Elon's wealth is mostly in acquisitions. Even PayPal, co-founded by Peter Thiel, was an acquisition by X.com (the bank), at which point Elon was already ousted as CEO. He came back briefly, trying to convert PayPal infra over to Microsoft much to Thiel's chagrin, but then ousted again in favour of Thiel, who renamed the merged company to PayPal.
So PayPal, an acquisition (not made by Elon). Tesla, another acquisition. And like SpaceX, Neuralink, Starlink, they are built by actual domain experts, with wealth bootstrapped from Elon dad's wealth (who funded Zip2), and Thiel. Thiel successfully built and administered PayPal, along with Amazon one of the few companies to make it unscathed through the dotcom bubble by providing actual business value, and gave a massive boost to Elon's net worth, and it was Thiel that enabled him to acquire Tesla. And it's Tesla's absurd valuation, that's enabled him to buy all the other things he fancies, including a seat at the government.
Capital should be allowed to accumulate to those, who find the best use for the capital and use it in the most efficient way for the service of the world. That's the idea of capitalism.
Now, if he makes bad capital allocation decisions (like what this news is about), then he loses the capital to someone smarter than him, to someone who finds better use for that capital. That's also capitalism. Doing irrational or "bad" things isn't possible, without it resulting in losing that capital.
> each of which make groundbreaking products and services
It's like you didn't read a word I said.
But to respond to your claim, which I've heard many times before – including from Paul Graham. Maybe he's some genius at allocating capital in your eyes or something, but I don't think his investment decisions were even that radical, but they are within the conservative circles of people who usually have that capital behind them. If, in some fantasy land, you could give more people the same level of wealth (i.e. real purchasing power) that Elon had in the 2000s, I'm certain a lot of people would have put that money into electric vehicles and batteries. They were exciting at the time, and had demonstrably great potential for returns, but they required enormous capex. Conservative old money wasn't interested in making that kind of all-in investment, but that's just because the kind of person that hoards wealth, isn't the kind that makes those kinds of bets. Elon had the luck of being wealthy enough, and also being an outsider with an aspirational mindset. That isn't so special, beyond the dumb luck of riding the coat tails of Peter Thiel's company.
Definitely not what I was arguing, but I'll leave you to figure out how we got here.
And you're seriously arguing that that's not a pretty important difference?
> he doesn't have any special powers to bludgeon anything
I've seen him described in all kinds of ways, but "without special powers" is a first.
This is straight up wrong. Musk built Zip2 with his father's money, but everything beyond that has been built off of investing money he received from Zip2's sale to Compaq and any wealth accumulated since then. He's funding ideas, but don't lie to yourself and say that he's building them himself.
Blackrock doesn't control how the vast majority of that money is spent...
You are confusing "assets under management" (AUM) with actual net worth. Blackrock's net worth is $43 billion, compared to $11 trillion in AUM, because 99.6% of the top-line number you chose is actually just client money. Musk, meanwhile, is around $400 billion, so you have the numbers backwards; Musk has about 10x the net worth of the nation's largest fund manager.
And the argument is moot anyway - he wasted tens of billions on Twitter. If he was doing good things (true scotsman) he would’ve built schools.
https://truthout.org/articles/musk-pledged-6b-to-solve-world...
They didn't come up with a plan, because it's obviously impossible to solve world hunger with $6 billion. If it was possible, why USAID $40 billion annually couldn't do it.
CNN maybe wrote a bad headline? Doesn't really seem like the sort of thing to pretend to offer and then deny 42M people food aid over, but then I'm not a trillionaire. I don't think he bothered to actually read the story, instead just tweeted after reading a screenshot of a headline. He got mad about something the WFP didn't even say, and then people decided they must have said that because he got mad about it. They didn't!
If he really wanted to know what $6B could do, he could have donated it and found out. It was cheap enough for him to donate $6B to sit in the "foundation" that he personally controls, so it's not like he was hard up for cash.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/26/economy/musk-world-hunger-wfp...
> Correction: An earlier version of this story’s headline incorrectly stated that the director of the UN’s food scarcity organization believes 2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could solve world hunger. He believes it could help solve world hunger.
Or bad things.
To put this in perspective, the net assets of Google are around $300 billion, and their total assets are around $450 billion. Musk's net worth is roughly $400 billion.
In addition, Elon isn't even that rich, when compared to other entities, which aren't a singular person. As an example, BlackRock manages over $10 trillion of assets (that's 30x compared to Elon), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms
Elon is not the richest entity in the world, and he doesn't have any special powers to bludgeon anything, like none of these large companies have, unless they do some weird market manipulation tricks (which should be illegal anyway).