The Oddest Man Out Among Our $Hundred-Billionaires: Elon Musk
The mirage of green-tech modernity, the evaporation of Tesla’s cultural capital: oligopoly, charisma, political extremism, the collapse of a psychic good, & the future of Elon Musk’s fortune…
The World’s $Hundred-Billionaires:
Consider the world’s $hundred-billionaires:
(1) There are the patrimonialists ruling resource-rich societies:
The of Al Saud
The House of Al Nahyan
The House of Al Thani
And—perhaps—Vladimir Putin.
(2) Moving on to those without formal political power, I see seven non-tech barons:
Reliance Industries of India made $2 billion last year. As India’s most successful industrial conglomerate, its profits are rock-solid. And so Mukash Ambani and his family are, I think, worth more than $100 billion from their 50% collective holding of it.
Similarly, their 50% share of LMVH admits Bernard Arnault and family to that $100+ billion club.
Also worth more than $100 billion—each, I think—are WalMart heirs Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton. WalMart’s profits are $15 billion a year, and are also rock solid. Plus Jim, Rob, and Alice are surely well diversified by now, making their fortunes more secure.
Warren Buffett’s 15% of Berkshire Hathaway’s $100 billion a year puts him in the club as well.
There is Michael Bloomberg with 90% of Bloomberg’s $15 billion a year.
One presslord, two conglomerateers, one luxury brand, and three retail barons. That rounds out, I think, rounds out the world’s non-tech $hundred-billionaires. There are seven, I think.
(3) Then there are the ten techbros. Roughly, I think:
Michael Dell with half of its $3 billion a year;
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft with wealth derived from its $100 billion of profits (even though the Gates and Ballmer shares of equity are now 4% and 1% respectively);
Jeff Bezos of Amazon with his 10% of its $30 billion a year;
Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google with 6% each of its $70 billion a year;
Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook with 13% of its $40 billion a year;
Larry Ellison of Oracle with half of its $10 billion a year;
Jensen Huang of NVIDIA with 4% of its $30 billion 2024 net income; and
Elon Musk of Tesla with 13% (as of now) of its $7 billion in 2024 profits.
Those ten plus the others, making twenty or twenty-one in all, are—I think—all the $hundred-billionaires the world owns today. (Yes, there are $billionaires and perhaps $ten-billionaires who make it their business to fly under the radar. But I do not think you can be a $hundred-billionaire and successfully hide, not at that scale.)
Out of all these, all except two have annual income from operations that has been consistently larger than $1 billion a year for years. But two do not.
Jensen Huang
The first of those two is Jensen Huang of NVIDIA. Consider NVIDIA’s recent profits, in billions:
Perhaps $70 for 2025…
$30 for 2024,
$11 for 2023,
$10 for 2022,
$4 for 2021,
an average of $3 for the previous five years,
And $70 forecast for 2025.
Thus Jensen Huang will pull in roughly $4 billion from NVIDIA over the two years 2024-2025, and its profits look high (if very unstable) further down the road. But his share of income from operations was only (only!) $400 million in 2024 and 2023, far below the scale of his fellow $hundred-billionaries.
Does he belong in the club? Yes, I think on balance it makes sense for Jensen Huang to be considered a $hundred-billionaire today, given his ownership stake and the amount of money people are going to pay for NVIDIA’s chips. And yet:
NVIDIA’s profits depend very much on its continuing to grab the lion’s share of the profits from what is a three-layer monopoly stack of ASML, TSMC, and NVIDIA.
ASML and TSMC have many other people to whom they could sell their machines and their fab capacity.
NVIDIA has nobody else from whom it could buy either.
And NVIDIA faces fierce competition from those who want to design equivalent chips:
AMD and Intel;
Trainium, Ironwood, and Azure for internal cloud use by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft;
plus Cerebras, Groq, Sambanova
(and perhaps Qualcomm and Apple: it depends on whether power efficiency rather than throughput per square cm. of silicon becomes the most important thing).
Jensen Huang’s membership in this club depends very much on:
NVIDIA’s ability to out-execute its rivals and would-be rivals in GPU chip design,
its ability to continue to fend off demands from TSMC and ASML for a proper share of the profit flow;
and on the AI-boom not being an AI-bubble.
Huang’s status as a $hundred-billionaire is somewhat shaky—built on cloud-castles that have not quite solidified, but that rapidly solidify with each day that the AI-boom does not collapse, and NVIDIA continues to be able to charge all that the market will bear for its chips, as its customers are unwilling to try to cut costs by going to alternative suppliers and run the risks of delay in building out their stack. (And there are risks: over at Apple Computer right now, the media whisperers love to blame relative executive outsider John Giannandrea for Apple’s disappointing performance in AI, but it seems much more likely than not that Giannandrea wanted to spend much more on NVIDIA hardware, that Luca Maestri kept him on a much shorter leash than he wanted to be on, and that Tim Cook backed Maestri.)
