Who’s afraid of Elon Musk, the trillionaire?

OPINION:

Early this year, we learned that Elon Musk may become the first trillionaire in world history.

My friends on the left of the political spectrum have been fuming about this story as the ultimate example of the rich getting richer and the poor getting crumbs. When I appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” not long ago, Bill’s first question to me was: “Why does anyone really need $1 trillion?”

This question has been asked of the super wealthy throughout American history. The first millionaire, John Jacob Aster, amassed his millions in the fur trade and Manhattan real estate in the first half of the 19th century. The first billionaire in America was John D. Rockefeller, arguably also America’s greatest business mind.

As the owner of Standard Oil in the early 20th century, Rockefeller brought access to cheap energy to the masses. Yet the government sued him and broke up his company.

The first $10 billionaire in America was likely Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft in the 1970s and supplier of the world’s first dominant computer operating system. The government sued him too as the price of computer software fell by 90%.

Then, a little more than a decade later, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon and became the first $100 billionaire by selling and delivering cheap goods to Americans online at very low prices.

Progressives are horrified by the news of billionaires and the soon arrival of trillionaires. Calls for imposing a steeply progressive wealth tax on billionaires (and trillionaires) are getting louder every day.

Notice that all the men of great wealth and almost all of America’s other super-wealthy individuals throughout history — the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Carnegies and the Fords — built spectacularly successful companies out of nothing and even invented new industries.

They didn’t inherit the money. They earned it themselves. They revolutionized and democratized energy production, railroads, cars, steel production and financial services. Yet they’re disparaged as robber barons.

Now, the new multi-billionaire class is making the digital age accessible to everyone. It’s no accident that we all have access to computers, artificial intelligence, search engines, smartphones, MRIs and the like. Even the poorest among us now have access to more goods and services.

Thanks to the genius of people like Mr. Musk, in a few years we will all have our own robot that will do our bidding: make the bed, fix our dinner, drive us to the movies, rake the leaves and buy the groceries.

One of the most influential economic studies of modern times came from economist William Nordhaus, who estimated that consumers capture about 95% (the “social surplus of invention”) of the economic benefits from innovation, while the inventors and entrepreneurs capture less than 5%.

In other words, for every $1 billion Mr. Musk earns from his satellites and electric vehicles, everyone else in society is over time a combined $20 billion richer. Michael Jordan and Paul McCartney are billionaires, and soon Taylor Swift will be as well, but the value of the joy they have brought to the citizens of the world is in the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars.

So just who owes whom money?

Show me any social welfare government program in American history that has produced those kinds of benefits for mankind. Even Mr. Gates has a $100 billion charitable foundation, but the impact of those charitable gifts and initiatives are dwarfed by the value added by his creation of Microsoft.

Here’s another way to think about it: Who do you think would put $1 trillion to better use, Elon Musk or the blowhards in Congress and the bureaucrats in Washington? The question answers itself.

• Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior adviser and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity.