Elon Musk: the world’s first trillionaire

Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. As a wealth researcher, did you see this coming?

Years ago, I cited others who predicted that the first trillionaire would come from the space sector. At the time, people laughed at me—and at the subject of my book , which many dismissed as an esoteric niche topic.

However, I was not the first to make this prediction. That distinction belongs to U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who said in 2017: »I’m going to make a prediction. The first trillionaire will be the entrepreneur who invests in space and makes discoveries that today we cannot even imagine. Right now, we have billionaires. My prediction is that the first trillionaire will come from space exploration and the space industry.«

Inflation has certainly played a role as well. Rockefeller would be extraordinarily wealthy by today’s standards, wouldn’t he?

Yes, of course. Historical and contemporary wealth figures can only be compared meaningfully if inflation and economic growth are taken into account.

When John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, his fortune was estimated at approximately $1.4 billion. Adjusted solely for inflation, that amount would equal roughly $32–35 billion today. However, that significantly understates his relative wealth.

If we compare Rockefeller’s share of the economy - his fortune represented about 1.5 percent of U.S. GDP at the time - with today’s economy, his wealth would amount to approximately $450–550 billion in current dollars. Even by that measure, however, he would still be far from reaching trillionaire status.

Elon Musk is often regarded as a genius. While he may not have invented entirely new things, he has improved existing technologies. Is that a common trait among the super-rich?

First, inventors and entrepreneurs are indeed two different things. Many great inventors were not entrepreneurs, and many successful entrepreneurs were not inventors.

However, the claim that Elon Musk has invented nothing is simply incorrect. He is a co-holder of numerous patents and has been actively involved in technological development at Tesla, SpaceX, and his other companies.

More importantly, the notion that an inventor must create something entirely new from scratch is far too narrow. Most innovations arise from improving, combining, or scaling existing ideas in unprecedented ways. The same was true for Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs.

Musk’s real achievement has been the development of technologies that many experts considered impossible: reusable rockets, mass-market electric vehicles, and a global satellite internet network. That goes far beyond incremental improvement.

This is also where economist Mariana Mazzucato, in my view, gets it wrong when she argues that the state—not Steve Jobs—invented the iPhone because many of its underlying technologies were publicly funded. By that logic, Picasso created nothing because all the paints he used already existed.

Innovation is not about inventing every individual building block; it is about combining those building blocks in a new and ingenious way. That is precisely what both Jobs and Musk accomplished.

Calls to ban extreme wealth are becoming increasingly common in politics and public debate. You recently wrote a book on this topic. How do you respond?

In my book, I examine in detail the zero-sum thinking that underlies such demands. Let me make just one point here.

Consider the billionaire rankings published by Forbes or Bloomberg and look at the countries that have no billionaires: These are typically either very poor countries - such as Bangladesh, Haiti, Afghanistan, Yemen, Eritrea, and South Sudan - or poor communist countries such as Cuba and North Korea.

By contrast, the highest concentrations of billionaires relative to population are found in countries such as Monaco, Singapore, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. Sweden also ranks remarkably high, with 43 billionaires among a population of only around ten million people.

If Germany had the same billionaire density as Sweden, it would be home to approximately 344 billionaires. In reality, the figure is only about half that number. Incidentally, the billionaire density in the United States is significantly lower than in Sweden.

The real question, therefore, is whether one would rather live in a country such as Sweden or Switzerland, with many billionaires, or in a country such as Cuba or Eritrea, where there are none. Although, to be fair, I am not entirely sure whether Kim Jong Un might himself qualify as a billionaire - Forbes, after all, does not include politicians in its rankings.