. Liberals in particular have a difficult time arguing for it because they believe what we spend on should be decided by elites and that populist choices would be bad. And they might! But the status quo is worse.
Truly curious. What would a higher tax on the middle class provide? In the current US tax code and budgetary infrastructure, it seems like it would just funnel more money to the upper classes, and fund more wars. From what I’ve learned about taxes in the US, the wealth of the middle class was essentially slowly gutted and funneled up starting in the 70s. (e.g. Lack of tax loophole closures from Congress for 50+ years) And to me appears to be what caused this whole TrElonnaire mess.
"Trillionaire" specifically is not the problem. But Musk spent a quarter of a million on electing Donald Trump in 2024, a basically negligible amount of money to him, and was rewarded by Donald Trump letting him run wild in the federal government and, among other things, destroy USAID, leading to untold unnecessary amounts of material deprevation and deaths. His regulating of Starlink to affect the war in Ukraine is also a massive amount of power for a nonstate actor to have.
If Musk or any other extremely rich person was willing to spend their time counting their billions/trillions and not interfering in politics, that would perhaos be OK. But that is not a world we live in. They guys are increasingly trying to use their wealth to redefine what it is to be an American.
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.
"... the amount a CEO should be paid is the minimum required to incentivize them to do the work..."
And that's exactly how it does work. If SpaceX has a job opening for a technician, the position may offer $100,000 and get up to 4,000 applications. The company has all the leverage. They're willing to pay $100,000 and not a penny more. But if the company wants Elon Musk as CEO, and they specifically don't want anyone else, which is exactly the situation, then Musk has all the leverage. He demands billions and the company has to pay it. That IS the minimum to get Musk.
You earn what you are in a position to command. The same holds true for any job, or anything, anywhere in the economy. What is a painting worth? Exactly what someone is willing to pay for it, $10 for one at the county fair, $450M for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. Soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo is the world's highest-paid athlete, earning an estimated $300 million annually. Is he worth it? He is if he can command it, and he can.
None of this is market failure. The market is working exactly how it's meant to work. It may seem out of line to you, but it's the same market dynamic that prevents milk from costing a thousand dollars a gallon. Because no one would pay that. But Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve Whiskey? That can easily go for a thousand or more a bottle. Because ... people are willing to pay it.
Musk’s compensation was found by a judge to be clearly in excess of what was necessary to motivate him, and also it is irrational to think you need him specifically, but neither of those things is relevant to my point. You’re just describing the mechanism of the market failure. If all income over 1m was taxed at 95%, Musk would still be working for SpaceX. Just for $1m. The difference between that and his actual compensation is pure waste.
If you're referring to Tesla, you fail to disclose that shareholders voted to reapprove the pay package and the Delaware Supreme Court struck down the lower court's ruling. And that's irrelevant to *my* point. I think paying $450M for a painting, any painting, is absurd. But it's not my decision to make. And you don't get to decide what someone else's pay package is worth, what is rational, or what constitutes waste. You're describing an idealized market that does not exist.
Lol, ok here's your disclosure: "Of particular note, the Supreme Court’s opinion did not address the trial court’s rulings going to liability: whether Musk was a controlling stockholder for purposes of the compensation package, whether Musk and the Tesla board of directors had breached their fiduciary duties in implementing the compensation package, and whether the compensation package was unfair."
Of course existing shareholders have an interest in keeping as much of the company as possible locked up in Musk for years. It's like a group of suburban homeowners voting to keep half the town's land part of the private grounds of a single mogul's estate instead of partitioning it for development.
I'm saying it would be better if it weren't people beholden to musk. his brother, a guy who is a former Tesla employee and other people who will always support Elon aren't a real market for his value. your point about markets falls apart when the board is independent in name only and doesn't actually seek to hold him accountable
Sure, if one person owned 99% of all things, it *might* be bad, but that is not the situation and I see no indication that we are headed there. In the more general case, you have a right to property and it doesn't get suspended because you have too much of it according to the covetous.
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.
A few points in response (as context, I'm a not quite 60 year old Californian who lived in Atlanta before my family moved to the Bay Area back in 1978):
- Really not a fan of Gavin (and don't think he's particularly electable for all the reasons that your former boss Matt describes). Even setting aside the fact that he doesn't really have strongly held beliefs, sleeping with a good friend and campaign manager's wife, marrying Kimberly Guilfoyle, and posing for this picture (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgOwpyPXsAIF3eS?format=jpg&name=medium) should all be disqualifying acts.
- I am a big fan of Ossoff (mostly for a variety of random personal reasons).
