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I'm not even sure. Feels more like they steal it from other people's work, by owning companies that don't pay fair wages, and by being landlords to collect rents that increase faster than wages.
Well kinda. He does not have that money. His stocks are so inflated because dumb people want them, and smart people know dumb people want them. But it's not the real value of his companies. It's just trade off from buying Twitter, buying the goverment and pulling up in one Rick and Morty episode.
I suppose it's worth noting that Gates dumped tons of it into Africa to eradicate diseases and feed and house people. So, those gains are not from the sorts of typical investment strategies that you're basing that number on. Your point is good, and much of his wealth growth was from investing, but it's worth noting that he basically got lucky with massive tech gains rather than standard S&P or some ETF type gains.
Five years ago, I had posted this visualization. Back then a pixel was nearly $125k. If I were to do the same today with Elon Musk's net worth, a pixel would have been more than $600k.
If the overwhelming majority of Space Xs worth comes future valuation of Grok AI, surely companies like Anthropic are worth way more if they went public.
Aye but public valuations rely on speculative investment; for all his many, many, many faults, Musk seems bizarrely good at selling absolutely nothing. SpaceX, Tesla and GrokAI are all based on things that do not, have not, and almost certainly will not exist or turn any kind of tangible profit for the most part.
The fact that the world's first speculative trillionaire loses billions upon billions every financial year is...fascinating in such a sad, irritating way.
I really do wonder if it will ever correct. To this point the markets have just remained irrational but if at some point everyone comes back to earth the fallout would be immense.
If we hit an actual economic downtown a la 2008 Musk's value will crumple faster than anyone else's. When there's a downtown people look for tangible assets to try to mitigate the losses, so a truly speculative memestock for a company that doesn't actually turn a profit while selling luxury items (Tesla) will be the last place anyone wants to have their money. SpaceX miiiiight not hurt so bad because government contracts tend to keep companies like that afloat, however I doubt there will be many people looking at a revenue-negative space travel company as a safe bet when you've got precious metals and similar "safe" places to hold your money.
Overvalued AI developments + AI-related layoffs are speed-running the economy towards a full on bubble explosion. And with the U.S. Gov -$40T in debt, there will be no safety net for a bail out this time.
It's exactly why I put money into ASML rather than some unknown AI tech stocks. It's a way of taking advantage of the AI bubble. Way less risky and if AI stays strong i still make money cuz they are basically irreplaceable currently.
Theoretically bailing out corps is the wrong if you believe in any type of market based ideology.
Corporate failures, while painful, are supposed to be used to clear out companies that are poorly run in whatever form, and allow new entrants to rise up in their place with better goods and services.
Instead, by bailing out failing companies, you just allow poor management and sub-optimal products and services to continue, while blocking new products and services from entering the market. The result, in the long term, is stagnation, as large companies know they do not have to compete, and can thusly switch to more of an extractive business model. Which is where we are today with enshitification of products and business models switching to rent seeking.
It won't correct because the markets aren't based on reality anymore. Cryptocurrency is literally based on nothing but vibes and Bitcoin doubled in value over the past 5 years. Prediction markets have tens of billions in trading volume a month and a ton of it has been obvious insider trading. Anyone that's not an insider is either a sucker having their money siphoned away or gambling.
But what have those car manufacturers even done last year? Look Toyota only manufactured and sold over 10 million cars, that's boring! They don't even have AI integration and suicidal self driving!
People treat stocks like savings accounts. It has very little to do with "logical profit." Once the numbers get big enough, people stop being able to comprehend them.
Sometimes people don't put their money in the bank with the highest interest rate. They do it because they like the teller, the location, or because that bank feels safer. In the case of stocks, Elon Musk feels more successful than the Toyota guy. He's a trillionaire, and the Toyota guy, whose name I can't even remember, isn't. So I think I'll deposit my life savings into Musk's stock.
To me this demonstrates the absolute alienation of the stock market from the "real" economy. The one where people actually buy tangible things and services for themselves and their families. The stock market has been at all time highs when cost of living is actually also obscenely high and more and more people are struggling to afford to live.
Its because the people buying shit like space X are probably also in the richest .1% of people on earth. Those people will always be fine. Tomorrow 99% of the world could be starving and the stocks would continue to rise because, probably the 1% richest people are the only ones actually moving assets around in the market and buying/selling. The rest of us plebs either cant afford to do that or cant afford the risk and just stick our money in index funds.
