Elon Musk Tells Walter Isaacson People Confuse His Wealth With Spending Money

Image: Tesla

Elon Musk says people misread what his fortune actually is, arguing that most of it is simply his stake in SpaceX and Tesla and that people often confuse controlling capital with spending it.

Musk made the comments to Walter Isaacson, who wrote his 2023 biography Elon Musk, in the season debut of Isaacson’s podcast The Builders, which was released on October 20. The episode notes say the interview was taped on August 6. When Isaacson asked about the wealth gap and the populist backlash that came with past waves of new technology, Musk said “a fundamental misunderstanding of economics arises because of conflating resource allocation and consumption.” He added that there is a limit to what any one person can consume, so going from a billion dollars to 10 billion dollars in net worth doesn’t make someone 10 times happier or give them 10 times more things. “It actually means you’ve got a resource allocation problem,” he said.

Isaacson then pointed out that Musk has accumulated about a trillion dollars and asked whether he keeps it to fund goals like Mars, AI and robots or whether it works more like a scoreboard. Musk said he needs “sufficient voting control in the companies to still be in charge,” and that his “so-called wealth is simply a percentage ownership in SpaceX and Tesla essentially.” He also said, “This is going to be taxed quite heavily. There’s not some magical way to avoid taxes. If there were, I would know about it.” In his view, the fortune will get whittled down over time, and a few generations from now his descendants “would have a tiny fraction of what I have.”

Later in the episode, Musk said his wealth “mostly goes to sort of foundation, essentially” after he’s gone, and that he would want that foundation to “continue the goals. Make life multi-planetary, extend consciousness to the stars, improve sustainable energy on Earth.” Earlier, he told Isaacson that in a future run by AI and robots “money becomes irrelevant,” and that any currency left would be measured in “fundamental physics metrics like wattage and tonnage.”

In a lighter part of the conversation about AI companies whose names seem to work against them, Musk joked that reality is “an irony maximizer,” listing examples like “Stability AI is unstable” and “Midjourney is not mid.” On energy, he said “we’re putting together 200 gigawatts a year of production capacity of solar in the U.S.” The rest of the 40-minute episode covers AI safety, his time in government with DOGE and his views on X.

The episode came out a day after Musk said he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year, a pledge he called “the first of many,” as we reported on Monday. Musk didn’t say in that post how the shares would be distributed, and his own SpaceX shares stay locked up under the IPO schedule until June 2027.

Musk’s argument that his net worth is mostly ownership in the companies also lines up with how he talks about where that value comes from. Over the weekend, he wrote on X that “Optimus and Cybercab will be the vast majority of Tesla’s value.” Both companies will update shareholders this week, with SpaceX posting its third-quarter results after the close today and a webcast at 1:30 PM PT, followed by Tesla’s earnings call on Wednesday, October 21.

Do you buy Musk’s argument that his wealth is mostly about control of his companies rather than money he can spend?