Elon Musk & Tesla’s Profit Curve:
And then there is Elon Musk. Consider the recent profits of Tesla, in billions:
perhaps $4 for 2025,
$7 for 2024,
$15 for 2023,
$13 for 2022,
$5 for 2021,
$0.7 for 2020,
$0.9 for 2019,
an average of -$1 for the previous five years 2014-2018.
Elon Musk will pull in only (“only”) $1.4 billion from Tesla over the two years 2024-2025.
Right now I do not see a scenario in which Tesla’s profits in 2026 are higher than in 2025.
And thereafter?
The EV Is Not (Yet) in Any Transportation-Services Sweet Spot:
The problem is that—outside of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, coastal Connecticut, and New York City—pure EVs are not yet in the sweet spot. The charging network is still not robust enough outside the key metropolises. If you are going to rent for outside-the-metropolis trips, then fine—but then you want a cheaper car with a 50-mile rather than a 300-mile battery range.
No. In nearly all of America, the sweet spot is still a gasoline-only vehicle or a plug-in hybrid: that’s where you get the most bang for your automotive purchase buck.
The Four Sources of the Tesla Boom:
Why, then, did people buy Teslas? Why did people buy so many Teslas in 2021, 2022, and 2023?
To understand that we must look well beyond transportation utility and instead situate the EV within the symbolic economy of the early twenty-first century’s urban professional class. Four factors produced the Tesla auto sales boom—three of them having to do with demand, and the fourth having to do with opportunity cost.
Here are the three demand factors:
First, as a piece of technology, the Tesla was sui generis: an electric vehicle that did not merely compete with, but outperformed, its internal combustion rivals. With its instantaneous torque, minimalist interface, and over-the-air software updates, the Tesla was a manifestation of the Silicon Valley imaginary made manifest in aluminum, lithium, and code. To own a Tesla was to own a piece of the future—a future that promised not just improved efficiency, but a qualitative leap in the relationship between human and machine (see: McLuhan, “Understanding Media,” 1964). Purchasing a Tesla was—at least for a certain ascendant stratum of the American bourgeoisie—a performative gesture, an act of self-fashioning that drew upon the logic of technological veneration.
Second, the Tesla was a pledge of allegiance to a vision of green modernity. In a world increasingly conscious of the planetary limits of fossil-fuel civilization, the Tesla was a mobile declaration of faith in technological salvation—a bet that the arc of innovation could be bent toward sustainability without sacrificing the pleasures of speed or the aesthetics of design (cf. Latour, “We Have Never Been Modern,” 1991). To drive a Tesla was to announce one’s membership in the vanguard of the Anthropocene’s would-be redeemers. Again, a performative gesture, an act of self-fashioning and ideological signaling within a reference group that prized both innovation and progressivism.
Third, the Tesla was an instrument of conspicuous consumption, but of a particularly contemporary sort. Within the status reference group of the urban, educated, and cosmopolitan, the vehicle functioned as a positional good, its value amplified by the shared valuation of both technological prowess and progressive virtue (see: Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” 1899; Bourdieu, “Distinction,” 1979). The Tesla was not simply a car; it was a shibboleth, an object lesson in the semiotics of aspiration, and—at least for a time—a ticket to the inner sanctum of the new elect. Yet again, a performative gesture, an act of self-fashioning that drew upon the logic of status competition within the same reference group that prized both innovation and progressivism.
Fourth—and here we get to opportunity cost—the joint action of the other automobile companies that, I think, provided Tesla Motors with the key opportunity
The global semiconductor shortage that afflicted the auto sector during the post-plague reopening boom is usually seen as a tale of misfortune. Plague-induced supply chain fragility, surging post-lockdown demand, the complexity of modern manufacturing, and the unwisdom of auto companies that had cut back their chip ordesrs in 2020. Yet look a little deeper and you can see a different—and a highly Machiavellian—pattern. Other companies are ahead of the auto companies in the line for chips. Chip deliveries are constrained. For lack of $50 worth of chips, the auto companies cannot make an extra $50,000 car. The “norma” reaction would have been for the auto companies ahead of them in the chip-allocation line, and offer to pay to jump the queue. The auto companies did not do that—with the exception of Tesla. And as long as each of the other major automakers is confident that the others are not paying to jum the queue, each can raise prices massively.
And so, by tacitly but collectively refusing to bid aggressively for scarce chip supplies, the auto companies constructed for themselves a remarkably cozy post-plague cartel.
Toyota, Volkswagen, GM, Ford, Stellantis, and their ilk—refused to engage in Hobbesian market competition. They acquiesced to production rationing, accepting multi-million-unit production losses. But in return they got to charge much higher prices to buyers (see S&P Global, “The semiconductor shortage is – mostly – over for the auto industry,” 2023; McKinsey, “Semiconductor shortage: How the automotive industry can succeed,” 2022). And the “exogenous chip scarcity” narrative provided impeccable cover for record markups and profit per unit.
