Trillionaire? Elon Musk's fortune could surpass the wealth of 46% of the world's population after SpaceX's IPO
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Billionaire Elon Musk will be richer than the poorest 46% of the world's population — around 3.8 billion people — with the entry of his aerospace and artificial intelligence (AI) company, SpaceX, into the stock market, according to an analysis published this Thursday (11) by the humanitarian NGO Oxfam.
Billionaire Elon Musk will be richer than the poorest 46% of the world's population — around 3.8 billion people — with the entry of his aerospace and artificial intelligence (AI) company, SpaceX, into the stock market, according to an analysis published this Thursday (11) by the humanitarian NGO Oxfam.
Musk's personal fortune, as owner of the social network X, is expected to exceed 1 trillion dollars with SpaceX's initial public offering (IPO), which will make him the world's first trillionaire.
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To give you an idea, if Musk spent 1 million dollars a day, it would take 2,740 years to spend 1 trillion dollars, assuming that this amount did not earn any interest.
"This extreme concentration of wealth is symptomatic of decades of pro-billionaire policies that have allowed them to dictate the economic rules in their favor," Oxfam said in a statement.
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Nabil Ahmed, senior director of economic justice at Oxfam America, said the tycoon's rise to trillionaire status "is a new milestone for the oligarchy and a dark day for democracy."
"Concentration of wealth incompatible with a healthy democracy"
"Musk will be a government-backed trillionaire whose fortune was boosted by an era of regressive public policies," Oxfam emphasized. The report noted that a trillion dollars "in the hands of one man" is incompatible with the idea of "an affordable economy and a healthy democracy" as "economic inequality breeds political inequality."
In its report, Oxfam highlighted that a 10% tax on Musk's estimated trillion-dollar fortune could eliminate extreme poverty in the world for a year, relieving the lives of more than 800 million people. And he would still be one of the ten richest billionaires in the world even if he donated $100 to every person on the planet.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump speaking to journalists in the Oval Office in February
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File photo
Close ties to the Trump administration
The organization points out that a large part of Musk's fortune is based not only on the government support he has received in the past, but also on the fact that, during his time in the government of United States President Donald Trump, he "allegedly took advantage of the situation to protect and increase" this wealth.
SpaceX gets a fifth of its revenue from the US federal government, the report says, adding that its IPO will "line the pockets" of Republican administration officials as well as venture capital firms, politically connected individuals and senior company executives.
The company scheduled the biggest IPO in history for this Friday, surpassing the record set by Saudi oil company Aramco in 2019.
With this operation, its market capitalization could reach approximately 1.77 trillion dollars, which would place it among the ten largest publicly traded companies in the world, but still behind Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Amazon.
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