You Are No Elon Musk
We have more in common with a homeless person
Everyone is always sticking up for billionaires. Despite the fact that they got where they are by exploiting workers and it is frankly immoral to have so much money when most of the rest of the world is starving - when Elon gets attacked, his fan club will come to his rescue.
“Elon got where are is today because of hard work. He is just smarter than the rest of us!” No, his father owned a diamond mine in South Africa and he had an easy start in life.
According to the gushing article in Time Magazine, which made Musk its 2021 Person of the Year, he is a genius:
“Musk made his money differently than most of today’s famous billionaires. Instead of one amazing idea, he had several good ones. And instead of a bunch of clever, safe investments, he made just a few spectacularly risky ones. But there was a method to his madness, even if it wasn’t apparent to many at the time. The sum total of those bets made Musk the richest private citizen on the planet this year…”
The fact that our society would make a hero out of a person like this shows us just how far we have degraded ourselves under capitalism. We could go on all day arguing about Elon, but this article is not really about him. It is about the millions of people who stick up for him because they think one day they will be just like him.
Every time I talk about billionaires not paying taxes, his fans come out of the woodwork to defend him. “He should pay fewer taxes because he is a job creator. The money he spends trickles down to the rest of us!”
The reason they defend him is that they think one day, they will be billionaires too and they don’t want to ruin it for themselves. They think, even though they are working dead-end jobs - because they read Entrepreneur magazine, one day they will have the wealth that Musk does.
The sad fact is, because Musk has so much money, all of us have more in common with a homeless person. Consider this — if you started saving $100 a day, it would take you 27,397.26 years to reach $1 billion. Most of us couldn’t even manage to save that much. If you, and “one descendent per generation, saved $100 each day, and each of you lived for 90 years, it would take you and 304 generations of your descendants to save up one billion dollars.”
In this economy, the chances that you or I would ever reach one billion dollars are slim to none. And Elon Musk has 221.4 of those billion dollars, so any one of us thinking we would ever be in the same boat as Musk is foolish.
Considering what is happening in the world today, and knowing that the world’s wealth is already held by people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, it’s plain to see that we have more in common with the guy begging for change in front of 7–11.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his novella, The Rich Boy, “The rich are different from you and me…” Ernest Hemingway mocked him, saying, “Yes, they have more money.” Hemingway later wrote in Esquire magazine, “that was not humorous to Scott. He thought that they were a special glamorous race and when he found out they weren’t, it wrecked him.”
People wanting to be rich because, somehow, the wealthy are better and more deserving people is nothing new. The rich have always been put on a pedestal, like celebrities, and made to be superhuman.
The fact that 99% of the population lives below their means and will never in a million years see a billion dollars does not stop them from defending the “poor” billionaires that are so put out and everyone loves to hate.
According to Ashley Ness in The Suffolk Journal, “…it should be considered criminal to have Bezos’ [or Musk's] net worth when millions of Americans are struggling to survive off of their paychecks.”
I agree that no one should have that much money, and we need to stop glorifying these people who hoard their wealth like Smaug in The Hobbit and treating them like they are somehow special and better than the rest of us.
Remember, you have more in common with a homeless man, and just because you follow Elon on Twitter and want to start a business does not mean you will ever have a billion dollars.
Stop defending the rich.
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