Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package. So says CNN. This news has been met with all the outrage that you would expect.
Inequality.org insists that it’s a bad thing and it’s at the heart of a broader national effort by oligarchs and corporate insiders to consolidate power over our economy. Americans for Financial Reform went so far as to offer message guidance to help people who were opposed to this trillion dollar pay package. Seemingly message guidance that didn’t go anywhere. Get involved as well, urging Tesla shareholders to vote no and using the classic black and white photo trick to portray Musk as a villain. And the unions, well, they’ve come out saying that no CEO is worth a trillion dollar package.
But amazingly, despite all of these advocacy groups who surely must know what they’re talking about, right? 75% of Tesla shareholders saw things differently and didn’t just vote to approve the pay package. They then gave Elon a rockstar welcome and chanted his name even as they handed him this trillion package. So, it’s pretty clear that the Tesla shareholders, the only people whose opinions actually matter in this case, very much believe that Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollars. And that’s because Musk won’t get his trillion unless he first makes his shareholders $7 trillion.
Yes, in this video I am absolutely going into bat for billionaires and indeed trillionaires because despite the PR campaign to demonize them, they create far more value, far more wealth than they consume. And I can absolutely 100% prove that. And this vote from Tesla shareholders, it means that they clearly agree with me and not the socialists in government or the media.
But before we get to that, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap, even popular crap like hating on rich people. And I help you to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. Sadly, I don’t have any shareholders to approve a trillion dollar payday for me. Instead, I rely on you guys, my viewers, to keep the Topher project going so that I can continue to provide counterpoints to the popular but misguided, anti-capitalist, anti-wealth, pro-socialist worldview that dominates our media and culture.
So, if you appreciate what I’m doing here with the Topher project, then please help me to keep it going by buying me a coffee via the button that you’ll find at topherfield.net. And if you appreciate my no-nonsense videos, then you will love my no-nonsense books, my DVD, and my t-shirts and hoodies, which come in a range of different designs, all of which you will find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
Hating on rich people is very popular, and I can understand why. They have a lot of money. I don’t have enough money. It must be their fault for hoarding all that money. But this worldview, whilst popular, is completely wrong. Rich people are not the reason why you’re poor. And in fact, most rich people, and I do say most because there certainly are some people who have gotten rich through dishonesty and crime. But the vast majority have not.
So, most rich people have made your life better, not worse, in the process of them becoming rich.
And that’s because they got rich by keeping only part of the value that they created. The wealth of the human race is simply the wealth that we create through work and industry and invention and technology and better organization and business minus the wealth that we consume through eating and traveling and having things like houses and clothes and sure in the case of the super rich having a super yacht. But what matters is not how much someone creates nor how much someone consumes. What matters is are they creating more than they are consuming, because if they are, then they’re making the world a better place and we are better off keeping them around and keeping them running our businesses.
And we see that in this new pay deal for Elon Musk. The way it’s being reported, you would think that Tesla are about to start pouring cash into a silo for Musk to swim around in, but that’s simply not the case. This pay deal doesn’t involve any actual money at all. It’s a payment in shares and he only gets them if he hits specific targets over the next 10 years. Targets which include adding a further $7 trillion to the market capitalization or the total value of the Tesla company itself.
Musk will become the world’s first trillionaire if and only if he can grow Tesla and achieve these milestones: delivering 20 million Tesla vehicles and 1 million Tesla robots. Now, those robots are a whole other story in themself. Getting 10 million subscriptions to Tesla’s full self-driving feature. Bringing 1 million self-driving robots taxi vehicles into commercial operation. Earning up to $400 billion in core profit and eventually lifting Tesla’s overall market value to 8.5 trillion while it’s currently about 1.5 trillion. And no, he won’t receive a salary under the agreed deal at all. If he hits his targets, he will be awarded with shares. And those shares, if he hits his targets, will be worth about a trillion dollar.
Now, for reference on just how ambitious this plan is, that target market valuation of $8.5 trillion exceeds the combined value of Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet and is worth more than the current most valuable company on Earth, which is Nvidia. And they are riding high thanks to the demand for their chips to drive AI, data centers, and to a lesser degree, crypto mining as well.
$8.5 trillion for a car technology company is ambitious to say the least.
And multiplying its current valuation by five in only the next 10 years, well, that’s something that very few companies ever achieve and even fewer companies once they get to be as big as what Tesla already is. What that means is that if Elon Musk becomes a trillionaire, it will be because he made a bunch of his shareholders into millionaires or perhaps even billionaires, multiplying their net worth by five. That’s their investments, retirement savings, their wealth is being multiplied along the way.
And this is the most important thing that socialists and anti-rich communists like the newly elected New York mayor Mamdani don’t understand. Wealth is not a fixed pie where we squabble over the pieces and one person getting a bigger piece means that the rest of us have to go without. Wealth works in exactly the opposite way. The amount of wealth in the world is changing all the time. It’s being created and it’s being destroyed. And focusing on how wealth is being distributed always results in people losing their focus on how wealth is created. Which is why socialism always leads to everyone being equally poor.
Well, when I say everyone equally, I mean everyone but the socialists in charge, who always seem to still be quite wealthy, because everybody’s equal, but obviously the leaders are more equal than others. So, no, Musk isn’t getting a trillion dollars into his bank account. Far from it. Rather he’s going to get about one out of every $7 worth of share value that he creates for his shareholders. Or to say it another way, Musk will get to keep about 15% of the wealth that he creates over the next 10 years if he hits his targets.
