The Giving Review: Elon Musk as trillionaire: philanthropically speaking, what comes next?

I never desired wealth on its own account but for the accomplishment of some ulterior purpose.  Possession and ownership involve cares and responsibilities inconsistent with the entire freedom I had enjoyed in my youth when I was impecunious. … After the necessary wealth was acquired, I voluntarily parted with wealth to promote my freedom from the care and responsibility requisite for retaining it, until nature should grant me the final divorce. — Judge Thomas Mellon, founder of Mellon Bank, as quoted in Burton Hersh’s The Mellon Family

***

Elon Musk may be Earth’s first trillionaire, but even with his stupendous wealth, like the late Rodney Dangerfield, Musk “gets no respect.” Not even in Canada, where he spent part of his late teens.

As anticipation over the latest Muskian financial bonanza was building, the (“veddy” establishment) Toronto Globe and Mail ran an article with the initial headline “SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him.” (Emphasis supplied.)

Someone at the Globe apparently got over his skis, as the headline was quickly toned down after massive online ridicule; the word “hate” disappeared entirely. Maybe the Globe suddenly also recalled that Canada has laws against promoting “hatred.”

Thankfully, we can predict some more-thoughtful, less-hysterical reactions to Musk’s emergence as the world’s (the universe’s?) first trillionaire. Some historically minded critic will no doubt get around to re-reading James Madison in Federalist No. 10, and ponder whether Musk represents the long-feared nemesis of the defences erected by America’s Founders against the rise of a single dominant political faction. An appropriate line of inquiry in this year 2026, as the U.S. celebrates 250 years.

From Federalist No. 10: “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but [thanks to the genius of American federalism, they] will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.”

Aha, comes the critic, but the U.S. system of checks and balances has never had to deal with a figure like Musk, possessing such wealth that he could easily—with his own resources—bankroll a national political party and recruit candidates, while standing up an auxiliary army of proxy § 501(c)(3) think tanks and other third-party groups to support that party. And have plenty of dollars for wall-to-wall political advertising left over.

In response to this line of argument, I wish to expand somewhat on a perspective on Musk and philanthropy that I previously sketched out in the Giving Review.

Put plainly

To put the question plainly, has Musk been waiting to achieve a certain net worth prior to opening his own equivalent of George Soros’ Open Society apparatus, or the network of nonprofits sustained by the Koch brothers?

Is all that’s been holding Elon back from starting his own version of the Tides Center/Tides Foundation, a few missing billions in his bank account?

As an entrepreneur and innovator, Musk does not seem to have much stomach at all for the political trench warfare that Soros, Koch, the Tides machine and so many large pools of money are funding with persistent, unending gusto across the U.S.

By temperament, the very last thing big-thinking Musk seems to want to do is sit in grant-approval meetings (“So, do we give this group the whole $100,000 all at once, or over three years?”), or to give instructions to foundation personnel directing his billions.

A crucial insight into Musk (and some of his contemporary “tech-lord” brethren) comes from Jeremy McKey: to them, nothing promises a greater potential impact on the broader society than “the activity of the entrepreneur in generating wealth.” For people with this mindset, as McKey puts it, “[t]here’s no distinction, there’s no room … for some sort of separate activity that we would call philanthropic” to separately create that impact.

Let me emphasize that the following is my view, and not necessarily McKey’s: from this perspective outlined above, Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and his repositioning of it as a megaphone to amplify MAGA beliefs (or at least not censor them), is a stand-out example of an entrepreneurial action with a tremendous societal ripple effect.

Indeed, Musk’s complete intent in taking over Twitter probably cannot be fully understood except from this combined entrepreneurial-action/societal-impact perspective.

So if we want to try to predict how Musk may use his billions to advance his political beliefs, we can confidently rule out in advance him musing about giving the Claremont Institute and the Cato Institute $5 billion to jointly open up a “Center for the Elimination of the Administrative State.”

Similarly, should the various arms of the administrative state begin to look seriously at bringing some level of censorship to the Internet, Musk’s reaction is more likely to be distributing Starlink terminals at low cost or even for free to Americans who want them, as a way to bypass any administrative-state controls—rather than send a few billion to the ACLU to litigate the matter.

And so on and so forth.

(Past?) Presumption of paper-vs.-paper

In 2023, Tucker Carlson gave a speech that included a brief reflection on his initiation into the daily combative exchanges of Washington, D.C.’s dueling think tanks (part of that political trench warfare made possible by the tax code and funded, of course, through acts of political philanthropy, whether large or small):

So, when I started at Heritage, the presumption was, and this is a very Anglo-American assumption, that the debates we’re having are rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed-upon outcomes.

So, we all want the country to be more prosperous and free, and people to be less oppressed or whatever. And so, we’re going to argue about tax rates. And I think higher tax gets us there. I’m a Keynesian and you disagree, you’re an Austrian or whatever, but the objective is the same.

And so, we write our papers, and they write their papers, and may the best papers win.

Some will look at Elon Musk’s wealth and assume a portion of his SpaceX windfall will surely result in the creation of new Heritages and new American Enterprise Institutes, keeping the “paper-vs.-paper” model of politically tinged philanthropy going.

But we can confidently say in advance this road does not suit Musk. If anything, Musk’s future “political” interventions will probably speed up the retirement of parts of this legacy think-tank-vs.-think-tank, influencer-vs.-influencer approach.

Must wants to shift debates, not one paper at a time, but through bold, risky moves—including buying Twitter and, through it, recruiting a powerful global force of vocal political fellow travelers. In overcoming obstacles in business or in politics, Musk’s attitude seems to parallel those famous words of General Douglas MacArthur about how “[i]n war, there can be no substitute for victory.”

The scale on which Musk thinks means those who oppose him—or wish to constrain his influence—will need to upgrade the scale of their thinking, too.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-elon-musk-as-trillionaire-philanthropically-speaking-what-comes-next/