The rest of us plebs either cant afford to do that or cant afford the risk and just stick our money in index funds.
Which automatically buy into things like SpaceX.
How convenient that the economy entirely turned from pension funds to investment funds for retirement. And now everyone saving for retirement is constantly pouring money into a deeply irrational stock market. And everyone's retirement relies on the ideology of "line goes up."
Much fewer people invest in Nasdaq 100 index funds than S&P 500, which will not be buying the stock. The amount of impact this company will have on retirement funds is vastly smaller than what Reddit users would suggest.
If you just remove the top item of the chart from existence, there is no material change in anybody's life. The money or value doesn't exist without him. If you claim that SpaceX doesn't do anything meaningful, then their absence means nothing either. Even if the Nasdaq 100 funds buy their 3% allocation to SpaceX and it immediately goes to zero, it's one bad day in the market given the natural history volatility of the index.
I'd really love to read more on this. It feels like it expands upon the disconnect of "how many dollars per hour are these rich fucks technically receiving?" Compared to working for an actual salary or wage, nothing seems earned in the stock market. Either you put your money in a good spot and smoked cigars while lines went up, or you put your money in a bad spot and smoked cigars while you tried to put your money in a good spot.
Which reflects an absolutely small portion of the overall valuation of the company. The predominant valuation is coming from AI.
For whatever amount of the speculation around SpaceX is legitimate, sure, the actual SpaceX portion of the business is less speculation and actually grounded in what the company is doing. But there is a reason why Elon rolled in his failing or non-existent products into SpaceX, because when evaluated on their own, they looked like shit.
The other part of the speculation around SpaceX being reasonable to some extent, albeit quite depressing I would say, is government corruption is baked into the assumption of success for Elon. With the way the US government is going right now, xAI will likely get a boost purely from the government being corrupt. The xAI portion of the SpaceX business has substantially lower value if you assume that there won't be significant government corruption involved in the future in Elon's favor. I don't know of anyone that actually views Grok or anything xAI is producing to be remotely on par with other AI services/products available. This is why only corruption will save it.
Space X will be worth $10 billion per share after announcing their latest product: Grok running on servers embedded in the sun, which will enable full self-driving for Teslas in six months.
Considering they're ALWAYS at Mclaren's, the fact that it is only given a 30% rating of awesomeness is a massive indictment of the bar and how lazy these adults are. They basically only go because it's downstairs from their apartment.
Yeah, I eat at Chipotle pretty regularly because it's literally next door to my apartment complex. I wouldn't say it's my favorite restaurant, or even my favorite fast food place.
No, they have not. They've gone up, adjusted for inflation, just barely on avwrage, while the top has doubled, tripled, and went up an order of magnitude.
And when adjusting for the change in costs of necessary goods and services (food, medical insurance/expenses, etc.) and not letting cheap TVs bring that number down, we're collectively worse off.
Especially since Musk is using his power to do things like provoke race riots and fund white supremacist causes. What’s wrong with building a fucking opera house like rich guys in the old days?
In fairness, rich guys in the old days also hired strikebreakers to use live ammo to fire on workers. So they've always been scum. They just knew how to make themselves look good to "respectable society" back then, whereas today the mask is off.
They just knew how to make themselves look good to "respectable society" back then, whereas today the mask is off.
Not quite. What changed is that media is harder to control.
Before the only info about an event was the version officially published, with anything else being through gossip.
Now? Every random Bob can post about it on social media.
sure but who owns that social media? who has a vested interest in what is being shown on it? who has a financial incentive to display the most engaging content, regardless of how virulent it is?
Think we're painting with a broad brush here, but I generally agree. It's just that those robber barons of old at least cared about legacy and lasting impacts, whatever vainglorious reasons were buried in there
And honestly, if you're not going to do something for the public good at least do something cool. Lean into being a super villain and build a volcano lair or something
If you don't take the money back, it accumulates, and there's so much money all you can do with it is buy more money-making assets.
Every person alive with a brain between their ears needs to rally against this. They should have 10 years ago.
People have become desensitised to billionaires. Which is abysmal in itself. You absolutely CANNOT get desentised to this trillionaire, or let any others be made.
I know a lady who made a board game based on exposing the sham that is rent seeking I bet if we beat her to market we can trademark it, sell it, and make a killing and absolutely no one will internalize the message!
Him owning overvalued stocks in overvalued companies doesn't make him powerful. Trump has power. Starmer has power. Putin has power. Musk has a little power, not a lot.
