How To Be Rich

…without becoming a complete jerk

I would make a terrible trillionaire.

Not that there’s any danger of that happening. But if though some glitch in the multiverse it ever came to pass that my net worth climbed to thirteen digits, I would be embarrassed. No, scratch that. What I would be is ashamed of myself, mortified and chagrined on a galactic scale.

It’s not that I don’t believe in capitalism. To the contrary, while I know capitalism requires strong guardrails to protect the vulnerable from exploitation – guardrails that are too often lacking, I might add – I much prefer our economic system to its alternatives, simply because it’s far more likely than they are to encourage productivity and innovation.

But with that said…a trillion dollars? Seriously? A one trailing twelve zeroes like a kite trailing a tail? Lord, but I would hate that. I’d be giving it away so fast, my hands would blur. To do otherwise, to find myself just sitting there atop that money mountain, would make me feel like I had failed at, well…humanity.

Which brings us to Elon Musk who did, in fact, become history’s first trillionaire last Friday with the launch of his SpaceX IPO. This is, you will recall, the same Musk who, under the aegis of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) took food from starving children, clean water from thirsty women and medical treatment from suffering men. It all happened last year when, given a free hand by Donald Trump, he essentially scrapped the United States Agency for International Development, the nation’s principal outlet for civilian foreign aid. According to a peer-reviewed study co-authored by the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health with researchers from Spain, Brazil and Mozambique, USAID prevented 91 million deaths between 2001 and 2021. The outlook going forward under the DOGE cuts is considerably less rosy: 14 million preventable deaths in the next four years. Four and a half million of the dead will be children under the age of five.

All because the richest man who ever lived decided that saving their lives would cost the richest nation that ever existed too much money. It is a juxtaposition of callousness and need for which there simply are no words.

Musk was just ten years old when Ronald Reagan came to office in 1981, but in many ways, his trajectory to becoming the planet’s first trillionaire feels like it was preordained in that moment. Like some snake oil salesman in one of his movies, Reagan touted like a magic elixir his so-called “trickle down” economics theory – tax cuts for the wealthy, service cuts for everyone else. It was the dawn of the “Greed is good” era, hippies and yippies became yuppies and buppies as America evolved a species of capitalism with ever fewer protections and safeguards, a capitalism so generously unfettered that, as we learned in 2008, one can commit fiscal malfeasance on a scale that crashes the U.S. economy itself, yet spend not even a night behind bars because you are, after all, too big to fail.

It is neither incidental nor coincidental that those same four decades have seen homelessness increase, hunger explode, the national debt boom, the wealth gap widen, the mentally ill dumped on our streets like refuse to fend for themselves. Meantime, there goes Musk, sitting contentedly upon a personal fortune larger than the economy of Sweden, a stack of money so obscenely high that if he never earned another dime, if he simply spent what he now has at a rate of a million dollars a day, he’d have to live almost three billion years to get rid of it.

I couldn’t do it. If he’s what it means to be a trillionaire, I’d rather stay a thousandaire.

How can you have the ability to help people who cannot afford the medications and treatments they need to stay alive, and not do it?

How can you have the capacity to house those who sleep under newspaper blankets on concrete mattresses, and instead look the other way?

How can you have the power to make fundamental, tectonic change in the life of the country – hell, the entire planet – and then just…don’t?

I couldn’t be that person. Apparently, philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott couldn’t either.

Granted, she is a relative pauper by Musk’s standards. Her Fortune magazine-estimated net worth of $36 billion would barely count as cupholder change, comparatively speaking. But she has committed herself to giving it all away to those who need it. She’s already donated $26 billion in the last seven years, including the headline-making gift of over $700 million she gave to historically black colleges and universities in 2025. Said Forbes magazine, “No one has ever given away more money as fast as Scott.”

And here’s the kicker. As noted above, Scott started with a $36 billion fortune, right? She’s given away $26 billion. Know how much she has left? She still has about $36 billion. That’s because her fortune stems from stock in Amazon, the company founded by her ex-husband, Jeff Bezos, and Amazon is doing well. So in effect, Scott gave away more than half of what she had – and lost nothing.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

A line from an old song by the O’Jays, “Rich Get Richer,” imposes itself whenever I think about MacKenzie Scott’s largesse. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with being rich,” they sang. “Just be rich through and through.”

Be rich in compassion, in other words. Rich in benevolence. Rich in giving a damn.

By that standard, Musk is a welfare case. Sadly, he has that in common with the government of his adoptive homeland. Once, America was the nation that fed and rebuilt Europe. Once, it was the nation that lifted its own poor from the depths of economic calamity. Now, America is a nation of perennial cutbacks, insufficiency and decrease, a nation where conservatives happily write blank checks for useless wars, but can hardly sleep at night for fear that somewhere, some undeserving poor person is gaming the system or some child on SNAP benefits is drinking a milkshake instead of eating gruel. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, America, through its lamentable excuse for a president, gave a rich nitwit the power to inflict hunger, thirst and disease upon men, women and babies trying to survive in the wretchedest and most destitute places in the world.

For as much as our culture encourages us to conflate wealth with worth, the ascendance of Elon Musk to financial godhood should be all anyone needs to see the flaw in that formulation. Indeed, one is hardly surprised to find that on a Forbes list of charitable giving by the richest people in the world, he ranks among the stingiest.

Meantime, generations of young, mostly African-American scholars at schools from Morgan State University in Baltimore to Howard University in Washington, DC to Spelman College in Atlanta to Xavier University in New Orleans will see their academic dreams realized as a direct result of MacKenzie Scott’s altruism. And that barely scratches the surface of what this woman has done. Children will be saved from street gangs in Los Angeles and explore Latino dance in New York City because of her. The elderly shut in will have their meals delivered in San Francisco, people will be protected from mosquito-borne diseases in Asia, the Caribbean and South America, LGBTQ folks will find legal advocacy in Massachusetts, the under-educated will be schooled in Mississippi, the hungry will be fed in Texas and the homeless will be housed in Hawaii, all because of her. And that is still just a bare fraction of the thousands of gifts she’s given, a catalogue of generosity that boggles the mind and lifts the spirit. Nor can one even begin to tally the millions of lives she has thereby touched.

It is a legacy that shames the grasping, penurious, I’ve-got-mine culture that grew like weeds in Reagan’s wake. And it makes the wealthiest man in history seem quite small. If the multiverse ever glitched, I know whose example I would emulate. True, Elon Musk has a lot more money than MacKenzie Scott.

But she is richer than he will ever be.