This summer Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in history. Supporters celebrated the trillions in market value and the thousands of jobs he helped create pioneering electric cars and reusable rockets. Critics treated the milestone as a referendum on inequality. Bernie Sanders invoked the “greed and power of a ruling class.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren renewed demands to tax extreme wealth. Then SpaceX shares fell back below their IPO price and Musk’s fortune dropped to a humble $850 billion, down from its brief peak of $1.4 trillion.
The decline provoked almost no commentary. When Musk “gained” hundreds of billions in unrealized wealth, politicians spoke as if the money had been taken from everyone else. When more than half a trillion dollars disappeared, no one proposed that wealth had been restored to the public. If anything, millions of shareholders, including blue-collar employees holding equity and the retirement accounts of ordinary Americans, lost money.
Economists can explain the difference between income and equity, paper wealth and spendable cash. But the real dispute is psychological. Humans dislike inequality even when a rising tide lifts all boats. If every centibillionaire donated over 99 percent of their net worth to charity and kept a single billion, people would still lament that billionaires exist.
Wealth can be created. That is why the economy grows every year and why most people can afford basic goods like refrigerators that were once luxuries. But status is zero-sum. If one person moves up in rank, everyone below moves down by definition.
Social psychology experiments consistently show that people care more about rank than wealth. Many will take a smaller income if it places them above their neighbors over a larger one that places them below, and their health and happiness track relative standing more than absolute income.
People will even pay to close a gap. When one person proposes how to split $100, and the other can only accept it or kill the deal for both, a lopsided offer is routinely rejected, the responder giving up a real $20 to stop a stranger from pocketing $80. The asymmetry appears early in development. Five-year-old children will even sacrifice some of their own reward to preserve an advantage over a peer.
Envy is not a free-floating vice. It is a system for detecting consequential differences in rank and resources. Humans evolved in groups that were both cooperative and competitive. Food sharing and reciprocal exchange produced mutual gains, but access to land, allies, and mates was limited, and a rival’s rise could shrink one’s own share. Monitoring who had more was adaptive.
The trouble begins when the system cannot distinguish extraction from creation. A fortune won by inventing something useful should be celebrated, not interpreted as a threat.
Musk does not hold a trillion dollars in food, houses, or currency. He owns stakes in companies whose prices reflect what investors expect them to produce. Comparisons between one man’s fortune and the combined wealth of whole populations translate an opaque balance sheet into a familiar problem: one member of the band appears to have claimed the communal kill.
Zero-sum belief also converts personal comparison into coalitional morality. A man who resents a richer neighbor feels small. A man who resents a class of exploiters feels righteous. The English writer George Orwell noticed the pattern: socialism is often motivated more by hatred of the rich than by love of the poor.
Musk may regain his fourth comma or shed another few hundred billion. His rank can swing violently without any matching change in everyone else’s circumstances. That is why the gains produce outrage and the losses silence. The number is being read as a status score.
I agree.
Much of the discourse that appears to be about economic inequality and power is really about zero-sum status games. Most people know that it makes them look bad to complain about someone else's status gained through accomplishments, so they pretend that what they really care about is inequality and power.
I believe you are right otherwise envy simply doesn't make sense.
It makes no sense to vilify the people that add value to our lives.
A reasoned response, a rational response, would be to support and encourage them to add further value.
Why is it then that an innovator, a creative individual, who develops something that wasn’t there before, or perhaps advances a way of doing something better, is not supposed to benefit from it?
Time and again when they bring something of value to us, they scale up that value by employing a team or a work force as a multiplier, adding great value for those employees, feeding a growing supply chain, as well as increasing the value for the rest of us.
Why then, if they dare to take a little of that value for themselves, are they accused of stealing from that work force or from those now benefiting from the value they created?
Where is the reason in saying the value creators should not benefit from their work while the rest of us do?
Where from; the sense of entitlement to whatever value is to be had, but indignation if anything is asked in return?
It is too easy to say: “Well, nothing they did has added value for me. I don’t use their product or their service”.
That may occasionally be true but we live in a complex and highly interactive world.
Quite likely someone whose product or service you do partake of, in turn needs that of the innovator, to provide for you.
Pay the price or not. You have free will and it is your choice. If the value added to your life is worth the price to you – you win.
Where is the harm if the creator of that value is winning too? It is not a zero-sum transaction when value is added.
If the value added is not worth the price to you, leave it alone – you’re no worse off and nothing is gained by denying it to others.
Instead, relish the added value we all in this century enjoy, from the generations of innovative and creative minds that came before.
It is quite obvious, if we look back a hundred, or a few hundred years, that we have gained greatly compared to our ancestors.
For the most part we appreciate those gains, and in our kinder moments maybe even those who bought us that added value.
It should not be so difficult to see that improvements to all our lives continue.
Nor should it be impossible to comprehend that such gains do not happen by chance, but by the efforts, the risks, the failures, the effort and risk again, and again, and eventually the successes of creative and innovative minds.
Individuals who try, and fail, and try again; for whom that value add is not just a product or service but a lifetime’s achievement.
How much further ahead might we be if we supported such individuals instead of taking from them as much as we can before they break?
Such support can only lead over time to further improvements in the lives of all of us.
If that means they're better than me - I'm good with that.