- I don't think it's really true that those guys are "firmly to the left of the median voter". In Gavin's case, again, it's because he doesn't really have firmly held beliefs. In Ossoff's case, it's because what makes him interesting as a candidate doesn't really map onto the left to center spectrum you're talking about.
- It's funny to see Clinton, Gore, and Kerry grouped together in the way that you did. It doesn't really map to how they were seen at the time they ran. And I think it gets to the fact that you've created a "model" for placing people on a left-right spectrum, which I don't think really reflects how voters make decisions.
If you don't already read Joe Klein at Sanity Clause, I would highly recommend. I think he does a better job than anyone else in the anti-Trump world at understanding how voters are going to perceive candidates. He's certainly not perfect (in particular, I think he's blinded himself to understanding what makes Mamdani appealing to so many folks), but I think he brings a lot of insight that I think would be a useful complement to how you think about politics.
[Note: The reply below was to an earlier version of Milan's comment which basically just said that he chose the headline he did intentionally.]
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."--
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.
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.
I think extreme inequality can create real political and social problems. But inequality often strikes me as a poor organizing principle for solving material problems.
The harder questions are how we actually pay for and deliver the things people care about.
Ironically, many of the wealthy social democracies that inequality critics point to as models rely on financing mechanisms that receive far less attention in American political debates. That conversation tends to be much less emotionally satisfying than talking about billionaires, but ultimately much more important.
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.
The intuitive case for your view of Musk's influence is strong, but the empirical case is very weak, so I appreciate that the authors did not spend much time refuting it.
I understand you would have liked the Demsas to address your view in greater detail, and maybe you need to hear it from her, but political scientists and social critics have studied this question closely for decades. I'd start with widely-respected writers like Mancur Olson or Steven Teles, who both conclude that power is incredibly fragmented and that Americans overrate the degree to which power is concentrated because we think on the wrong scale. When you look at influence and the exercise of power at a high resolution, you see that it's dispersed across bureaucracies, courts, local governments, donors, activists, media organizations, interest groups, and competing economic actors.
But even without going into that level of detail, the existence of billionaires does not eliminate political disagreement among billionaires. Take any of Musk's controversial priorities and you'll easily find equivalent amounts of money opposed to them.
Perhaps the first few months of Trump 2 would have turned out differently if he'd appointed someone else. But the (painful though it is to say) democratically-elected president wanted to inflict chaos: would we have been better off if Russell Vought or Stephen Miller had run DOGE?
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.
The thing about the indices is not really true. It would have been a problem if S&P had changed their rules for the S&P500 but they did not, so SpaceX will not be listed until 2027, and only if they have 4 quarters of positive earnings, same as it would have been in the past.
Russell and CRSP did change their rules. But most people are using their indices to get total stock market exposure. Because these indices are much wider and because not much of SpaceX is actually floated, its weight is only 0.1%.
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.
Not true. In the US shareholders have almost no ability to influence management. As long as Musk was still CEO he could do more or less whatever he wanted.
And yet, strangely, we don't see the CEO of Raytheon having private negotiations with Putin. But I'm an empirically minded person. Let's try the experiment and see how it goes.
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.
Is that what happened? Are Trump's most consequential polices Musk's preferred outcomes, let alone his doings?
If I was working backwards from that theory, looking at Trumps advisors, I would have to conclude that Stephen Miller is the trillionaire. His perferred versions of tarriffs, border enforcement and immigration enforcement are in effect despite their general unpopularity.
how are you defining consequential?
musk making , $600 billion dollars is pretty consequential.
and musk mostly agrees with Stephen miller on border and immigration enforcement. this is a silly comment to somehow claim Elon didn't get what he wanted.
Elon wanted tariffs, visa restrictions and green energy money clawed back?
Having any policy at all that a billionaire agrees with is hardly proof the billionaires are running the Government. If this billionaire theory is so useful, go look a the 10 richest people in the US, and tell me what policy preference of theirs that I can expect to be enacted shortly.
are you allergic to context?
Elon making $600 billion dollars and having an anti workers rights administration is fine for him with losing money on green energy credits. the tradeoff is still hugely in his favor. Elon is also intensely transphobic and xenophobic literally pushing great replacement theory.
your top ten billionaire comment would make sense if the other billionaires had donated to trump directly as much as he did.
mark Zuckerberg has cozied up to the administration and is advocating for section 230 reform to block competitors. the billionaires want to crush workers rights. keep taxes low and score government contracts.
I could also point to the literal billionaires in government appointed by trump. yes some left. but like Elon still talks to trump.
https://abcnews.com/US/trump-tapped-unprecedented-13-billionaires-top-administration-roles/story?id=116872968
What is the connection between SpaceX's IPO and Elon's involvement in politics?
The logic seems to be: Elon does bad things, Elon donated to Trump, Elon is a billionaire, therefore bad billionaires control the Government. What is the proposal here, make the Elon is Bad Bill that says he can't donate or advocate political causes?
Actions > Outrage. Everyone is outraged about everything but no one has an realistic proposals, or any useful predictions from their theories to act on.
there are lots of proposals. increase progressive tax rates and wealth tax is one way for example. robust regulation of securities fraud and the ftc.
you're assuming that there aren't concrete proposals to handle this.
a much more pro union next Dem administration and universal basic income pilots funded off of wealth tax.
is your argument his wealth isn't tied to inequality at all and nothing can be done?
"I just don’t think material inequality is a good way to organize one’s political thinking."
Exactly right. Because it's not based on real concern for anyone's wellbeing, but on envy, or specifically in the case of Musk, political partisanship.
Let's not forget that Musk was once thought of as the wonder boy, and not coincidentally a registered Democrat and a significant donor to Democratic candidates for most of his early career.
Then he got involved in right wing politics, taking over the Twitter propaganda machine and supporting Trump. Suddenly, he was considered a threat to democracy and a clueless business owner. An amazing transformation!
But how many of the same people who now clutch their pearls over Musk do the same about George Soros, who has spent over 2 billion dollars on elections and political advocacy? Or Tom Steyer who has spent half a billion on his own political campaigns, including more than $200M in his recent run for California governor? Did anyone wring their hands over the fact that 83 billionaires financially supported Harris in the 2024 presidential election?
Except for a handful of economic wonks, complaints about inequality are not about inequality. They're about who the rich people are and who they support. The filthy rich are A-OK as long as they wear the right political jersey.
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 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.
Elon Musk was able to use his power to change IPO rules around index funds essentially forcing me to own it before the waiting period was over and also was able to use his political power to take a successful company, and allow them to merge with a much less successful company, xAI, without any scrutiny.
You are way underestimating the way Elon uses his power.
Focusing on Musk and billionaires is a symptom of liberals and the left not having the courage to argue that higher taxes on the middle class is a valuable thing that the middle class should want to do because of what it gets in return. Effectively they've agreed with the rightwing demonization of taxes and government. Liberals in particular have a difficult time arguing for it because they believe what we spend on should be decided by elites and that populist choices would be bad. And they might! But the status quo is worse.
Truly curious. What would a higher tax on the middle class provide? In the current US tax code and budgetary infrastructure, it seems like it would just funnel more money to the upper classes, and fund more wars. From what I’ve learned about taxes in the US, the wealth of the middle class was essentially slowly gutted and funneled up starting in the 70s. (e.g. Lack of tax loophole closures from Congress for 50+ years) And to me appears to be what caused this whole TrElonnaire mess.
"Trillionaire" specifically is not the problem. But Musk spent a quarter of a million on electing Donald Trump in 2024, a basically negligible amount of money to him, and was rewarded by Donald Trump letting him run wild in the federal government and, among other things, destroy USAID, leading to untold unnecessary amounts of material deprevation and deaths. His regulating of Starlink to affect the war in Ukraine is also a massive amount of power for a nonstate actor to have.
If Musk or any other extremely rich person was willing to spend their time counting their billions/trillions and not interfering in politics, that would perhaos be OK. But that is not a world we live in. They guys are increasingly trying to use their wealth to redefine what it is to be an American.
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
"... the amount a CEO should be paid is the minimum required to incentivize them to do the work..."
And that's exactly how it does work. If SpaceX has a job opening for a technician, the position may offer $100,000 and get up to 4,000 applications. The company has all the leverage. They're willing to pay $100,000 and not a penny more. But if the company wants Elon Musk as CEO, and they specifically don't want anyone else, which is exactly the situation, then Musk has all the leverage. He demands billions and the company has to pay it. That IS the minimum to get Musk.
You earn what you are in a position to command. The same holds true for any job, or anything, anywhere in the economy. What is a painting worth? Exactly what someone is willing to pay for it, $10 for one at the county fair, $450M for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. Soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo is the world's highest-paid athlete, earning an estimated $300 million annually. Is he worth it? He is if he can command it, and he can.
None of this is market failure. The market is working exactly how it's meant to work. It may seem out of line to you, but it's the same market dynamic that prevents milk from costing a thousand dollars a gallon. Because no one would pay that. But Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve Whiskey? That can easily go for a thousand or more a bottle. Because ... people are willing to pay it.
There's a term for this: supply and demand.
