Why does anyone else care what Elon Musk does with his money?

By David McElroy · April 25, 2022

Elon Musk can be an eccentric jerk. He can also be a visionary who leads companies to great achievements. He does things that people say can’t be done. But he’s not always honest or reasonable about it, as I see it.

Musk has been a wildly successful creator. He’s gotten stunningly wealthy by betting on himself. I like and admire some of the things he’s done. I detest many of his actions at other times. I don’t see how anybody can admire him completely or reject him completely.

But Musk is a polarizing figure. Some people seem to worship him. Others seem to hate everything about him. And now that he’s buying Twitter, a lot of people are projecting their deep biases about the man onto their opinions about the purchase.

But the most bizarre thing about public commentary about Musk — and other wealthy people at times — is that so many otherwise-reasonable people have strong feelings about what he should do with his money.

Every time I see someone criticize Musk — for his space ventures or for his latest plan to buy Twitter, for example — I always ask one simple question.

Why do you care what Elon Musk does with his own money?

Indignant people angrily tweet at Musk all the time to tell him he ought to be using his money in a different way. And it’s always some favorite leftist dream which they claim this successful capitalist should be spending his money on.

I’ve seen people claim Musk could solve world hunger if he would just give his money to the poor instead of building SpaceX. I’ve seen people tell Musk that he could “cure cancer” if he threw his money at some undefined thing instead of buying Twitter.

I have no opinion about how Musk ought to spend his money, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about hungry people or curing cancer. It’s simply that Musk’s money belongs to him, not to me.

Musk’s spending is none of my business.

And this is the root of why it scares me that such criticisms are becoming more common. For many people on the political left, Musk shouldn’t have that much money. Even if he’s earned it by commercializing his ideas and creating things that wouldn’t otherwise exist, these people don’t believe that anybody has a right to become wealthy.

When they see a wealthy person — particularly a wealthy person who doesn’t act as they prefer — their envy and their anger kick in. They want politicians to make up “rules” to steal the money of billionaires.

I’m appalled at the way most people spend their money, because very few have the same priorities that I have. Many people spend their collective billions of dollars on big-screen televisions and lottery tickets and alcohol and cigarettes.

I don’t own a television and think we would be better off if more people turned their televisions off for good. I know that people waste uncounted billions of dollars on lotteries that leave them poor and needy. And since I’ve never used alcohol or smoked cigarettes, I can easily point to the data showing that we would be better off without these dangerous substances.

But the point is that what other people do with their money and with their lives in none of my business. I don’t get a vote in whether you waste your money on booze or tobacco. Or on gambling or television sets or whatever you like to spend your money on.

It’s simply none of my business.

You might find my life choices equally absurd. You might spend my money differently. You might invest my time differently. But you don’t get a vote about my life — about my money or time or effort.

Elon Musk has more money than you have. More money than I have. But the same principle applies.

How the man spends his money is none of our business. Whether you love the man or hate him, it’s his money. Not yours. Not mine.

And if he wants to build rockets or electric cars or social media platforms, that’s his business. You can admire him or hate him. You can do business with his companies or not.

But don’t tell him how to spend his money. It’s none of your business.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts