NEW YORK, June 28 — The red emergency light is flashing on America’s democracy dashboard, like a damaged aircraft teetering toward a mountain. Elon Musk becoming the planet’s first trillionaire should make us tremble for the future of self-governing republics. It’s as if we’re bringing back modern pharaohs to dominate our societies.
The milestone arrived this week. Musk’s SpaceX company went public with a market capitalization of $2 trillion.
The IPO increased Musk’s net worth by an estimated $188 billion, and the stock’s first-day surge pushed his fortune to roughly $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes. The concern here isn’t with wealth per se. It’s the tremendous power of concentrated wealth to distort markets, politics, and society.
When you have Musk’s level of wealth, you’re no longer just buying another mansion or private jet. You’re buying a media outlet, a senator, and maybe, in the case of Musk, elevating a president.
Musk has no inhibitions about deploying the power of his considerable wealth. He bought Twitter, one of the public squares of our time, and transformed it into X, a partisan and disinformation platform rife with hate speech and extremism. In the 2024 election cycle, he donated $291 million to President Trump and Republican candidates, according to Open Secrets.
As Michael Mechanic wrote in Mother Jones, “Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return.” Mechanic notes the Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies. Musk was rewarded with a rogue government agency — the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), named for a cryptocurrency meme. By nightfall on Times Square, a video broadcast showed Musk speaking as his SpaceX company went public.
The scene captures the moment a single individual crossed a threshold that should alarm anyone who believes in self-governing republics. The flashing red light isn’t about envy.
It’s about what happens when one person’s fortune can buy the public square, sideline regulators, and install a president. What to watch next: whether the Trump administration continues to shield Musk’s business interests from oversight, and how other trillion-dollar fortunes might reshape the political landscape ahead of the 2028 election cycle.
