“In Elon We Trust. When Elon speaks, we listen. Where Elon goes, we follow.”
Engineer by day philanthropist by night, where did this guy come from?
Elon Musk has purchased over 73,486,938 shares of Twitter for an estimated $2.9 billion or less. After the SEC announced the purchase, the shares rose to a value of over $4 billion dollars at its high point creating an unrealized gain of over $1.1 billion dollars — larger than the annual Gross Domestic Product of many small countries.
Those 73 million shares went from $39.49 to a high of 54.57 in less than 24 hours.
These profits will most likely be stuck in the shares as Elon probably didn’t buy Twitter to flip it. Motivated by the need to protect free speech he likely made this purchase instead of launching his own platform.
This leads us to the question of how much influence and social power is too much?
To put this into perspective, according to the IRS, the total earned income in 2019 was $11.9 trillion dollars reported by 148.3 million tax returns which amounts to $32.6 billion dollars earned per day by all households in the United States.
Of the $11.9 trillion, the top 10% households earned about $5.6 trillion of it while the bottom 50% accounted for just $1.37 trillion or about $3.75 billion dollars per day. That’s over 74 million tax returns in the bottom 50% totaling just $3.75 billion dollars per day.
To put this into perspective in the scale of the poorest people in the United States — Elon Musk created as much wealth as about 27 million Americans do in a day.
It’s one thing to build an electric car/energy/save the world business over a decade like Tesla or create an online retail giant like Amazon and experience profits in the billions, but to make over a billion dollars in a day by simply purchasing stock and having it announced brings a new level of absurdity to the market.
Should people be able to create as much wealth in a day as 27 million workers by simply buying an asset and causing its price to skyrocket once the news is leaked they bought it?
This type of investment advice can’t be found in Benjamin Grahams The Intelligent Investor. This monster is a side effect of Social Media’s power and influence over all things, including the stock market.
Top level government employees are restricted from certain investments because they have some control over swaying the market, should people like Elon be held to the same standard?
After witnessing his influence on a dead end project like Dogecoin we can clearly see he wields more power than most government officials do.
He is the unelected leader of the free world but what if this power were to fall in the wrong hands? Do we attempt to govern this type of power while it is in the hands of the “good” to prevent someday when the “evil” may take control of this power or do we wait until it’s too late?
Thoughts?
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