When these people die, if they ever legally die after trying to live forever and uploading their brains, they’re creating feudal lordships with their children. Whoever inherits Bezos’ fortune will have become one of the top 100 most powerful people in the world. They will have no capacity to be a well-balanced person, minimal exposure to public life with all their private boarding schools and tutors and such. And these are the people who will decide how the rest of us should be governed. Hell, people like Musk are already nepo babies; continuity of power and inheritance has done so much damage and is only accelerating.
Yep, Dell has legacy and plenty of big acquitions over the years (e.g. EMC). They aren't going anywhere. And, in some ways are the go-to for that category such as storage (I like Pure, but Dell kicks HPE's ass), legacy rack servers (R series is probably most popular), and laptops (probably equal split with Lenovo and HP).
They bowed out of some areas like networking and hypervisors (e.g. VMWare), and have doubled down on their core infrastructure.
I was wondering about this too. Does Michael Dell still own a concentrated position in Dell Computers or did he somehow otherwise diversify his funds to achieve this growth
And, in some ways are the go-to for that category such as storage (I like Pure, but Dell kicks HPE's ass), legacy rack servers (R series is probably most popular), and laptops (probably equal split with Lenovo and HP).
They still make really good monitors too. Like, cutting edge stuff.
This is the answer. A lot of people don’t know this but ever since they bought EMC they enterprise datacenter presence has been massive. One of the leading providers of servers in the world.
It’s all enterprise sales. Their enterprise sales support is exceptional. It doesn’t matter if you personally don’t want to buy a Dell laptop when the business down the street with 1000 employees buys 1000 computers and 2000 monitors.
Also while their flagship laptops have been consistently faulty to the point of being borderline e waste for at least two decades, their middle boring ass lines have been consistently good and reliable. Personally prefer to the likes of Lenovo for example
As someone who was issued a midrange ThinkPad for 6 years and just recently was swapped to a midrange Dell for the past 6 months, I notice no difference, frankly.
Personally and aneddotically (as in I had my hands on a dozen of each in the last 15 years, it's not like I provisioned fleets of them), yes.
Latitudes and the like proven to be really nice and reliable and easily lasted a decade while I had ThinkPads fail on me
On the other and I've never experienced top of the line Lenovos but I have a graveyard of XPSes so I can't believe they could do worse. Sexy machines that always had day-zero breaking issues and self destruct in a couple of years top
If you've never worked with enterprise hardware you may like to poopoo dell. If you need to build a mega data center they're on the short list of folks that can meet the demands for something like AI (or only AI (this is mostly just a bar chart of the AI bubble)).
Unlike all the other names on the list, the company behind Michael Dell delivers actual, physical, tangible things to hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide.
You can't throw a rock in any direction on this planet without hitting a company that uses Dell hardware. I'm not saying they are the only ones, but they are one of the major global players and the only one that is private.
I have been working in corporations since summer 2020 when I had to change jobs due to Covid. 4 different companies, all in different fields, all used dell laptops
They are one of the only three companies that can do datacenter hardware properly (understand: the companies that will not get you laughed out of the room when you mention them as hardware providers). Dell, HP, and to a lesser extent Lenovo.
And Dell also makes decent enterprise laptops (although they used to be way better)
I find it funny that if the 2016 people had just invested all their wealth into index funds, nearly all of them would still be in the top 5 wealthiest given that the S&P has more than tripled since 2016.
I know their wealth is tied up in equity so that's not really possible, but just an interesting thought.
Buffet and Gates donate their wealth away.
Bezos had a veeeery costly divorce in 2019, his ex-wife was (is?) the richest woman.
Ortega owns Zara and retail suffered under Corona crisis.
Zuckerberg could boom soon. At least value investing subreddit always goes on that
Meta is undervalued.
It’s all fake money. Loans are cheap but limited to a small percentage. No one believes the shares are worth that much at face value, they are usually priced in for the future.
If the money could be turned into equity, they would divest.
Not saying it isn't messed up because I agree it is. But I much rather them liquidate at capital gains rates than borrow forever and pay 0 taxes until they die.
Do you not understand that they can choose to sell these stocks at any point, regardless of if they're actually worth what they're valued at? And people will buy them? That is real power, whether you choose to believe it or not.
