Politicians are weaponizing wealth resentment to justify a massive power grab

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on June 12, the day SpaceX went public. American singer Billie Eilish had already called him a coward and shared a graphic listing the hunger he could end. When the day came, Oxfam called it a danger to democracy, and politicians reached, as always, for a wealth tax.

Before you join in, ask a simple question: What is the trillion, really?

Picture a vault full of coins, one man swimming in it while the world goes hungry. Almost none of it is like that. Musk’s fortune consists largely of his shares in SpaceX, Tesla and the rest, worth whatever price the market sets today. It is not cash in a bank. It is an estimate, and it moves every minute. It can drop by hundreds of billions between Friday and Monday. A number that can vanish in an afternoon is a strange kind of hoard.

So what would it mean to give it away, like Eilish wants? To get the cash, Musk would have to sell. Dumping that many shares at once would crash the price he was selling at, and the trillion would shrink in his hands as he reached for it. You cannot spend a number on a screen.

A bigger mix-up sits underneath. SpaceX was not a public company a month ago. Today, the market figures it is worth more than most countries make in a year. Who got poorer when that number showed up? Nobody. No one took a slice from anyone else’s plate. Reusable rockets that cut the cost of getting to space made it. Wealth like this is built, not grabbed from a pile that was already sitting there. The idea that his gain is your loss comes from an older time, when one man’s full barn meant another’s empty one.

Say someone could grab the trillion and spend it. Would that go well? The graphics assume a planner who could spend a trillion dollars better than the market that made it. Money in private hands has to answer to profit and loss. A business that wastes its resources goes under and stops wasting. Money run by politicians answers to nothing so strict. Take the wealth from people who have to please customers and hand it to people who have to win votes, and the question is no longer whether anyone is kinder. It is whether anyone still knows where the money should go.

The inequality numbers are real. Oxfam puts billionaire wealth at $18.3 trillion. The richest tenth own about three-quarters of the world’s wealth. But those numbers measure the gap, not hunger. Even the reports waving them admit, usually in a line they hope you skip, that extreme poverty keeps falling. A world where the bottom rises while the top rises faster is not clearly worse than one where both sink together, unless you have decided the gap matters more than the floor.

The critics are not wrong about everything. When big money and government climb into bed together, both go bad. Musk is the proof. His companies have run on government contracts for years, and he walked straight into a White House job. Money made through government connections is not the same as money made by selling people something they want. The first kind should worry us. The second kind should not.

This is where the argument turns back on the people making it. They fear concentrated power, then ask for more of it. Every time the state gets bigger, the well-connected get a bigger prize to chase. The cure for cronyism is a smaller government, not a fatter one. Cut the subsidies and contracts that let people get rich in Ottawa or Washington instead of in the open market.

The panic treats a price as a hoard, a lucky decade as a dynasty, and a thing built as a thing stolen.

Envy makes a poor economist. It makes an even worse lawmaker.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.