Amazing how in the two years since Trump took office for his second term, his wealth has grown 5x.
Five. Fucking. Times.
He was worth scantly less than 200B back in 2024.
In 2025, he went up to 342B. What is that like 75%?
And how 3x since last year.
Man everyone thought he was crazy for buying twitter. Him, Zuck, Bezos, and Ellison need to be first in line for the guillotines.
He’s worth that much because we inflated his stocks and are rushing in to buy them. Not because he is doing anything different in those 5 yrs.
We?
Part of the problem is that is really is “we”.
I haven’t dug in, but I have a 401k, a Roth IRA and a HSA. I don’t directly control how those mutual/hedge funds invest, I just get a slice of them. Historically, that’s been a good way to be “diverse”, a funny word in our current political climate, and be protected from one area or company suddenly failing.
With the spacex and incoming google, anthropic and openai stocks coming at us, I cannot imagine that I won’t end up, or already own, a tiny share of these companies. My 401k contribution next month will almost certainly go towards a fractional share of spacex.
I haven’t looked recently, because I’m tired, but I doubt I even have an option to choose a non-techbro fund via my retirement operator, who I have to deal with because they are contracted by my employer.
Sure, I could manage my investments myself, but that takes time, energy and money that I’m already spending on my living. I just get the choices of assorted Vanguard funds, all defined by when I hope to retire! It all depends on how much food costs next month at this point. I couldn’t even find a way to see the specific stocks my fund was currently holding – this data is hidden from us plebeians.
If YOU are certain you haven’t invested in spacex, the only way is if you manage all your stock market exposure, which puts you in a pretty rare place.
For me, I’m probably holding a tiny amount of spacex now and I hate it and I had no choice. The only other choice is to stuff the cash in my mattress, but even that paper will be worthless when this shit hits the fan.
Seriously? Is it so hard to conclude that they are not talking about you and I as individuals?
Cmon.
The loose “we” is garbage terminology used to implicate everybody in the crimes of a few.
Who is “we”? Who are they talking about? People here? There’s at least three of us who aren’t part of that “we”. Me, you, and the person above.
What’s funny is that $1,000,000,000,000 is enough to give 18,000,000 families of four $35,000 (slightly above the us poverty live for a family of four), and still have over $350,000,000,000 left.
Edit: maybe funny isn’t the right word…
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
“I have a hemorrhoid. It’s like an infected blood vessel on your ass. I’m nine years old, and I have a hemorrhoid, Stan. I have a hemorrhoid, and, Cartman has his own theme park.”
Millions are homeless and starving, but hey someone got a trilly!
What was the figure? All it would take to end world hunger is 500 billion or something like that? Half one person’s weath?
What sort of person has that amount and decides not to end world hunger.
The same kind of person that steals a trillion from society in the first place
The same kind of person who ends government programs that help those hungry people, killing hundreds of thousands of them
Musk said he could do it with six billion.
Naturally, he didn’t even try.
Hunger is a political problem, not a money problem. You can’t just say “here are X billion dollars, let’s end world hunger”. Having said that, the system that allows people like Musk to get that rich, is also the same system that creates hunger.
In a capitalism-controlled world, political problems are money problems.
Here in the good ole USA money and politics are the same thing. If you have the political will, you can get the money and if you have the money, you can but the political will.
That said, didn’t Elmo have a beef with the fucking United Nations because he said he’d pay the 6 or 7 billion to end world hunger if the could prove that it’s possible and then they produced a detailed plan and he quibbled and but-akshually’ed his way to a reneg because he never intended to do jack shit for anyone other than himself?
Probably, but if you started with 500B vs 0 I’m guessing one will have a better result.
Not defending this worthless sack of shit but I’m certain he doesn’t actually have that much money
I mean it’s all tied up in stocks and if he wanted to liquidate it, all he’d lose control over all his companies and the sudden sell off would collapse the company stocks and probably destroy the world economy.
It looks very impressive on paper though.
He can take out loans using the made up money as collateral without ever paying taxes on it.
@snooggums I hate that.
Someone should dare Elon to do this.
They did.
in 2021
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/tech/elon-musk-world-hunger-wfp-donation
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-solve-world-hunger
except it was 1/6 of his worth (6.6b$) instead of half, and we he did nothing they left the plan public and called for wny other billionaires to do it.
And since you’re hearing about it here, guess who stepped up to do it?
Somebody?
Somebody2152 perhaps?
What it would really take to end world hunger is massive systemic change that’s actually pretty straight-forward but is fought by every single person who loves a deaperate workforce and their insane conservative followers who believe that their greatest enemy is a hungry person.
It was $6B he offered
He didn’t have that much money. He has stocks, and stocks from companies that don’t turn a profit won’t solve world hunger.
Yes. Thank you. We’re all aware of that, but pretty sure he could sell even 10 billion a year and fix it.