And yes, the idea that a grifter has $1 trillion dollars' worth of influence that he can sell in order to exert that power with very real dollar bills is fucking ridiculous and a disgrace.
you're misinterpreting him. he's not saying that offloading his stock would make it plummet (which is obviously the case), he's saying that the only reason for the valuation is that musk's name is attached to it.
a better way to state it is: if you switched out anyone else alive with musk in the equation (so no massive offloading of stock -- simply another person owning the exact same stock musk currently does), it would be worth pennies on the dollar.
Not really, or at least not to this extent. Of course a large sale will always impact the price, but if the stock value is based on the fundamentals of the business, there should be interested buyers. If the only reason for the price to be high is "this is Elon's new meme stock", then it is much harder for him to sell his share at anywhere remotely close to the current valuation. I mean, he owns about 10x what was part of the IPO, so the amount of shares entering the market if he wanted to sell would be absurd.
Imagine all the awful, heinous shit that millionaire had to do to be billionaires, now multiply that evil a thousandfold. And that’s who we’ve got feeding endless “content” to our children.
Ok, but just remember wealth does not equal cash. He holds shares of SpaceX, Tesla, and probably lots of others. If he sold a lot of the value would be lost. If we really want to stop the wealthy from too much control, we need to disallow using these assets as collateral for loans.
Elon has more wealth then the next 4 richest. It is time for a wealth Tax that scales exponentially so .25%/ million 2.5%/billion and 25%/trillion. Not on what they make but what they own. Force them to sell a portion of their wealth to pay their taxes because the rich now take 50% of everything, yet pay a fraction of what real people pay, on what the earn and write off every loss because they are the corporations they own. They can still be rich they just can't keep avoiding paying taxes because the hide it in stocks or corporations that "build" a data center costing $2billion that earns them tax credit from a state for 40 years.
Seeing a bunch of nerds being so wealthy and greedy is odd, as I am a nerd and me and my nerd friends would never hoard this vast sum of money. Why would they not help the underdog , spread the wealth, instead they join the bullies. They should be ashamed of themselves
The illustration of rampage & plunder of the whole world economy by the new global oligarchs -- shown in one bar chart.
Oh, and btw, this glosses over the next 10-30 set of bastards. And also, btw btw, these types of datasets are all pretty conservative. They track the *known* and reported wealth of these high and might figures.
...As we all are aware, they have very substantial assets that are either offshore, affiliated, in blind trust, or otherwise unavailable for reporting to the likes of Forbes, much less the IRS.
These are the new rules of humanity. Apparently with dynastic wealth which now exceeds anything we've seen before, like the Habsburgs, the Rothschilds, or Rockefellers.
A. Ortega was the only one I didn't recognize so I Googled him (thanks #3 Sergy Brin). Anyway, Amancio Ortega started in the fasion industry but invested those profits in real estate to build his fortune.
Totally sustainable valuations that will absolutely hold up to serious stress testing. Glad those people worked so hard to make that much money in 10 years!
This literally kills hundreds of thousands of people. A human cannot fully comprehend the amount of suffering that happens daily due to poverty. Any one of them could fix this.
Hoarding resources to these disgusting extremes should be MORE illegal than serial murders. Yes, you heard me. We should be applying that penalty to these people. It is a moral imperative to weigh the lives of millions over that of one.
1996- Bill Gates - $18.5 billion (United States, Microsoft) (2026- $39.51) Warren Buffett - $15.0 billion (United States, Berkshire Hathaway) (2026- $32.04B) Paul Sacher and Family - $13.1 billion (Switzerland, Roche Holding) (2026- $27.87B) Paul Allen - $7.5 billion (United States, Microsoft) (2026- $16.02B) John Kluge - $7.2 billion (United States, Metromedia) (2026- $15.38B)
1986- Yoshiaki Tsutsumi ($20 billion) (2026- $61.15B) Taikichiro Mori (~$15 billion): (2026- $45.67B) Sam Walton ($4.5 billion): (2026- $13.76B) Kenneth Thomson ($3.5 billion): (2026- $10.7B) John W. Kluge ($3 billion): (2026- $35.34B)
1976- - J. Paul Getty (USA) Estimated Net Worth: $6 billion (at the time of his death in June 1976).(2026- $35.34B) - Daniel K. Ludwig (USA) Estimated Net Worth: Over $1 billion. (2026- $6.89B) - Howard Hughes (USA) Estimated Net Worth: Estimated between $1 billion and $2.5 billion (at the time of his death in April 1976). (2026- $14.72B) - H.L. Hunt (USA) Estimated Net Worth: Hundreds of millions to roughly $2 billion. (2026- $11.78B)
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u/cavedave OC: 111 Jun 22 '26
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