Sickening Levels of Wealth

Today, with the IPO of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s wealth soared to over $1 trillion dollars. For me, and I hope for you, dear reader, that is an outrageous amount of money for one person to have.

Even the saintliest of individuals should never be a trillionaire, and, well, Musk is very, very far from that.

I write a lot about how we can build an economy that works for real people and communities in Canada and beyond. Our current extractive system concentrates wealth at the top and is ultimately incompatible with a democratic, equitable society.

Despite the protestations of people like Tobi Lütke, obscene levels of wealth such as Musk’s (and his own) aren’t just the “just rewards” for entrepreneurship, nor are people like them “load bearing for human thriving.”

Such gross levels of inequality hoard the ability to take entrepreneurial risks for an ever smaller group of people. It starves states of the funds they need to provide social safety nets that can allow people to take risks and launch businesses. Not everyone is the son of a wealthy emerald trader, like Musk, the son-in-law of mining investors, like Lütke, or the grandson of a national bank president, like Bill Gates with their money and social capital on demand.

But even above and beyond the distorting effect of such levels of wealth inequality, it is just morally wrong for one person to be that rich given the suffering that exists in the world.

It can be hard to comprehend how much money even a billion dollars is, let alone a trillion. In the Verge today, Jess Weatherbed draws comparisons on how much that actually is, starting with time:

If you were to count out a million seconds, it would take you 11 and a half days. A billion seconds would take you 31.7 years. But a trillion seconds would take 31,700 years.

The median after-tax income for Canadian families was $108,900 in 2024. For unattached individuals it is $38,000. I recently worked out how long it would take that family and individual to earn the equivalent to Galen Weston Jr’s net worth of over $20 billion. When I’ve ask people what they think the answer is, most guesses range from a few hundred to 10,000 years.

In reality, it would take the median family over 187,000 years to earn that much. The median unattached individual would need over 531,000 years!

And Weston’s net worth is chump change to Musk. The latter is about 50 times richer.

That amount of money could do so much to solve real global challenges. The list would be a long one for what that money could do.

But instead of going into that, I just want to make one local comparison.

Toronto, Canada’s largest and richest city, and a city that in 2023 already was home to 116,100 millionaires and 17 billionaires, is also a city where one-in-four children experience poverty

In 2023, 119,690 children in lived in poverty. Almost the same number of children in poverty as there were millionaires in the city. It would take a startling small amount of their wealth to have a transformative impact on the lives of those children and their families.

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Something is profoundly broken when a single person can be worth more than 3.8 billion people — 46% of the total world population combined — all at a time when so many people here and globally live hand to mouth. It is absolutely disgusting and there is no possible justification for it.

The systems that allowed this to happen, frankly, need to be completely burnt to the ground.