Three Cheers for Elon Musk — and America

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. I think that this is marvelous.

 

Many of our public officials, it seems, do not. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, responded to the news by saying that “the rich get richer and everyone else gets shafted.” Senator Ed Markey complained that it was “disgusting.” Senator Elizabeth Warren suggested that it was a “wake up call.” Would-be Senator Graham Platner wrote that “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire. Let’s make sure he’s also the last.” And so on and forth.

 

I find this viewpoint revolting. Repulsive. Grotesque. Un-American. I hate it. As far as I’m concerned, Newsom, Markey, Warren, Platner, and those who agree with them are members of an impotent envy cult. Elon Musk has been responsible for PayPal, Starlink, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and more. If your primary reaction to his stewardship of these endeavors is to wonder how quickly you can confiscate the money he has tied up in them, you are a loser and you do not deserve the blessings that this country has bestowed upon you. That sort of thinking is at home in Belgium or Canada or Russia. It is not at home in the United States of America. There are many, many reasons that I wanted to move to this country, and one of them is that it is the sort of place where people such as Elon Musk are able to do great things. England has become sclerotic and its politics have become narrow and covetous. But America? America is a different beast. Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire? Hell yeah he is.

 

And spare me the cheap psychoanalysis. I don’t believe what I believe because I want Elon Musk to “like” me or because I expect rich people to “give” me things or because I suspect that, one day, I, too, will be a trillionaire. What sort of political worldview would that be? And what does it say about those who assume it in others? No, I believe what I believe because I lived for 26 years in a place that seems to have given up on creating wealth and dreaming big dreams — and that has become gray and boring and myopic as a result — and because I much prefer the alternative.

 

I suspect, at one level, Musk’s enemies believe the things he has achieved would magically have happened without him — that, somehow, they were foreordained to occur, and that he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. This is stupid and it is wrong. There are such things in history as great men, and Musk is one of them. Gavin Newsom, Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, and Graham Platner, by contrast, are not. If they got their way, the United States would become France. An interesting place, yes, but not one that ever does much of note.

 

So, yeah: If your reaction to this news was to cavil and whine and start looking lasciviously at Musk’s property, you can count me out.  I want no part of it. Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. Only in America.