Elon Musk opens construction of Shanghai ‘gigafactory’ Your support helps us to tell the story Read more lon Musk, is he worth it – a trillion dollars, give or take? Unfashionable as it may be, I still cleave to the view once provocatively expressed by the now equally unfashionable Peter Mandelson, that even social democrats should be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”. But in the case of Musk – no ordinary mortal, he – one should probably add: “And as long as they behave like a responsible global citizen and don’t abuse the political influence money can buy.” Not only is the Tesla boss already the wealthiest person on earth – a net worth of $491bn, last time I consulted the handy Forbes Real-Time Billionaires database – but he has a claim to being the richest human ever to inhabit the planet, leastways aside from the ancient emperors who “owned” entire civilisations. Adjusting for inflation, Musk easily outstrips JP Morgan, Henry Ford, John Paul Getty and Rupert Murdoch put together, with only John D Rockefeller at the close of the Gilded Age edging him – but maybe not for much longer. ‘Adjusting for inflation, Musk easily outstrips JP Morgan, Henry Ford, John Paul Getty and Rupert Murdoch put together’ (Getty for Heidi Klum) It seems incomprehensible. Could Musk really be that rich, now that he’s got his trillion-dollar payday, on top of his existing half-a-trillion net worth? Well, there are a couple of things to bear in mind here. First, it’s not inevitable. He gets no salary as commonly understood, and will only get to see his latest Tesla “pay deal” if he hits some exacting targets: delivering 20 million Tesla vehicles and one million Optimus robots; winning 10 million subscriptions to Tesla’s full self-driving feature; getting 1 million self-driving Robotaxi vehicles into commercial operation; and earning up to $400bn in core profit. The idea is to boost Tesla's overall market value from $1.4 trillion to $8.5 trillion. “Time to pull a LOT of rabbits out of the hat”, as the centi-billionaire/semi-trillionaire quipped on his very own X (Twitter) profile. None of that is easy, let alone inevitable. Then there is the unreal nature of Musk and his wealth. He, like many of the truly elite rich, has almost all of his money tied up in his various enterprises – Tesla, SpaceX (including the Starlink satellites) and X, most prominently. It is, in a sense, notional. Whereas the rest of us, if we won the lottery, we’d most likely give up work, buy some nice properties, indulge our hobbies and dole out some gifts to friends and family. We might even buy an island somewhere, maybe a whole archipelago. But Musk is not classically materialistic. He doesn’t seem interested in vulgar, gilt-edged displays of wealth, as Donald Trump, for example, insists on. Musk wouldn’t necessarily, for example, fall foul of Nicky Haslam’s latest “common” list because this extraordinary individual isn’t that interested in air fryers, Kilner jars, lanyards and nduja, dread indicators of poor taste according to Our Nicky. For most of Musk’s life, he didn’t even own a home – and when he did buy one, it was a fairly modest affair next to his dusty space station in Texas. Clearly, he isn’t into fancy clothes or cars, despite manufacturing them. There are only three things that seem to interest him, aside from business: gaming, procreation (almost for the sake of it – 14 of ’em at the last count) and, more closely linked to his corporate life, starting a colony on Mars. Which does rather lead one to the thought that Musk might one day, in effect, control and own the Red Planet – which is quite the piece of real estate. Worth another trillion in mining rights? Purely in business terms, if Musk manages to create trillions in shareholder value for his fellow Tesla shareholders by dominating AI, robotics and self-driving vehicles, then when he comes to claim his stock options, his tech will be easily affordable to the masses. We would all be able to enjoy the long-anticipated sci-fi dream of a work-free society, one where the autonomous vehicles do the driving, the robots all the work, from bookkeeping to social care to eye surgery, and the AI bots could do our thinking, taking our vague human creativity and turning it into video games, movies and architecture. Win, win, as they say. Provided Grok doesn’t evolve into some sort of fascistic master being, we’d be doing alright. Indeed, economic growth would boom, and our “productivity problem” would be over. That is why, provided we keep him under some sort of control, Elon Musk is worth every cent of his trillion dollars. More about