Let’s pretend.
Why Musk? Because he is the wealthiest man in the world. Let’s assume his net worth to be $750 billion (an average of publicly available estimates), which is more or less accurate as of today (Musk's wealth is highly variable as it is based on the value of Tesla and SpaceX stocks which – like the rest of the stock market lately – has been highly volatile. The exact value of Musk's wealth does not affect my argument in the slightest).
Let’s assume it doesn’t grow due to the growth of the underlying assets. Let’s also assume it isn’t taxed. No inflation, no recessions, no savings accounts or Treasuries. It just remains $750 billion – except for how quickly you can spend it.
Let’s assume you have a wife and three children. Let’s assume you have 45 years left to live (Musk is 55, let’s keep you alive to 100 years old). Let’s spend this wealth like crazy and see what happens. This is our thought experiment: what is the lifestyle of a man who can have everything?
Housing
The Playboy Mansion was sold for $100 million in 2016. Bill Gates’ home is worth $127 million. Musk divested himself from domestic properties several years ago and may have realized $100 million in exchange. Screw it, let's assume you own six properties worth $1 billion. 0.133 (roughly 1/8th) of 1% of your wealth.
Servants
Let’s assume you need twenty(!) servants for each of your six homes for 45 years at $40,000 per servant/year. You may think that $40,000 is too low a wage until you consider that they each have free room and board (in a mansion!); not to mention, how many of these homes really need twenty servants? Nevertheless, the cost of servants over 45 years is 6 homes * 20 servants / home * $40,000 / servant-year * 45 years = $264 million, 0.035 (roughly 1/28th) of 1% of your wealth.
Food
Let’s go whole hog. Let’s spend $1,000 for dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants in the world. That’s for you. But you also have a wife and three kids to feed. And three meals / day. So, $1,000 / meal * 5 mouths to feed * 3 meals / day * 365.25 days / year = $5,478,000 per year, and $246.5 million for 45 years. What, you can’t eat home once in a while? $246.5 million is .033 (1/30th) of 1% of your wealth.
Transportation
Each of your homes deserves two automobiles, and a new one every three years! In today’s market, a Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail retails for $32 million, a Rolls-Royce Boat Tail for $28 million, and a Bugatti La Voiture Noire for $18.7 million. So, $78,700,000 / 3 autos * 6 homes * 2 cars / home * 45 years / 3 (# of years car is kept) = $4.722 billion, about .63 of 1% of your wealth.
OK, OK, auto insurance, gas & oil, and repairs. You think $15 million is enough? It’s enough. Another 0.002% of 1% of your wealth.
How about personal jets? Let’s assume two jets that you keep for five years each. “A private jet can cost anywhere from $3 million to $90 million. Ongoing expenses include flight crew salaries and expenses, the costs of routine maintenance and unforeseen repairs, hangar rental, and aircraft insurance.” (borrowed from Google). The crew can be borrowed from our servants’ allocation, fuel and insurance will be a small fraction (let’s add another 50%) of each jet’s cost. So, $45,000,000 / jet * 2 jets / 5 (years per jet’s lifetime) * 45 years = $810 million + 50% of that for maintenance, etc. = $1.2 billion, another 1/6th of 1% of your wealth.
Clothing
For a man like you, suits cost $2500. Three new suits every year. So, $2500 / suit * five persons * 3 suits / year * 45 years = $1,687,500, add shirts and underwear, etc., and you clothe your family for $2 million, another next to nothing of your wealth.
Education
Let’s keep all five of you in school at top prices. Five persons * $100,000/person * 45 years = $22.5 million, another .003 (1/33rd) of 1% of your wealth.
Health
Let’s assume crazy: five quadruple bypasses for each of you for 45 years. The real cost per bypass may be $50,000, but let’s go with $500,000! So, $500K / year per person * 5 persons * 45 years = $112.5 million for the five of you for 45 years, another .015 (1/67th) of 1% of your wealth.
Jewelry and works of art
These are not necessities, and the figures that I have worked with above are so extravagant that you can own more than enough without going beyond the budget that I have imagined.
