I was at a farmers’ market perusing a selection of squash, dithering over whether to splurge $5 on just one. I pulled out my phone, in part because I wanted to check what you can do with squash, but mostly because I reflexively look at my phone whenever I encounter any difficulty. Just as I did so, a news alert popped up, informing me that Elon Musk could soon become the world’s first trillionaire.
“How much is a trillion?” I asked out loud.
“I think . . .” My boyfriend, a mathematician, squinted into the distance. “It’s a billion billions.”
He was wrong. A trillion is a million millions—twelve zeroes—but in his defence, it is an unfathomable number. If Musk has $1 trillion (US), his wealth would hover somewhere between the gross domestic product of the Netherlands—$1.2 trillion (US)—and Switzerland—$936 billion (US)—making him the equivalent of the world’s twentieth largest economy. The International Space Station, the most expensive structure ever built, was co-funded by fourteen countries, including the United States, Canada, Russia, and Japan, and it cost around $150 billion (US). With $1 trillion, Musk could independently build six international space stations and have $100 billion left.
Upon further investigation, I realized that the reality is more complicated than Tesla writing Musk a cheque for a trillion dollars. Musk’s net worth currently hovers around a little under half a trillion dollars, making him, generally speaking, the richest person in the world. I say “generally speaking” because a significant portion of Musk’s net worth takes the form of stocks, meaning that it oscillates daily depending on speculation.
Tesla’s proposed compensation package for Musk promises to award him 423.7 million shares of Tesla stock, which is roughly equal to $900 billion (US). To receive this reward, Musk has to stay at the company over the next decade, and in that time period, he must increase its market value eightfold, multiply profits over twenty-four times, and oversee the commercial deployment of 1 million autonomous taxis as well as 1 million humanoid robots (a branch of Tesla’s business that has been performing especially poorly). The proposal is not yet set in stone—Tesla shareholders will vote on it at an annual meeting on November 6.
Most recently, Bloomberg has reported that at least one prominent Tesla investor—the California Public Employees’ Retirement System—plans to vote against the Musk package. Even so, a report from 2024, composed before the package had been discussed, predicted that Musk was on track to become a trillionaire before the end of this decade. It would seem that regardless of whether the compensation package goes through, the era of the trillionaire is imminent.
Musk’s compensation package has spawned plenty of discussion. Some debate whether the targets set for Musk by Tesla’s board are feasible. Predictably, a chorus of pundits rushed to criticize the board’s decision to compensate Musk so handsomely. The New York Times nabbed a quote from a director at Americans for Financial Reform that decried the vast discrepancy between Musk’s compensation package and the median compensation at Tesla—roughly $57,000 (US) per year. Pope Leo also weighed in. During a September 14 interview, he opined, “CEOs that sixty years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving, the last figure I saw, it’s 600 times more than what average workers are receiving.” Even Ross Gerber, an early investor in Tesla, who has since sold almost all of his stakes, criticized the proposal and decried the “level of greed” in “modern society.” (Keep in mind, Gerber is himself a millionaire.)
Widen the aperture and we can see that the “eat the rich” mindset is ubiquitous, evidenced by the barely suppressed glee that pervaded the internet after Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in the middle of Manhattan last year. But if the creation of a trillionaire class is anathema to so many, then why has it been so hard to mitigate income inequality?
Billionaires constitute a minority—there are 902 billionaires in the US and seventy-six in Canada, according to Forbes—and they could theoretically be outvoted in any functioning democracy. The problem is that the US, at least, does not have a functioning democracy. Political scientist Larry Bartels has found that elected officials are not especially responsive to the desires of the poor or even the middle class. Instead, they are primarily guided by their own ideological commitments. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have also shown that economic elites and organizations tied to corporate interests exert significant influence over US government policy, whereas grassroots groups and ordinary citizens have almost no impact.
The most obvious way in which the ultrawealthy exert political influence is through campaign donations. Election campaigns are expensive, and elected officials can be beholden to those who make large donations. The Brookings Institute political scientist Darrell West has written about the “get a senator” strategy, whereby an ultrawealthy individual gives enough donations to convince a senator to do their bidding. In the US political system, individual senators are powerful. A single senator can filibuster to prevent voting on a bill or block nominations of appointees to the federal judiciary and the military.
Of course, Musk himself is perhaps the most revealing case study for just how much political power the ultrawealthy can buy. He donated at least $288 million (US)—0.0288 percent of a trillion—to the 2024 Donald Trump campaign. A week after Trump was elected president, he vowed to create the Department of Government Efficiency (infamously nicknamed DOGE) with Musk and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy at its helm. DOGE allowed Musk to overhaul the executive branch. He fired (or at least tried to fire) tens of thousands of federal workers and slashed international aid programs, throwing a slew of federal agencies and the lives of people who depended on them into disarray.
Donor influence may not even be as straightforward as a quid quo pro. Sometimes, it is simply a function of whom an elected official spends time with. Campaign donations can buy time with elected officials, and if a candidate is spending most of her time listening to the concerns of the ultrawealthy as opposed to the concerns of the poor working mother or the man who is living on disability, then her perception of what is on the minds of her constituency is inevitably skewed.
