Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
SpaceX debuts on the stock exchange this Friday, which should make the businessman the first billionaire in the world. Oxfam warns of an “extreme concentration of wealth” and speaks of a “dark day for democracy”. IPO will “fill the pockets” of Trump administration officials.
The billionaire will be richer than the poorest 46% of the world’s population — around 3.8 billion people — when its aerospace and artificial intelligence (AI) company goes public, according to an analysis published this Thursday by the humanitarian organization Oxfam.
The personal fortune of Musk, owner of the social network X, is expected to exceed one billion dollars with the (IPO) of SpaceX, making him the first ‘trillionaire’ in the world.
To give you an idea, if Musk spent a million dollars a day, it would take 2740 years to spend a billion dollars, assuming that this amount did not generate any interest.
“This extreme concentration of wealth is symptomatic of decades of pro-billionaire policies that have allowed them to dictate economic rules to their benefit,” Oxfam said in a statement.
Nabil Ahmed, senior director of economic justice at Oxfam America, said the tycoon’s rise to billionaire status “is a new milestone for the oligarchy and a dark day for democracy.”
“Incompatible with a healthy democracy”
“Musk will be a government-backed billionaire, whose fortune was boosted by an era of regressive public policies”, highlighted Oxfam. The report noted that a trillion dollars “in the hands of one man” is incompatible with the idea of “an affordable economy and a healthy democracy” since “economic inequality breeds political inequality.”
In the report, Oxfam highlighted that a 10% tax about Musk’s estimated fortune of one billion dollars could eliminate extreme poverty in the world for a year, easing the lives of more than 800 million people. And Musk would still be one of the ten richest billionaires in the world even if he donated $100 to every person on the planet.
Close ties to the Trump administration
The organization points out that a large part of Musk’s fortune is based not only on the government support he received in the past, but also on the fact that, during his time in the government of United States President Donald Trump, he “allegedly took advantage of the situation to protect and increase” this wealth.
SpaceX gets one fifth of its revenue with the US Federal Government, the report states, adding that its IPO will “fill the pockets” of officials from the Republican Administration, as well as venture capital companies, individuals with political connections and senior company executives.
The company scheduled the biggest IPO in history for this Friday, surpassing the record set by the Saudi oil company Aramco in 2019. With this operation, its market capitalization could reach around 1.77 billion dollarswhich would place it among the ten largest listed companies in the world, although still behind Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Amazon.