From the perspective of industrial organization theory, this episode stands as a case study in the power of tacit collusion in oligopolistic markets (cf. Stigler, “A Theory of Oligopoly,” 1964; Scherer & Ross, “Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance,” 1990). Collective restraint rather than competitive escalation was very profitable, as long as nobody broke the tacit cartel.
And nobody did, except for Tesla. It used the post-plague reopening to grab as much market share as it could, and found it could do so without offering any discounts whatsoever. Hence its shipments ballooned from 400 and 500 thousand in 2019 and 2020 to 1.0, 1.3, and 1.8 million in 2021, 2022, and 2023. At which it has plateaued: fewer Teslas delivered in 2024 than in 2023, and it looks like fewer will be delivered in 2025 than in 2024. And it was this successful ramp-up at list prices and more that drove Tesla’s profits from their $900 million in 2019 to their $15 billion in 2023. And it was that that made Elon Musk the richest man in the world.
And this boom in Tesla’s came about, as Teslas were declarations of allegiance to green high-tech modernity and conspicuous-consumption status plays, and as the cozy chip-shortage cartel of the other auto companies gave Tesla the opportunity to quintuple its shipments without cutting prices at all. This extraordinary rise from of Tesla from niche automaker to the world’s most valuable car company was, for a time, the closest thing Silicon Valley had to a secular miracle. The fragile equilibrium underpinning this was held together by the charisma of Elon Musk, who, for a time, overpromising and yet also overdelivering, managed to straddle the line between Tony Stark and Henry Ford.
Tearing Your Brand into Shreds & Gobbets, & Eating the Gobbets:
But charisma is a double-edged sword. Now that is gone. The other auto companies may not be confident about how fast the EV transition will take place. But they do know that it is quite possibly an existential threat to them if they fall any further behind BYD than they currently are.
And Elon Musk has taken Tesla-as-a-brand—just two years ago a powerful psychic-good declaration of luxury, modernity, technology, greenness, progressivism, status, and a brighter future—ripped it into shreds and gobbets, eaten the gobbets, and then vomited them up. Musk’s lurch into the political mosh pit—his embrace of Trump’s DOGE initiative, his public feuds, his erratic pronouncements, his willingness to align the Tesla brand with the most polarizing elements of American politics—has detonated a rapid exodus of precisely those customers who once served as Tesla’s most effective evangelists.
Thus the thing that made Teslas worth buying even though they were not in any transportation-services sweet spot is gone. And its natural customers—the affluent, urban, educated, and environmentally conscious—are gone, thanks to Musk. When a brand is as tightly coupled to its founder as Tesla is to Musk, the founder’s political and personal misadventures become the company’s own. It is not simply that Tesla is no longer “cool” among the urban professional class; it is that, for many, it has become actively distasteful, a rolling signifier of reaction, not progress.
Gaming-Out Tesla’s Prospects as a Production Network:
What is the prospect that Tesla will do much better than break even as a production network for useful cars over the next half-decade? Very slim. The downfall is, looking back, an incredible concatenation of self-inflicted wounds, strategic missteps, and the inexorable logic of markets and culture. And while there may be a market for Dukes-of-Hazzard “General Lee”-themed cybertrucks with the stars-and-bars painted on them, that market is small.
Do I need to say more? Do I need to say that the price cuts intended to maintain volume have eviscerated margins, the much-vaunted “moat” of the Supercharger network is being steadily breached by regulatory fiat and the rise of credible competitors, that the Model Y is no longer the object of desire it once was, that the cybertruck is a flop, that the robotaxi fleet remains all-but-vaporware, that the company’s reliance on regulatory credits to pad its bottom line is increasingly unsustainable, that the president for whom Elon Musk was the largest contributor has declared war on Musk’s product line, and that Musk in return has declared war on Trump’s legislative program?.
I think the odds are 50-50 that the Tesla production network is not making Teslas in five years—in one scenario either broken up for its components, or sold and rebranded something unconnected with Musk; in the other scenario surviving as a company, but as a near commodity producer much like other auto companies, with its margins ground down by competition, its brand equity spent, and its days as a world-historic disruptor consigned to the annals of business history.
So what happens to Musk’s status as a $hundred-billionaire? Could it be supported by SpaceX or by xAI? Or could Tesla stock continue to levitate even if the economic earnings are not there? And why should the stock levitate, anyway? Does anybody believe that profits earned either by FSD robotaxis or Optimus humanoid robots will flow to the public corporation that is Tesla rather than to Musk’s private xAI?
If someone asked me to take the “no” side of an even-odds bet on “will Elon Musk be forced into not just a corporate but a personal debt-writedown-and-workout in the next decade?”, right now I would not take that bet.