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What Elon Musk’s Trillion-Dollar Payday Is Costing the Rest of Us

The tech mogul will leverage the initial public offering of SpaceX into more sociopathic wealth-hoarding.

An inflatable effigy of Elon Musk in New York’s Times Square is displayed on the eve of the SpaceX IPO.

With this week’s IPO for Elon Musk’s tech megafirm SpaceX, he  is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire, thanks to generous government subsidies, years of government-funded research, and government contracts. All these public-sector boondoggles have made SpaceX successful enough to make the world’s richest man even richer.

You’d think this might cause Musk to appreciate the value of what government does. Yet the arch-right mogul is dogmatically opposed to any such concession; indeed, his high-profile and stunningly ineffectual initiative to eliminate government spending, the Department of Government Efficiency, is the reason why multiple crucial agencies and programs have decimated, including a program that worked to prevent the deadly screwworm parasite from infecting U.S. livestock. 

As Musk’s wealth multiplies, he continues to prosper on the public dime. In 2018, Musk  paid nothing in federal taxes, and because much of his wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, it can continue to grow without being taxed until he chooses to sell it. (In order to avoid taxation, billionaires like Musk sometimes take out loans using the equity they claim in their corporate properties as collateral.) The Securities and Exchange Commission settled with Musk for $1.5 million over charges that he failed to properly disclose his purchase of Twitter shares in 2022—a large civil penalty for the SEC, but chump change relative to the $150 million he may have gained through the late disclosure, much less compared to his overall net worth. 

The Twitter agreement came after Musk had battled with the SEC for years, settling in 2018 on securities fraud charges, and generally thumbing his nose at any effort to restrain him. Given all of this, it seems fair to say that his overall orientation toward government is that it’s an entity ripe for plunder. In any instance when it does not contribute directly to his personal wealth, he is happy to weaken, if not destroy it. In a just world, someone who has benefited as much as Musk has from government resources would be compelled to put money back into federal coffers via taxation, but tax avoidance is the favored sport of billionaires. 

What Musk has contributed to the public good is minimal compared to the scale of this pillaging.  Years ago, I was a buy-side tech equity analyst, and watched the net worth of many mediocre C-level officers balloon way out of proportion to their contributions. This was because the stock market often values companies based on things that have little to do with their fundamentals. And apart from these rampant market distortions, there’s simply no........

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