“The most important part of my job is to keep my now-23,000 employees focused on the great work we do every day,” she said. “I feel like we put our heads down, we plow through our very difficult jobs. Maybe my best contribution…would be keeping everyone focused, not listening to the noise.”
Then too, there is the matter of appearances—the very existence of a single man with more than one trillion dollars in his pockets in a world of extreme wealth inequality. “Today, Elon Musk, a trillionaire, pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making $184,500,” posted Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders on the Musk-owned X. “If we end that absurdity and lift the cap on taxable income, we can make Social Security solvent for 75 years and expand benefits by $2,400.”
“Think Musk the Billionaire was bad?” wrote The Guardian. “Brace Yourself for Musk the Trillionaire.”
The Wall Street Journal, meantime, took the opposite view. In a commentary headlined “In Defense of Trillionaires,” contributor Novi Zhukovsky wrote, “Mr. Musk’s companies have kept America at the forefront of two of the defining industries of our era, employed tens of thousands of American workers, and—by going public, as Tesla did in 2010—given ordinary Americans the opportunity to share in their economic success.”
