Arwa Mahdawi: Elon Musk nears trillionaire status

In the space of less than two years, Elon Musk’s reported wealth has swung from the high hundreds of billions to something that, if a SpaceX flotation lands as planned, could put him on track to be the world’s first trillionaire. Arwa Mahdawi writes in The Guardian that Musk has publicly posted about happiness on X while also appearing, by her account, “angry frequently” on the same platform. The piece treats the possible milestone less as a curiosity of finance than as a test of how porous the boundary has become between private empires and public authority.

Musk’s fortune is largely not cash but ownership stakes whose paper value can rise and fall sharply; Mahdawi notes he has lost billions in a single day before. But the column argues that the practical meaning of a headline net worth changes when the number becomes so large that ordinary reference points stop working. A trillion dollars is “one million million,” Mahdawi writes, and at that scale even a million dollars becomes a rounding error. She offers a comparison drawn from US median net worth figures: what looks like a life-changing sum to most households can become, in relative terms, the equivalent of spare change to someone at the top.

The article ties that scale to politics through Musk’s spending and access. Mahdawi cites reporting that Musk gave $290 million to Donald Trump and other Republicans in the 2024 election cycle, and argues that such money can smooth the path for a candidate even when counterfactual outcomes are unknowable. She also points to Musk’s proximity to power after Trump’s return: attending cabinet meetings, joining state visits, and, as described in the piece, cutting deals for his companies during trips that are formally about national diplomacy. The arrangement is straightforward: the state confers regulatory and contracting advantages, while the billionaire supplies funding, attention, and a ready-made communications machine.

Musk’s role in a “department of government efficiency” called Doge is presented as a case study in how political branding can be outsourced. The column says Doge pushed through large-scale cuts, encouraged tens of thousands of firings, and drove the dismantling of USAID. Mahdawi cites “some calculations” claiming that the aid cuts contributed to 600,000 deaths, mostly children, from disease and malnutrition—an estimate framed as contested but included to show how decisions sold as domestic housekeeping can have lethal spillovers abroad.

A trillionaire, in this telling, is not merely a rich individual but an institution that can buy time, attention, and state capacity—while remaining shielded by the volatility of markets and the complexity of corporate structures. Musk can lose billions on paper and still remain central to the political economy that helped create the gains.

Musk’s net worth, Mahdawi notes, was reported at roughly $270 billion in late 2024. The column’s premise is that the bigger story is not the next number on the scoreboard, but how easily public functions can be folded into a private balance sheet.