The ultrawealthy also wield sheer economic power by deciding where their businesses operate. For example, according to a study conducted by McKinsey & Company, the opening of a new data centre can add more than a thousand high-earning jobs—many of which do not require college degrees. This investment translates to a boost for the local economy. Even without directly donating to any political candidate, the ultrawealthy can hold tremendous leverage over local representatives.
The unequal political influence of the ultrawealthy is especially troubling because they generally depart from the rest of the country in their policy preferences. Research has shown that in America, the top 1 percent is typically far more conservative than the American public on policies that affect taxation, economic regulation, and social welfare programs. Preliminary data indicates that the top one-tenth of this elite group may be even more fiscally conservative.
I was curious about whether the ultrawealthy are motivated by the promise of more wealth. Surely, I surmised, there is a point of diminishing returns when money is no longer an incentive. Was there a difference between the daily life of a billionaire and that of a trillionaire? After all, how many private jets, yachts, or mansions can a man want? Gilens suggested that the ultrawealthy may be motivated by the desire for success, which in our society translates into the possession of ever more wealth. West reported that many ultrawealthy people are ideologically motivated. They support policies like deregulation and tax cuts, because—despite all evidence to the contrary—they genuinely believe that these policies are better for the country because they are good for business.
I was surprised to find that many new additions to the Forbes 2025 list of billionaires are “self-made,” insofar as they did not inherit their wealth. But instead of sympathizing with those who are less well off, self-made billionaires may be especially susceptible to the myth that people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. One study has shown that the ultrawealthy prefer spending cuts rather than tax increases to combat budget deficits, even as many of them could not have made their money without public infrastructure. To take a basic example: the commercial internet, which has made many a billionaire, was developed from an initiative of the US Department of Defense. Also, it’s likely that many of the engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians employed by the billionaire class to make their money were educated at public institutions.
Again, Musk is the case in point for how much public assistance is necessary for the creation of a billionaire (or, as may soon be the case, a trillionaire). In 2008, he was almost bankrupt. He had put most of his money into Tesla and SpaceX, and the survival of those companies hung in precarious balance. It was not until SpaceX received a federal contract for $1.6 billion (US) in December 2008 that his fortunes began to perk up.
It saddened me to find that the ultrawealthy are so oblivious to the daily struggles of the many people who rely on public services. But then again, I should hardly be surprised. This past summer, I worked as a hostess at a restaurant in the Seaport, one of the wealthiest and whitest neighbourhoods in Boston. (It had all the telltale signs: a SoulCycle, a Juice Press, and a bakery that sells something called a “Pistachio Mascarpone Croissant” for $9.50, US.) I was paid $18 per hour to attend to patrons who were dropping $50–$100 for a meal—so really, as far as the Seaport goes, the restaurant is hardly on the upper end. And yet, it was still striking—and more than a little dispiriting—to observe how the clientele ceased to view me as a person when I stepped behind the hostess stand. People routinely ignored me when I greeted them. Alternately, they peered down at me from behind their designer sunglasses like I was an imposition on their way to dinner, even though my entire job was to optimize seating in the restaurant so they would have the best experience.
Neither West nor Gilens gave me a definitive answer for how much more power a trillionaire could have compared to a billionaire. The precise difference between a billionaire and a trillionaire is perhaps beside the point. But the fact that a trillionaire may soon exist should not be dismissed as mere trivia; it could affect the lives of millions. The difficulty of survival in America for the vast majority of people is caused by the fact that our public policy has been dictated over the past several decades by billionaires and millionaires wielding ideas about the boons of a “free” market and the conviction that public assistance should only go to the “deserving poor.”
I am fortunate in many ways—I am able bodied and do not have dependents—but I still spend most of my time working or trying to find work. Over the summer, I had to commute for an hour on perennially delayed public transit to get the restaurant where I worked. When I wasn’t at the restaurant, I was calling the Department of Transitional Assistance trying to convince them that I met the requirements to get on food stamps, researching ways to get on Medicaid, cooking, and cleaning. Logistics cluttered my mind. It wasn’t until I started writing this essay that I slowed down enough to put the pieces together.
The nightmare I describe is, in some respects, a particularly American one; Canada is better off in many ways. Unions have been a strong counterbalancing force to the policy preferences of the ultrawealthy, and the rate of unionization is higher in Canada than in the US (~30 percent as opposed to ~10 percent). Campaign finance laws are more stringent in Canada, and unlimited election donations are not protected as free speech, as they are in the US in the wake of the 2010 US Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.
And yet, income inequality also reached a record high in Canada this year. Political Action Committees—an American labour union innovation in the 1940s that has since been adopted by the ultrawealthy in the US to bypass limits on election donations—have sprung up in Canada over the past decade. More worrying still is a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, which struck down an Ontario law that placed strict limits on third-party political advertising, leaving Canada potentially vulnerable to the forces that have eroded American democracy over the past fifteen years.
Instead of a world with trillionaires, imagine this: well-maintained shelters for those who have, for whatever reason, lost access to housing; a flourishing public education system that values both research and teaching; a reliable public transit system that renders cars obsolete; abundant public funding for the arts; robust environmental conservation policies; free health care for all. All these could be possible, but the possibility of them existing in a world with trillionaires is vanishingly small.
