The philosopher Michael Huemer wrote a post a while back called Elon Musk is better than you, where he says:
What good has Elon Musk done for the world? First, the amount of money he’s made is a rough indicator of the amount of economic value he has produced, i.e., the extent to which his activities have helped to satisfy other people’s desires, because you get money in a free market by giving other people things they want. (This is unlike how you get money if you’re a government official; if you’re a government official, you get money by threatening to hurt people if they don’t hand it over.) Now, even if you think this is only a very rough indicator of the value Musk has produced, it still must be that he has produced more value than all but a tiny fraction of humans on the Earth.
As I write this, Elon Musk is perhaps illegally dismantling USAID’s operational capacity. I’ll admit that I don’t know that much about USAID,1 but what I do know is that USAID and the bureaucracies Elon Musk decries do great work around the globe to save lives, including saving children who have HIV through PEPFAR.
This raises a paramount moral question: Given that Elon Musk is worth over $400 billion, how much harm does he have to do for me, a lowly plebe, to have standing to call him an asshole?
It would be wrong to say Elon Musk is a better person than you or I just because of the economic value he has created, because as a business person, he doesn’t necessarily need any moral virtue (i.e. a commendable character trait) to create that level of wealth. And when we say someone is better or worse than another, we’re talking about moral virtue.
Accumulating massive wealth is a function of many factors, many of them having nothing to do with moral virtue: business acumen, owning stocks that could possibly be overvalued, or just dumb luck. That doesn’t diminish a billionaire’s skill as a world class businessman, but that wealth has little to do with him being a good person.
What’s more, individual net worth can be a misleading measure for individual economic value if that wealth is based on stock valuation, which accounts for most of Musk’s wealth. Those valuations can be undermined by revelations of fraud or bursted economic bubbles. For example, Scott Bankman Fried had an estimated net worth between $16 and $26 Billion before FTX went bankrupt. Was he suddenly a better person than you or me before he was convicted of fraud? Of course not.
In this way, being a billionaire is neither a necessary or sufficient condition to being a good person. Wealth doesn’t tell us how good of a person you are because the virtues that lead to wealth are morally arbitrary, and one’s market valuation can be overvalued for amoral or immoral reasons.
What makes matters worse, a billionaire can survive unfathomable losses in wealth to pursue personal vendettas. You could argue that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was just that: a horrible business decision, but a great method of advancing Musk’s own interests. He’s ruined the platform, laid off most of Twitter’s workforce, and made it less profitable than before. Some would argue he’s also ruined democracy and his own brain in the process. But Musk is still the richest person in the world.
In this way, a billionaire can do great harm with their means, without accountability, while still maintaining high status and wealth.
So is Elon Musk a better person than you or I? I can only speak for myself.
I didn’t try to hurt children with HIV recently, or poison democracy as a side hustle. I have the self awareness to know when a social media platform is poisoning my brain. I have the intellectual virtue to not spread conspiracy theories or to jump to hasty conclusions from click bait just because it “feels right.” I have the wisdom to realize that the pleasure one gets from dunking on your political opponents (no matter how right you are) comes from a bad place. It corrodes one’s virtue, and if one lives in that brain space indefinitely, it will corrode one’s character as well.
On the other hand, Elon Musk probably has a more intense work ethic than I do, owns some big companies, and is richer than me. I’ll let you be the judge.
For my day job, I work for an organization that gets grants from the Federal Government. All views on this substack are mine exclusively, and do not reflect the views of my employer.
Very good article, thanks. Regarding the last bit — although I don’t know you, I doubt Elon has a better work ethic than you. I think he’s mastered the aesthetics of looking like a hard worker, much like a toddler “cooking” plastic food with a Fisher Price kitchen set.