Elon Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire. And that’s OK.

It’s a great thing that the US economy can generate tremendous entrepreneurial wealth from technological innovation

 
One of the articles in the recent “Money Issue” of The New York Times Magazine tries to calculate just how many American billionaires there are: “Forbes thinks there are 735 of them in America. Another count finds 927. Whatever the answer, the mystery is revealing — and the number is growing rapidly.”

Yes, reporter Willy Staley does try to parse the differences between how Forbes, Bloomberg, and a research company called Wealth-X all try to tally the super-rich of the USA. But the piece’s deeper purpose is to persuade Times readers that any number of billionaires greater than zero is probably a bad thing. Here are a few snippets that give the flavor of Staley’s prose — and perhaps politics:

As the ultrawealthy have multiplied, some Americans have drifted toward a sort of billionaire Gnosticism, a sense that we live in a fallen world run by a demonic group of plutocrats. … But you don’t need to think of any individual billionaire as evil to find the sheer concentration of power they have disturbing. … The issue with billionaires is not that they’re sociopaths, though certainly some are. … And until something changes, we will live in a nation that is substantially warped by the gravity of their fortunes.

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Πηγή: fasterplease.substack.com