So, $1 billion for housing, $264 million for servants, $246.5 million for food, $4.75 billion for automobiles, etc., $1.2 billion for jets, $2 million for clothing, $22.5 million for education, $112.5 million for health care. The total hit is about $7.5 billion (spread evenly over 45 years, that is $166.667 million / year, $456,308 / day, $19.013 / hour), which covers you in King Louis XIV splendor (do you think you could survive on this sum for the next 45 years?). That is 1.00% of your total wealth. You and your family could live like this for 4,500 years! If tomorrow you lost 99% of your total wealth – to a stock market crash, to taxes! – you would be devastated by the loss – emotionally! But once you got it together, you’d realize that you would not have to miss a meal or a suit, you would still have enough for your family to live real high on the hog (see above) for the rest of your life, for the next 45 years, until you reach 100. And the average American could live an upper-middle class life ($200K / year) off of this remaining 1% of Musk's' fortune for – oh – 37,500 years!
As to the remaining un-spent $742.5 billion of your fortune, it would not be kept in your bathtub; it would be saved and invested in stocks, bonds, Treasuries, museum quality art, artifacts and jewelry. Not spent. And it would outgrow any attempts to tax it as wealth. No one need fear it would just disappear! No one need fear it would be worth less than $750 billion next year, stock market correction notwithstanding. Still, your wealth will still grow much faster than your taxes and your hobbies.
One of the possible lessons that you (once you are back in your own body) may draw from this thought experiment is: don’t be so bent out of shape when you hear a “socialistic” politician begin to talk about taxing the rich. Indeed, this experiment uses the wealth of Elon Musk, and no one else lives the life he could live.
But there are 989 billionaires in the USA in 2026. And there are 74,000 households in the USA in 2026 with wealth upwards of $100 million. Americans who live in this economic stratosphere quite often declare no taxable income (Musk hasn't paid a red cent in income taxes in years if not decades, as he has declared no "taxable income"). He has declared Capital Gains income when he sells some stock, but even that tax rate is below the rate that you probably pay on your wage-slave income. In addition, Musk's wealth (net worth) has grown more than 50% annually for the last ten years, for the last 20 years. Still shedding crocodile years.
Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax that kicks in at $50 million. You need not worry, nor need you waste any energy feeling empathy for those grandees who would be burdened by such a tax. A tax on wealth in excess of $50,000,000! In MY version of a wealth tax, I would kill the income tax altogether and the Capital Gains tax entirely, and depend solely on taxing wealth. Does that idea frighten you? Only multi-millionaires would pay more in a wealth tax than they now pay in income tax now. But it would finally capture (in tax revenues) what it has failed to capture for decades: a portion of the wealth of the super-wealthy. Imagine the good it could do: rebuild our infrastructure, eliminate annual deficits and pay down the National Debt, pay teachers enough to attract the BEST!, oh so much more.
There are a few folks out there who are concerned that a wealth tax could wipe out a man’s entire estate over time. Indeed, if one billionaire’s wealth is, say, $1 billion, and his annual wealth tax were 6% (a very unlikely assumption) on his entire estate, and his wealth did not grow at all, his net worth after 10 years would have shrunk to $539 million, after 20 years it would shriveled to $290 million, and after 45 years he would have less than $61.8 million left to live on. Can you imagine, $61.8 million left by the time he reaches age 100! Poor fellow! But the typical billionaire’s net worth does NOT stagnate over time; it grows – reliably – and faster than our supposed top wealth tax rate of 6%. Elon Musk’s wealth has grown at upwards of 60% / year since he began, and the typical billionaire’s and multi-millionaire’s wealth accumulates at multiples of 6% annually; so – after taxes – their net worth still grows. Shed no crocodile tears for your friendly multi-millionaires and billionaires – and centi-billionaires.
Save your empathy for those who might benefit from it. These folks could care less. Unless they are running for president!
