Meanwhile, a disturbingly popular post quipped, “In nature, if a monkey hoarded 1 trillion bananas the other monkeys would beat that monkey to death and take his bananas.”

But Musk becoming a trillionaire does not mean he has $1 trillion in a checking account or in any form of liquid assets — or, in monkey terms, because I guess we’re doing that, Musk does not actually have 1 trillion bananas. It simply means that the stock he holds in his companies, primarily SpaceX and Tesla, is theoretically worth more than $1 trillion at its current price.

But that isn’t money sitting in a bank account. And it couldn’t be even if Musk wanted, because if he were to suddenly try to sell all the stock, its corresponding price would plummet — plus, he would owe hundreds of billions in capital gains taxes on it.

So, contrary to the internet’s widespread confusion, there isn’t actually some mysterious pile of 1 trillion dollars, or bananas, that Musk is “hoarding.” And, even ignoring all the negative economic consequences, Musk’s critics are also vastly overestimating what kind of impact confiscating and redistributing his wealth via the government would even have.

If you were somehow able to extract $1 trillion from Musk, which, again, isn’t really possible, that would fund the federal government’s current spending levels for roughly 49 days. It would barely even cover the annual interest payments on the national debt. So, the idea that this amount of money “could solve virtually every problem” is not just self-evidently false but actually laughable.

The backlash against Musk also ignores the fact that his business success has not come at the average American’s expense.

Wealth creation isn’t zero-sum, and no one loses money simply because the valuation of Musk’s stocks increases. On the contrary, just the recent SpaceX initial public offering reportedly made 4,400 of his employees millionaires via their stock options, and that’s just one example of the countless trillions of dollars his companies have created for society via jobs, tax revenue, and even growing retirement accounts for Americans with no direct connection to them.

Yet all these benefits are overlooked by Musk’s critics, some of whom are politicians at the highest levels, not X trolls.

New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, posted that the news was “reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich.” Meanwhile, Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D-KY) falsely posted that Musk “pays less tax than you,” referring to ordinary people. This all ignores that the U.S. federal tax system already disproportionately taxes the rich, with 40% of the public paying no net federal income taxes at all, and that Musk himself paid in 2021 alone $12 billion in personal taxes, the largest tax bill in all of human history.

Oh, and don’t forget Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who seized on the Musk news to once again push her dream of instituting a “wealth tax.” Left out of Warren’s shaky car selfie video that went viral were the pesky facts that a wealth tax would almost certainly be struck down in the courts as unconstitutional and that many socialist-leaning European nations have tried and abandoned wealth taxes after they caused economic problems and raised far less revenue than expected.

SPACEX HAS A MONOPOLY, BUT THAT’S NOT A PROBLEM

And while Musk’s personal scandals, political impact, and public rhetoric are all fair game for often much-deserved criticism, his companies’ actual value has been built by creating products consumers love, advancing technology, and meeting national needs via government contracts.

So, there’s nothing about his rise to trillionaire status that remotely warrants the level of confused anger it has prompted online. But that hasn’t, and won’t, stop demagogues from capitalizing on the moment to stir up class warfare and exploit the public’s economic illiteracy.

Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and YouTuber.