Musk’s compensation was found by a judge to be clearly in excess of what was necessary to motivate him, and also it is irrational to think you need him specifically, but neither of those things is relevant to my point. You’re just describing the mechanism of the market failure. If all income over 1m was taxed at 95%, Musk would still be working for SpaceX. Just for $1m. The difference between that and his actual compensation is pure waste.
If you're referring to Tesla, you fail to disclose that shareholders voted to reapprove the pay package and the Delaware Supreme Court struck down the lower court's ruling. And that's irrelevant to *my* point. I think paying $450M for a painting, any painting, is absurd. But it's not my decision to make. And you don't get to decide what someone else's pay package is worth, what is rational, or what constitutes waste. You're describing an idealized market that does not exist.
Lol, ok here's your disclosure: "Of particular note, the Supreme Court’s opinion did not address the trial court’s rulings going to liability: whether Musk was a controlling stockholder for purposes of the compensation package, whether Musk and the Tesla board of directors had breached their fiduciary duties in implementing the compensation package, and whether the compensation package was unfair."
Of course existing shareholders have an interest in keeping as much of the company as possible locked up in Musk for years. It's like a group of suburban homeowners voting to keep half the town's land part of the private grounds of a single mogul's estate instead of partitioning it for development.
the board is musk toadies. your analogy about markets working is pretty silly when the board isn't a random group of people not beholden to musk bro.
Boards are never "random groups of people." Handing control to "random" people would be silly ... bro.
https://www.votetesla.com/meet-your-board/
I'm saying it would be better if it weren't people beholden to musk. his brother, a guy who is a former Tesla employee and other people who will always support Elon aren't a real market for his value. your point about markets falls apart when the board is independent in name only and doesn't actually seek to hold him accountable
Sure, if one person owned 99% of all things, it *might* be bad, but that is not the situation and I see no indication that we are headed there. In the more general case, you have a right to property and it doesn't get suspended because you have too much of it according to the covetous.
Property is the creation of the state, and your rights to it are whatever the current law says they are.
Property predates the state. Small children and even many animals understand the basics.
Indeed, children have the quintessentially natural conception of property: I want it. I can take it. Therefore I get it.
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.
Thanks for explaining further.
A few points in response (as context, I'm a not quite 60 year old Californian who lived in Atlanta before my family moved to the Bay Area back in 1978):
- Really not a fan of Gavin (and don't think he's particularly electable for all the reasons that your former boss Matt describes). Even setting aside the fact that he doesn't really have strongly held beliefs, sleeping with a good friend and campaign manager's wife, marrying Kimberly Guilfoyle, and posing for this picture (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgOwpyPXsAIF3eS?format=jpg&name=medium) should all be disqualifying acts.
- I am a big fan of Ossoff (mostly for a variety of random personal reasons).
- I don't think it's really true that those guys are "firmly to the left of the median voter". In Gavin's case, again, it's because he doesn't really have firmly held beliefs. In Ossoff's case, it's because what makes him interesting as a candidate doesn't really map onto the left to center spectrum you're talking about.
- It's funny to see Clinton, Gore, and Kerry grouped together in the way that you did. It doesn't really map to how they were seen at the time they ran. And I think it gets to the fact that you've created a "model" for placing people on a left-right spectrum, which I don't think really reflects how voters make decisions.
If you don't already read Joe Klein at Sanity Clause, I would highly recommend. I think he does a better job than anyone else in the anti-Trump world at understanding how voters are going to perceive candidates. He's certainly not perfect (in particular, I think he's blinded himself to understanding what makes Mamdani appealing to so many folks), but I think he brings a lot of insight that I think would be a useful complement to how you think about politics.
[Note: The reply below was to an earlier version of Milan's comment which basically just said that he chose the headline he did intentionally.]
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."--
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.
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.
I'm grateful to Jerusalem for responding to that outrage in the most constructive way possible: making an excellent argument against it.
can you point out where the alleged excellent argument is?
I agree.
I think extreme inequality can create real political and social problems. But inequality often strikes me as a poor organizing principle for solving material problems.
The harder questions are how we actually pay for and deliver the things people care about.
Ironically, many of the wealthy social democracies that inequality critics point to as models rely on financing mechanisms that receive far less attention in American political debates. That conversation tends to be much less emotionally satisfying than talking about billionaires, but ultimately much more important.
I’ve been wrestling with many of these same questions in a recent piece: https://alexvayslep.substack.com/p/the-debate-was-never-really-about?r=49h0uf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://www.wired.com/story/doj-lawyers-argue-xai-vital-national-security-naacp-lawsuit/ xai is a part of SpaceX at least the debt is. wonder why trump administration is on their side
Jerusalem gave up on supporting the half baked contrarian take I guess?
Money is power, and power should be balanced. It is a failed society that lets an individual accumulate so much power.