Comment by cowmix
3 days ago
I don’t know who his wealth was transferred from, exactly. But I do know what he’s using it for now: as a gravitational force to unilaterally screw with public institutions and systems the rest of us depend on.
Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable.
I’m honestly sick that my personal Model Y purchase helped add to that power.
And I say that as someone who was a huge Musk fan for years, despite the warning signs — the Thai “pedo” comments, and his very public turn during COVID.
Musk's money came from creating a business that was worth a lot of money. I.e. he created his wealth.
It was not transferred to him.
The same goes for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc.
He ended up with all of the profits, but he didn't put in all of the work. A lot of people worked very hard for that wealth, either for salary or a minuscule fraction of the profits.
He gets to keep the lion's share of the profits because he was the one who took the risk with his capital. And bully for him; well done that man. But we treat him as if he had all of the ideas and wrote all of the code, and that's simply not true. It's a myth that the wealth owners tell us.
All of these products would exist with the CEOs who get the credit. If it weren't them it would have been someone else. Their expertise as CEOs is not to get the product done, but to get it done a week earlier than the other guy. And even that much is more luck than skill.
There's no way to say "Musk took this money from someone else". But that's different from "He has a million times as much wealth because he is a million times more valuable."
> He ended up with all of the profits
Obviously not. The investors got their share, and employees got their stock options.
> But we treat him as if he had all of the ideas and wrote all of the code, and that's simply not true.
What were the names of the crew of Captain Cook's ship? Who was under the command of General Sherman? Who won the battle of Yorktown? Who created Standard Oil? We give credit to the head of something, not to the people under his command.
> If it weren't them it would have been someone else.
Nobody knows that.
> And even that much is more luck than skill.
If I hit a home run once, I would attribute it to luck. If I hit a home run 3 times, then I have skillz.
Gates maneuvered 3 dramatic changes in Microsoft, where other companies failed at the transition. Jobs made 3 fortunes. Musk has made several diverse fortunes.
At some point, you're going to have to give these people credit.
Musk has created a million times more wealth than others. If his life story was a novel, I would have put it down as absurd.
I won’t deny he created his own fortune from PayPal.
But if you come from “so much money we couldn't even close our safe” as his father put (quote from Wikipedia
Then you do have a leg up
> I won’t deny he created his own fortune from PayPal.
I'd deny even that. He made enough dumb decisions that he was forced out and got rich primarily because of other peoples' good ideas/decisions.
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You can always trick investors. For example all the overpromising Musk has done over the years. Also when you are that famous you can sell lower quality goods for a higher price that people will buy because they are associated to you.
All true. That's why there are laws against fraud.
What do you think of the tricks that California pulled to have billions vanish with not a mile of track laid? Or all those hospices with no beds? Or this fun one:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...
Unfortunately, as a taxpayer, I am on the hook for those tricks. With a business, I can do some due diligence and then decide if I want to get in or not.
I suspect you and I are being fleeced far more by government waste and fraud than by businesses.
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Buying an ownership stake in an established business and forcing them to give you a "co-founder" title isn't "creating a business".
Tesla was quickly going bankrupt when Musk decided to buy into it. It was not an "established business". It had no plan, no car, no design, no sales. When you sell a controlling share to another person, the other person then controls the business.
The “created vs transferred” thing is more nuanced than that.
At some point, accumulated wealth becomes power, and that power can be used to pull energy, attention, labor, and public resources out of the system for one person’s agenda.
And in Tesla’s case, the stock value creation story is insanely unorthodox, to be charitable. A lot of that valuation was supercharged by years of market-moving hype done personally by Elon: 10+ years of FSD timelines that never happened, the more recent “buy a Tesla, it’s an appreciating asset!” super-lie, the mission gradually being abandoned, GOP craps on EVs and it’s crickets from Elon, etc.
Now we have the ultimate example of wealth gravity distortion: Musk helped put Trump back in power, and the relationship looks openly transactional. But Elon is not just benefiting from Trump’s transactional nature. He is also benefiting from an administration where white collar crime and regulatory accountability seem to have basically stopped being real things.
So with all that, the kind of shady behavior Elon pulled that might normally trigger government scrutiny or enforcement is now being smothered by political influence.
Even today, Tesla appears to be the highest P/E outlier in the S&P 500 among profitable companies. So the market is not just valuing the current business. It is valuing the story, the hype, and increasingly Musk’s ability to buy influence to stay outta trouble.
And to be clear, I’m not trying to pretend nothing real was built. SpaceX is impressive. Tesla really did help kickstart the EV market. But that does not make up for the harm, distortion, and unaccountable power being exercised now.
So yes, maybe the wealth was “created” in an accounting sense. But the concern is what happens when that created value becomes an unaccountable force acting on everything else.
If TSLA is in a bubble, at some point it will implode. And then the wealth that was created is destroyed - it won't be transferred out of the company, either.
> Musk helped put Trump back in power, and the relationship looks openly transactional.
Both parties accept help from wealthy people, and yes, they do expect something in return. I don't see that Musk got anything out of it, though. Musk received 0 benefit from DOGE.
> But that does not make up for the harm, distortion, and unaccountable power being exercised now.
What power do you think Musk is exercising now?
> He is also benefiting from an administration where white collar crime and regulatory accountability seem to have basically stopped being real things.
I gave you examples of no accountability in government things. I don't see any decrease in accountability.
> Even today, Tesla appears to be the highest P/E outlier in the S&P 500 among profitable companies. So the market is not just valuing the current business. It is valuing the story, the hype,
Sure. And I bought TSLA years ago. I didn't believe his FSD hype. But he delivered on it anyway. If TSLA stock implodes, it's only going to hurt the shareholders, not you.
> and increasingly Musk’s ability to buy influence to stay outta trouble.
What influence is he buying?
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That business is currently worth a lot of money, but why? Its not making a lot of money.
Businesses are valued on their ability to make money in the future.
Wealth is not created, it's stripped from the natural commons and it is, despite being massive, obviously finite. What you're referring to is "value creation"--the transformation of this natural wealth into a form that some other humans find valuable at a point in time. This value creation is rewarded via capitalism by the accumulation of monetary instruments which very much represent an appropriation of this wealth. If this system wasn't zero sum then we wouldn't have inflation?
Where was all this wealth 200 years ago?
Inflation is caused by printing money not backed by goods and services. Inflation is another form of taxation.
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