P.S. A political (on again, off again) "friend" of mine has insisted that I hate billionaires (because I want to raise their taxes). Offhand, I can think of only one multi-billionaire (Musk) whom I detest beyond reason, but because of his arrogance, not his obscene wealth.
But whether I admire or despise the guy has no bearing on whether he should pay (more than nothing?) taxes, much more taxes. He can and he should (whether anyone agrees with me or no) pay more taxes! All super-wealthy Americans should pay more taxes, as they all have gotten away with murder for far too long! The country needs the extra revenue! Tax the rich!
P.S., the artist who drew the awesome cartoon above is no mathematician. His last three numbers are ten times too SMALL!!! It's $114 million / hour, not $11.4 million / hour. And the following two the same, too small by ten times. Pity the poor trillionaire. I don't give a rat's ass how much you believe he has contributed to our lives, he pays NO income taxes, or FICA taxes or Medicare taxes, or state and local income taxes. If you're OK with that, you need a brain transplant.
P.S. #2: translate 1 Trillion into years and it is 72 times the age of our "observable universe," translate 1 Trillion into miles and it is 160 round trips to Pluto and back.
Pity the poor centi-billionaire.
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P.S. #3: How often have I heard – how often have you heard – “these uber wealthy Americans should not have to pay an income tax because they are job creators!” My initial reaction is; “yeah. OK, so what! I fail to see the argument, all I see is a slogan, or an equation between one kind of income or wealth and the legal need to pay income taxes. My impression is that Americans pay taxes to pay for the ways that we as a nation have chosen to spend them. Why should job creators be an exception?”
Just because I don’t understand the unspoken argument may be enough for me, but I want to convince those who think this way that they are wrong. So, here goes.
Quibble #1: A classic case of a job creator is the homeowner who hires one or more people to mow his lawn, or make his property more appealing, not by buying but by hiring. When he hires a babysitter, he creates a job. When a man owns a mansion and needs servants to … serve, he creates jobs.
Quibble #2: Let’s assume that this job creator owns a business, 100% of the business. If he creates a job out of his personal stash, he will derive NO tax benefit, no tax deduction; if he creates a job with corporate funds, he will be able to report it as an expense and thereby reduce his corporation's tax liability.
Quibble #3: Musk does NOT own 100% of Tesla, he owns ca. 14% of Tesla. If Tesla creates 100 jobs, it would seem that Musk’s job creation, if he should be credited with any, would be limited to 14 jobs. Musk owns ca. 45% of SpaceX, so in this case maybe he is created with creating 45 jobs out of 100.
Quibble #4: Tesla employs 134,785 people worldwide, SpaceX employs another 22,000, for a total of 156,785 jobs. Musk’s personal net worth (today) is $866 billion. Each employee enriches Musk by some $5,523,487.58 (net worth / # of employees). It would be lovely if Musk’s (corporate) employee were worth this godly sum, but apparently job creation enriches the job creator 5,000 times more than it enriches any of his (corporation’s) employees.
Quibble #5: and this for Musk alone. DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), under the supreme leadership of Elon Musk, terminated 300,000 to 350,000 workers. What do we call this? I think the expression is “job destruction.” So, if Elon Musk is an example of a job creator, he is responsible for creating NEGATIVE 150,000 jobs!
And you, binkie, think that it’s OK that Elon Musk pays zero income taxes because he is a “job creator”!
As for those multi-billionaires not named Elon Musk, you need to understand that corporate job creation is NOT the same as personal job creator, that it makes all the difference in the world. Repeat quibbles #1 through #4.
I realize that this argument – made mostly of numbers – will be easily understood only by math geeks and for that I apologize. But avoiding math would make the argument much much longer. You have heard of hundred-page judicial decisions? This is the alternative. What is the solution? This P.S. #3 is 500+ words. If it were a random sample from a piece of fiction, it would take most of us about three to five minutes. But it’s not as easy to absorb as a work of fiction. Find ten to fifteen minutes of time to re-read the thing until you get it.
Finally, if you can improve on (make it easier to understand) what I have written, please let me know. If you think I'm dead wrong, prove it!
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