Elon Musk Is Not Actually a Trillionaire in the Way Democrats Want You to Believe

David Strom 1:00 PM | June 13, 2026
Globe and Mail/X

X is filled with Democrats talking about what they could do if you let them confiscate Elon Musk's wealth and spend it. 

There is a lot wrong with that, morally, fiscally, and factually. However much Elon Musk is worth on paper, that wealth is not convertible into spendable money. At least not as they want you to believe. 

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I know most of you know this, but it bears repeating: Elon Musk's wealth is bound up in the notional value of his stock, which is really his actual control over the companies he runs, which generate wealth through their ongoing operations.

Nobody thinks that if you liquidated SpaceX today, it would actually sell for between one and two trillion dollars. In terms of actual capital, it might, just might, be worth a few billion dollars. You could sell off the inventory of cars, make a nice penny on the computing power, and you could sell the rockets for some real dough. 

But overall, the capital alone is worth a tiny fraction of its worth as an ongoing concern. 

(Hint: she's lying)

What about confiscating that concern, taking it from Elon, and making it state- or stockholder-owned?

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Really? No doubt you could keep SpaceX and Tesla as going concerns, but not as growth juggernauts. Love him or hate him, those companies are worth what they are because people are investing in Elon Musk, and Elon Musk's top employees are there to work for Elon. Investors wouldn't value his companies as they do without Elon, because they aren't investing in current operations or profits, which are pretty modest or even negative, but in Elon's vision and his ability to magically create wealth out of ideas. 

He does not have $1 trillion sitting in cash, it is 99% stock in his companies.

To make that wealth liquid would mean selling all that stock which would swiftly destroy *both* the companies (Tesla, SpaceX, others) and the wealth. If he sold it all, he'd end up with maybe $100b max, several hundred thousand people would be out of work, the companies ruined and many of their suppliers also ruined.

Okay, but now Elon has $100b in cash, and can "solve the world's problems".

$100b divided by the world's 8 billion people is $12

If you were in charge, several of the most innovative industrial companies in the world would be destroyed, hundreds of thousands out of work, and space would again close to human civilization for another generation.

But everyone on earth could have one nice meal and you could revel in your altruism.

Someday his companies will be Elon-independent, but that day is far into the future, just as Apple became the profit juggernaut it is only through the magic of Steve Jobs. Apple would have died in the 1990s without Jobs. SpaceX would do better than that, but after a while it would be Boeing-like, not SpaceX-like. 

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Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.

400 of them are now worth over $100 million.

These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.

Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.

Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."

The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.

Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.

Liberals want you to believe that Elon is just a figurehead, or a parasite, or a crank, and that it is his employees who do the real work. It's true that his employees do the work, but they do his work. Love him or hate him, but Elon IS SpaceX. It would be like saying that Patton was irrelevant to the U.S. Third Army in Europe, because others fired the rifles and drove the tanks. 

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In other words, it's trivially true that Elon doesn't do everything at SpaceX and that Patton didn't really defeat the Germans at Bastogne, but it is also entirely wrong to say that they were not pivotal to the success of their enterprises. Not just wrong, but fatally wrong. 

Not that there is anything surprising about the Democrats' failure to tell the truth, or even understand, the nature of Elon's wealth. They talk about what they could do with NOTIONAL money—it's not money, it's potential wealth—but if they actually tried to take it the result would be most of the value evaporating before they touched it. 

Democrats don't understand wealth. That's why, when Seattle's mayor waved "bye" to the wealthy leaving her city after tax hikes, she was floored. She thought raising taxes would transfer wealth from others to her piggy bank. Instead, the wealth just left. In essence, what was real suddenly evaporated for all intents and purposes. 

The kind of wealth we are talking about is not dollars, jewels, gold, or anything like that. It's the capacity to produce more wealth—goods and services that people want. Government, almost exclusively, produces no wealth. It is a consumer of wealth, and the more it consumes, at least after providing baseline services that make a functioning civilization possible, the less real wealth is created. 

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Now, you may decide that a certain level of consumption beyond the bare necessities is worth the trade-off, but it is a huge one. If you buy a bigger house instead of investing that extra money in the stock market, you may think it is worth it, and the wealthier you are, the more you might think so. 

But you ARE, inevitably, taking from the future to consume in the present. And when you are spending money that doesn't really exist, the trade-off is infinitely worse. Stealing Elon Musk's wealth harms the country's future far more than any short-term benefit you might gain, because Elon is building the future. 

And, not incidentally, all the things the Democrats promise they could buy if they just stole Elon's wealth are fraudulent promises. All you need to do is look at how they spend the vast amounts of money they have now to see how ridiculous their claims are. If they were true, there would be no homeless people, for instance; instead, we have a growing number taking craps on the street as they zombify themselves. 

It's all performative propaganda. They are talking about notional money they can't have, wouldn't spend well, and that would steal not only from Elon, but more importantly, the future. 

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Elon isn't an oligarch. He lives in a tiny home at Starbase most of the time, and works constantly. If you confiscated 99% of his wealth, he could live more comfortably than 99% of Americans. He just couldn't create value for the world, and hence would make us all poorer. 

Which, come to think about it, is precisely what these Democrats want. 

It's all a lie. They hate Elon for many reasons. Envy, primarily. But they want his money because they want power. That's the real bottom line. 


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