But saying, “Oh, Musk will keep 15% of the wealth he creates.” Well, that’s a crappy headline. So, the media don’t report it that way. Now, one more thing. Some people say, “Oh, okay. Well, we need visionaries and we need millionaires and yes, okay, fine. We need billionaires, but they should have to pay their fair share of tax.” This kind of thinking fantasizes about taking the wealth off these fat cats and using it to fund government services for those who are less fortunate.
But there’s a problem with that idea. The problem is that if you add up the total net worth of every person worth over a hundred billion on the planet, you would get to a combined total of just under $2.5 trillion, which is a lot of money to be sure. But if all of that money was confiscated and given to the US government, the US government would spend it in about 4 months. Exact US government spending estimates vary with about $7 trillion in the 2025 financial year being the most common figure. However, just like in Australia, there is other spending which is called off-budget or off-books. Money goes out, but they don’t have to put it into the accounts in the normal way. Which means that in the US expenditure is actually closer to 10 trillion US in 2025.
In any case, whichever number you use, that $2.5 trillion that you just confiscated from all of the hundred billionaires on Earth, it’s gone in 3 to four months.
Then what? Well, you work your way down the list, grab all the money off the 10 billionaires, and then the billionaires, and you’re confiscating 100% of their wealth, and all of that is just disappearing, being consumed by the insatiable beast that is big government. The wealth’s being destroyed. This is what communists want. Take from those who have too much and redistribute it via the government. Of course, what they don’t account for is that wealth is created and it can be destroyed. And if these fat cats stop creating wealth, if it’s just going to be confiscated off them, why would they? And that doesn’t just hurt them, it hurts everyone around them.
Now, socialists will scoff. Oh, fat cats creating what wealth? Well, let’s go through this list, shall we? Musk, we’ve already talked about. Larry Ellison is worth a cool $276 billion. But Oracle, the company where Larry Ellison made his wealth, well, that’s worth three times that amount. So for every dollar Larry Ellison has made, he also created $2 for someone else, another shareholder. Mark Zuckerberg is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars. Obscene. But Meta is worth $2.5 trillion. Which means that for every dollar Mark Zuckerberg got to keep, he made $9 that someone else has gotten to keep.
Bezos worth $200 billion. Well, Amazon’s worth $4 trillion. That’s a 19:1 ratio for every dollar Bezos kept after he created that wealth. There’s $19 that he created and somebody else now has. All the way down this list, all we will see time and time again is that these so-called fat cats have made more money for others than they have made for themselves. Which means that if they hadn’t made all that money for themselves, if they hadn’t become this evil fat cat, well, it wouldn’t just be them who were worse off. It would be every other shareholder as well.
And shareholders aren’t just rich people. There’s lots of people who use the share market as a way of protecting and building and growing their wealth even when they’re just starting out or for their retirement. But in addition to the shareholders, what often gets missed is also you’ve got employees. You’ve got other companies that these companies do business with. You’ve got vast amounts of economic activity that benefits an enormous number of other people.
And these companies, whether you want to admit it or not, they generate enormous amounts of tax revenue as well because of the economic activity that they generate. Sure, there’s corporate taxes, and yes, some companies do manage to minimize those. That’s true. But there’s also GST or value added consumption type taxes around the world. There’s land taxes and council rates. There’s all sorts of excise fees, import and export duties, not to mention payroll taxes. Then there’s the income taxes paid by the employees.
The economic activity and employment which is created by these companies, well, that generates billions in tax revenue every year.
If we get rid of the incentive for these fat cats by simply taking all their money and their businesses off them, then all of that economic activity and all of that tax revenue disappears with it. This is why socialism always fails. Socialism doesn’t understand where wealth comes from. That it is created and it can be destroyed. That when it’s created, it benefits way more people than just the person in the middle.
But that without that person in the middle guiding and directing and with a vision for this wealth creation for the benefit of themselves and everyone, well, without them, we will soon be equally poor and hungry. Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is misquoted as having said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Now, that’s a misquote because it looks like she probably never used those exact words. But she would most definitely have agreed with that quote and would have said if she was asked, “You can take the entire net worth of all of these people, give it to the US government, and they’d be broke again in 4 months. Then you could carry on down the list of less and less wealthy people and the same problem would continue. No matter how much you confiscate, you would just keep destroying that wealth and running out of other people’s money.”
Because socialism cares only about the distribution of wealth, not the creation. But it’s only through the creation of wealth that we as a culture, as a society, as a species become wealthier. And if we stop creating wealth, we will quickly become equally poor. The Tesla shareholders understand that. This is why they voted overwhelmingly for this trillion dollar payday for Elon Musk, because they’re okay with Musk making another dollar if it means that they make seven.
The future wealth of the human race is simply a product of how much wealth we create minus how much we consume.
And the difference between those two numbers is what we leave to our children. And then they will create and consume and then they will leave that difference and so on it goes. Tesla shareholders are very aware of the fact that Elon Musk is creating way more value than he is consuming. And by keeping him inside their company and keeping him happy, then it’s not only Elon Musk who benefits, it’s them as well. And that’s why, contrary to what the haters will say, it is absolutely possible for a CEO to be worth a trillion dollars. Is Elon Musk going to be the first? Well, only time will tell. But personally, I am thrilled that he’s been given the opportunity to try.
My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. I don’t get taxpayers money like the ABC do, nor do I have shareholders to give me a trillion dollars like Elon Musk. Instead, I have you. So, if you appreciate what I’m doing here at the Topher project and if you’re able to help me to keep going, to keep providing this alternative voice to the socialists and the parasites in government and the media, then please help me to keep doing what I do. Keep the Topher project alive by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you’ll love my books, my DVDs, and my merch, which you’ll find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
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