We need more trillionaires
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To investors,
The SpaceX IPO launch saw a 20% stock price increase on Friday before closing at $160 per share, which drove the company’s market cap to $2.1 trillion. This is unsurprising given the rumors that the IPO was at least 4x oversubscribed. That means there was more than $300 billion of investor interest that SpaceX refrained from accepting during the fundraising process.
The other milestone achieved on Friday was that Elon Musk officially became the world’s first trillionaire. That is a very big number: $1,000,000,000,000. Twelve zeroes to be exact.
To put this amount of money in perspective, you and I are closer in wealth to Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin, than any of them are to Elon Musk.
Imagine being one of the five richest men in the world and realizing that Elon has 3x more money than you. That is insane.
But not everyone was excited for Elon Musk. In fact, there was a cast of characters publicly shaming Elon for his vast wealth. Bernie Sanders came out of swinging when he wrote:
“Elon Musk’s rise to trillionaire status is not a time to celebrate. It’s a call to action to take on the unprecedented income and wealth inequality that now exists and the greed and power of a ruling class that is destroying the social fabric of America.
Our democracy cannot survive when one man, who contributed $290 million to get Trump elected, becomes $700 billion richer since Trump’s election.
Our economy cannot sustain itself when one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of our society, when 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major nation and when our kids will have a lower standard of living than their parents.
This is not just about wealth. It’s about power. Musk and his fellow Oligarchs want it ALL.
Together, we must fight back. We can and must create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires.”
Here is the thing about Bernie’s commentary: he takes a kernel of truth and then extrapolates the conclusion out into a crazy socialist plan to confiscate private citizen’s wealth. Bernie is right that too many people live paycheck to paycheck, childhood poverty should be eradicated, and every parent wants their kid to have a better standard of living than themselves.
The problem is that Bernie doesn’t understand that capitalism is our only change to solve these problems. For example, SpaceX is creating nearly 5,000 millionaires as part of the IPO process, including cafeteria workers, welders, janitors, and other non-white collar roles.
Nvidia has created almost 30,000 millionaires who work at the company. Amazon and many other corporations are estimated to have created thousands of millionaires as well.
Whether we are talking about Elon Musk or any other private sector company, this wealth is being generated by growing the pie. Elon Musk did not need to make anyone poorer in order for him to create trillions of dollars in value for himself, his shareholders, and his employees.
More importantly, Elon has created his wealth by solving hard problems at scale. Tesla’s consumer car is one of the safest on the market, which has saved countless human lives. Combine the physical car’s safety with the innovative Full Self-Driving technology and you get a car that is objectively safer than anything else on the market.
SpaceX has not only brought down the cost of space launches, but as Bill Ackman wrote: “SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.
Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.”
This is the type of impact that billionaires (and trillionaires) are supposed to have. It is like a modern Batman that spends their money, time and energy trying to improve the lives of other people.
If Elon ran a non-profit, he would be hailed as the second coming of Mother Theresa for this type of positive impact. And we haven’t even talked about Neuralink helping the disabled, The Boring Company extracting people from wasted time in traffic, or the plethora of other projects he is involved in.
Now I understand that many people don’t like Elon because of politics. That is unfortunate, but that is how modern society works. Allegiances (and sometimes logic) is drawn by party affiliation. One of the big critiques of Elon from Democrats is that he wouldn’t have these companies, or the related wealth, without the help of the government. These critics insinuate that Elon got handouts in order to enrich himself.
I was not well informed on the details of what happened or didn’t happen with the government funding, so I spent time looking into it this weekend. The best explanation I found comes from @digitalsamiam when he wrote:
“Elon Musk was awarded (note: not given) cost-per-result contracts to perform a service for the US government. The total of those for SpaceX specifically is ~$22B, which includes repaid loans, state tax incentives, etc.
The deal was simple: put stuff into low earth orbit at or below a set cost. If SpaceX does it below the set cost, SpaceX keeps the difference. If it doesn’t, the company is responsible for the overrun.
End result? SpaceX & Elon lowered the cost of getting 1 kg into low earth orbit by 95-97% vs what NASA was paying previously.
And for the record, every other company around at the time was offered the same opportunity to bid on the contract - Musk/SpaceX just took it.
The handout narrative implies the taxpayer is the patron and SpaceX the dependent. The cost data shows the opposite: before SpaceX, NASA paid Russia’s Soyuz $80-86M per seat; SpaceX delivered at ~$55 million. SpaceX saved the US taxpayer $300M-$465M each year on that alone (the US sends 12-15 astronauts to space each year)
On the lunar lander, NASA estimated SpaceX’s fixed-price bid saved $20B-$30B vs the Boeing-preferred cost-plus approach.
So: SpaceX saved the US taxpayer more than the total value of contracts it earned on a single project, PLUS provided the US government with the requested services (put stuff in low earth orbit) at the best possible price.”
If this explanation is true, which it is to the best of my knowledge, then SpaceX was able to solve a hard problem at scale. The government didn’t give a handout, but rather they dangled an economic reward in front of the market for any company to capture if they could solve the stated challenge. That is how capitalism works. The entrepreneurs and companies that solve problems are given the economic reward.
This is why we need more trillionaires. The only way to make a trillion dollars is to solve an insanely hard problem at scale. You may have to solve multiple problems to reach that level of wealth. It is impossible to become a trillionaire without positively impacting millions and millions of people’s lives. You can’t inherit a trillion dollars. You can’t steal a trillion dollars. You only get a trillion dollars if you solve problems in society for millions of people.
So rather than attack people for succeeding, which is a very short-sighted and uninformed view, we should be encouraging everyone to solve bigger and harder problems. Maybe everyone can’t become a trillionaire, but almost anyone can become a millionaire by solving problems in their local community.
Grow the pie. Solve problems. Reward solutions. Celebrate success. That is how innovation, prosperity, and economic freedom are achieved. Let’s not lose sight of these hard truths.
I hope everyone has a great start to their week. I will talk to you next time.
- Anthony J. Pompliano
Founder & CEO, ProCap Financial (Nasdaq: BRR)
Should You Invest In SpaceX IPO, Elon Musk, Bitcoin or AI?
Jordi Visser is a veteran macro investor with 30+ years of experience and the author of the VisserLabs Substack.
In this conversation, we break down the SpaceX IPO, orbital data centers, and the critical minerals powering the AI buildout. We also discuss the AI model wars, why Jordi thinks Sam Altman won't be running OpenAI within a year, and how the New York Knicks playoff run connects to the future of crypto and blockchain in a world of AI and deep fakes.
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There is not one important problem solved.
The Planet is going to hell and a delusional small group of men think they solve problems.
This is gros.
This article is very out of touch. Spoken like a true CEO who has had too much Elon kool aid. So you are telling me that a trillion dollar company that makes negative income, bypassed the usual checks and balances to get into the NAS100 is good for the American economy. Sounds like the rich eating the poor to me.