California spends 1.5 billion already and hasn’t accomplished anything. You think 10 billion would fix homeless across the country?
We were talking about world hunger, but k. You’re obviously trying to pick a fight here on what was obviously not a concrete plan. I’m not sure if you noticed but I’m actually not an expert and don’t haven’t a 32 part plan on how to solve it. Instead pointing out the obvious fact that the man is worth more than the gdp of many nations and how none of that will go to help others, but please keep telling me how the idea of him helping is silly.
I get it I’m not expert as well. I’m just saying his stocks are over inflated in a bubble economy, and if you tried to extract any cash from this, the bubble pops and nothing if value can really be extracted.
Here is my thinking. Most of his stocks are trading at 350p/e. Most normal companies trade at 10. Give it a high end of 35, his real “wealth” is 100 billion, not 1 trillion. Or if the 100 billion he would owe 20 billion in taxes, and we know he still owes 40 billion on X. On the high end we can safely say he could extract 40 billion in cash “if” he didn’t owe money on other projects or loans. Realistically he would get a free billion.
The reason i say the high drop in p/e is because every speculative investor is investing in him, and not his stocks. And if he put in the required paperwork to sell all of his stocks, he would trigger a mass sell off from investors and the p/e would go to realistic values. The other reason is there isn’t enough liquidity in the market to support 1 trillion in sell off to support a zero crash anyways.
The world seems to be owned by Musk, and he really REALLY doesn’t like poor people. This is the same klepto grifter who suggested a political party for only the middle class.
How can we call him a trillionaire if the wealth is effectively imaginary. If it isnt imaginary l, tax it.
I don’t consider him a trillionaire. The stock he holds is of an unprofitable company. If he tried to hold a trillion dollars in his hands by cashing out on the stock, it would plummet, who would buy that at that price without the hype? If he cant hold a trillion dollars in his hands, how can he be a trillionaire? Its purely speculative.
It’s like some ancient king claiming to be a trillionaire because a lot of people believe that there’s a ton of gold in his kingdom - without good evidence. There’s no guarantee he’d be able to mine enough gold to become a trillionaire, so why call him that?
When it comes to leveraged loans for buyouts, it’s the same difference.
It’s not, not even close. He’s worth a trillion because investors are investing in him. If he tried to sell everything the 350p/e stocks would go to 20 instantly making him only with 10 billion. He still owes 40 billion on Twitter.
He would be bankrupt overnight if he tried to sell it all
If you owe the bank $1,000, that’s your problem. If you owe investors $1,000B, that’s their problem.
One would think that investors are smart enough to know that this is a shell game. I think what we’re seeing is that they believe they have won the quiet war of capital vs humanity and are no longer afraid of consequences.
We’ve all ‘bought in’ via 401k, HSA plans and other retirement ‘vehicles’ and they think we can’t bite the hand that feeds. Crashing this ‘line-go-up’ would mean we lose “money” too.
And they may be right… but I think we’re rapid approaching a point where that hand no longer feeds, and that hand is quite close to the head. If $1T of this fake money disappeared overnight, the cash in my wallet would become worth a lot more; or we’d switch to trading in bottle caps. The techbros found the infinite money glitch and are printing virtual currency at the cost of real people who will eventually notice and turn on them.
They are even taking away our circuses: My decade-old computer has literally APPRECIATED in value over the last 12 months and the industry that created the products that are being traded right now has completely pivoted away from the consumers that made it. I can’t afford to replace the parts I currently have if they fail.
Even people who don’t call themselves gamers will feel this squeeze when their current iphone battery degrades, can’t be easily replaced, and the new model with no actual value-add beyond battery costs $5k because silicon is all tied up in some useless datacenter no one can afford to access. Oh, and you need a phone to respond to a captcha so you can apply for food stamps, a job, or interact with the chatbot that is gatekeeping whatever else you have to do to survive.
The Billionaires have captured the system and the average person has no awareness or care.
If you use twitter you are directly to blame. Stop upvoting twitter repost, upvote serious posts that calls out elon musk not memes.
It’s not a moral failure, its a systematic failure; everybody suffers
The difference between a billion dollars and a trillion dollars is roughly a trillion dollars…
I remember when the National debt in the US was 7 trillion, and people were talking about it at the time about how enormous that number was, and how people couldn’t conceptualize it. Now we have a singular person in our midst who could singlehandedly clear up 14% of that. And our current national debt is like 40 trillion now?
That’s almost 1.3 million per homeless person or 55k for 18 million people to eat
even distributing all his wealth between homeless people or people without food won’t really solve anything
No it wouldn’t but I’m just putting into perspective how much money that really is. It’s disgusting.
i got your point wrong then. but i agree, it is disgusting and i just can’t wrap my brain around how much that is
Yeah no worries. The homeless problem and the people going without enough to eat is a systemic problem that can’t be solved with just money.
Or the fucking millions that just lost healthcare for billionaires to have more tax breaks
