Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know by now that with SpaceX’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire. The implications of this for all of us and our grandchildren are many and far-reaching. Of course, the left has found a way to narrow it all down to one simple idea: “His money is our money, or it should be.”
That’s not the way they say it. What leftists actually are saying is he doesn’t pay enough in taxes. Why? For the sole reason that he’s rich. If you’re a leftist, rich people are never paying “their fair share.”
This is the politics of envy, and if you study the vast majority of leftist messaging at any time on any topic, envy is a critical component. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if the Democrats, and the left at large, decided to quit being jealous of the right, the left would die as a movement in less than 24 hours.
Envy is the lifeblood of leftist politics, and Musk is merely their latest, biggest, and most convenient target. But it’s worth being reminded that to the left, you are no different than Elon Musk. Let me explain.
The left is miserable when you’re happy. It feels entitled to be the only source of your happiness, but it has no desire to make you happy. Rather, it simply wants to control how happy it will allow you to be.
You saw this during the COVD-19 pandemic when the left rationed aspects of your previous life to you in small portions. The desire to control you in this way came from a fear that you might find a way to be happy in spite of conditions, in this case a pandemic. The thoroughness with which arbitrary measures were taken to deny you the simplest of pleasures was rooted in envy.
Around the same time and in the same environment, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the whole entitlement movement accused you, if you were white, of having “white privilege” and and said that you don’t deserve to be happy. Instead, you should feel guilty because some on the left are unhappy. The “white privilege” guilt trip was not only one of the purest forms of the politics of envy, but it worked to get leftist and otherwise weak white people to voluntarily surrender their happiness.
At some point, almost all leftist politics comes back to envy.
And so, when Musk took SpaceX public and the company’s value skyrocketed (sorry, I couldn’t help myself), the left fell back on its most core strategy – the politics of envy.
Leftist billionaires and their pawns were well prepared to opportunistically try to capitalize on Musk’s good fortune with protest signs, messaging, and rent-a-mobs ready to go.
A union representing leftist college professors showed up alongside all the other envious union members, paid protestors, and disgruntled leftists, complete with their pre-printed signs. They were there to air their grievance that someone was having a good day and just might be happy.
Their signs alone showed an extremely high level of financial illiteracy and ignorance regarding just about everything related to the SpaceX IPO. They read: “Billionaires are a scam”; “Elon is stealing your pension"; “Overthrow the oligarchs”; “This billionaire is stealing from you”; “Elon is stealing your 401K”; and, of course, “Stop Elon. No Trillionaires.”
Since the signs were pre-printed and funded by the usual funders of anything good for America, we can only assume that the evil strategists on the left conceived of these messages because they knew the phrases would appeal to their illiterate base.
First off, how could Elon making money from willing investors represent him stealing your pension? There is no relationship at all, and there can’t be. The money Musk and everyone else made from the IPO came from the market, not from unwilling American citizens or taxpayers. It came from institutional investors through mutual and index funds, universities, large pension funds, and millions of willing individual investors. People invested because they hoped to make profits at some later point. The protestors either don’t understand that, or they pretend not to.
Another sign that actually sidesteps all rational thought is the one that says Elon is stealing your 401(k). The truth is, the SpaceX IPO very likely already helped your 401(k), and if it didn’t, it soon will. Many, if not most of the big mutual funds are riding on the fortunes of a handful of companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, maybe Tesla, and Alphabet. SpaceX just joined the club.
That means if you have a 401(k), it’s in your best interest to want SpaceX to do well. That can only grow your retirement savings. And then there’s that argument the left makes when it has no argument: “Stop Elon. No Trillionaires.”
Why? I mean, really, why? What’s the point? If someone else becomes rich and it has no effect on you, why should you even care? I mean, other than pure jealousy.
That post from Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) is rich, literally. She’s playing upon jealousy and envy to encourage more taxation, but only of the rich, so we're told (for now). They play this “lower effective tax rate” game to try to pretend Elon doesn’t pay a ton of taxes, which he does.
Also, like the financially illiterate protestors in New York, Jacobs is drawing no distinction between income, which is taxed, and assets like stock, which only convert into taxable money if you sell shares.
What makes Jacobs’ post curious is that she is one of the richest people in Congress. She’s got an estimated net worth of $76 million, and she didn’t earn any of it. She was born into it. If ever there is such a thing as privilege, she’s got it. Her father is billionaire Irwin Jacobs, who founded semiconductor company Qualcomm. So, when she demonizes Elon for being a billionaire, or now a trillionaire, she’s pretty much demonizing her own daddy, and she’s not doing herself any favors. She just wants you to think she’s one of the good kind of millionaires.
What’s obvious is she wants you to feel like a “have not,” and she wants you to hate Elon simply because he’s a “have.”
Something Jacobs did not do and would not do is acknowledge all those who have immediately benefited from the SpaceX IPO. A lot of leftists are making money here.
The University of North Carolina, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Virginia bought in early and have huge stakes in the company.
According to Fortune, “In total, more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to become millionaires in the IPO.”
My colleague, David Manney, reported on how some of Musk's loyal employees at different levels of the company will be rewarded.
SpaceX counts 22,000 employees at the moment, and all of them pay taxes. The average salary of SpaceX employees is $155,000-$176,000, according to the company. All of these people pay local, state and federal taxes. Many, if not most, pay property taxes. Those who just made millions each on the IPO will ultimately pay a collective billions more in federal taxes. That means more money headed into the local, state, and federal piggy banks.
Over time, millions of individual investors will make profits on their SpaceX stock at some point, and they will pay taxes on the profit.
The point is, the government will see its share of cash from the IPO, and it didn’t have to do a thing except sit back and wait for the profits to roll in. Yet, Democrats like Jacobs and the rest of the left somehow want you to feel like only Musk is the beneficiary of the IPO.
That’s not stopping the left from engaging in envy porn. Check out this post from millionaire Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), decrying the rich as she rides in the back of her limo.
Or this common refrain that attempts to blame Musk for people putting themselves on government entitlement programs that you, the taxpayer, pay for anyway. In other words, people getting free stuff are big mad that Musk is winning. Since he’s making more money, naturally, they want more free stuff…just because.
That poster blamed Musk for just about every economic challenge anyone in America could face, but one thing he posted that deserves to be addressed is this notion that Musk is getting federal handouts to make his money at SpaceX. As though he's running a non-profit that doesn't reward the federal government. His rockets are the delivery system for satellites that protect our national security, among many other things. Oh, and remember the time NASA couldn't rescue those astronauts, so Musk had to bail out the government?
It all comes back to envy. It’s the foundation of the left’s push for reparations over slavery, not that 360,000 dead union soldiers counted for anything. It’s behind the way the left uses climate change to take away your SUV or even your gas stove.
It’s not about the climate. It’s never about the climate. It’s always about taking way the things you like to take away your happiness. In the process, it will try to control your happiness to control you. It has to make its base envious of you in order to find the support it needs to take away your money, your stuff, and your freedoms. It has to be able to make a case that you deserve to have things taken away from you. Envy is a prerequisite.
Projection is when the left accuses you of doing the very thing it’s doing. When it accuses Musk of getting rich at the public’s expense, it’s exposing how it always seeks to use envy to take someone’s money and freedoms away.
Musk isn’t trying to steal your retirement, but the left is, through higher taxes, higher regulation, and ultimately a higher cost of living. To keep its racket up, it just needs you to look over there at the rich guy and be jealous of him. If it can get you to do that, you’ll never notice how it’s taking away your freedom and your money right out from under your nose. At the same time, it will get you to actually support its oppressive policies and programs designed to hurt Musk. But eventually they’ll come for you. Envy is the secret sauce to all of it.
https://pjmedia.com/tim-o-brien/2026/06/14/elon-musk-and-the-politics-of-envy-n4953968
