From "Good work if you can get it: Elon Musk is set to make more than every elementary school teacher COMBINED/Tesla shareholders approved a $1 trillion pay package for the world’s richest person" (Independent).
I'll just do a survey:
November 19, 2025
"If Musk earns $1 trillion over the next decade... an average of $100 billion each year... [he]could make $3 billion more each year than all 1.4 million elementary school teachers in the nation combined...."
"Teaching isn’t the only essential profession Musk is set to out-earn.... Each year, Musk will earn $72 billion more than all 107,950 family medicine physicians in the U.S. Musk will also out-earn all 1,057,660 construction laborers by about $46 billion.... Musk’s average yearly payment roughly equals the combined paychecks of all 3.2 million cashiers in the U.S. America’s 747,750 lawyers are... et to out-earn Musk, with his average annual payment coming in at three-quarters of their combined earnings...."
From "Good work if you can get it: Elon Musk is set to make more than every elementary school teacher COMBINED/Tesla shareholders approved a $1 trillion pay package for the world’s richest person" (Independent).
From "Good work if you can get it: Elon Musk is set to make more than every elementary school teacher COMBINED/Tesla shareholders approved a $1 trillion pay package for the world’s richest person" (Independent).
Posts
245 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 245 of 245Of course Elon pays massive taxes.
The left lie about that.
The left demand that capitalism be destroyed - and once again we go down the kkkommunist hell hole they demand at gun point. Leftists reject history and demand we repeat all the bad stuff.
A model of economy and opportunity, teachers included... benefit.
Fifty years ago top .1 % of Americans use to control about 7% of all the wealth in the country. Today it’s gone up to 18%. The reason is because the government has changed the rules to make it much easier for big fortunes to grow mostly by reducing taxes. The average tax rate for the top 400 richest Americans is now around half of what it was 50 years ago. While tax rates for the rest of us have stayed the same. I would say the economy was not too bad in the Reagan era when taxes were higher for the wealthy. And the economy under the Eisenhower era was good as well [houses were more affordable for the middle class] when taxes were much higher. I’ve worked for two billionaires so I appreciate that they exist but even they understand that they alone don’t keep their companies in business - a company [or business] is only successful because of its customers and a business model that can turn a profit.
If the economy is supposed to work to create more billionaires and potential trillionaires then, sorry, but I would say the economy is not working as well as it should unless real wages and the quality of living for everyone gets better. I’m not sure that is the case today. I don’t mean in some kind of ‘socialist way’. And I would not blame billionaires for this inequality but maybe we can blame the government.
It is emotional mush that, doggone it, does kind of make you wonder if at some point inequalities do matter.
As I understand it, Musk's pay package is all stock in Tesla, of which he already owns tons. The proper way to think about this is that even if his additional stock over this period has a market value $1 trillion dollars, he, himself, will probably spend less than $100 million on consumption goods.
The framing shouldn't focus on particular professions- think about the entire population of 340,000,000 U.S. residents. Then $1 trillion dollars in Tesla stock over 10 years would be $294/year resident.
Temujin said...
I don’t understand why so many have wealth envy. They have it to the point of attacking wealth, cutting it off, ending it.
50 years ago 2-5 years average salary could buy a house.
Today it is 10-20 years average salary to buy a house.
This is not okay.
How much cash do you think Musk could raise if he sold $1 trillion dollars of Tesla's stock (at today's valuation) over the next 10 years? One of the problems with wealth taxes is that it liquidates capital stock in favor of immediate consumption which drives inflation on both sides of the calculation- raising demand and cutting supply. If Musk holds $1 trillion dollars of Tesla stock, it basically sits there as capital but if you liquidated it and gave it to other individuals who sell it for consumption, the capital base it represents dissipates almost immediately. That was the lesson of Venezuela, for example.
Spiros Pappas said...
Peachy, you want safer schools, try hiring more male teachers. An old, obese cop making $150,000 per year isn't going to stop a school shooting
@Spotos, you ignorant lout, in March of 2018 a younger, physically fit, heard gunshots and ran towards the sound of gunfire. He wounded the school shooter, who turned his own gun upon himself and finished the job for the officer. I doubt that school resource officer was making even half of your hypothesized salary.
We have all heard of Scot Peterson, the Broward County
deputy sheriff who earned the nickname the Coward from Broward for hiding during the February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed. One male teacher, a coach IIRC, died confronting Nikolas Cruz, but on the whole the male members of the teaching staff were as cowardly as Peterson. I am thinking in particular of a male teacher who saw Cruz entering the campus, knew he was not allowed on campus with any sort of backpack or carrying case, saw that Cruz was unmistakably carrying a soft sided rifle case, and did nothing to impede his entry. If all the acts of adult male cowardice that day, that one stands out to me because the teacher in question had a chance to disarm Cruz while his rifle was still unloaded.
Bottom line, Spiros, you are incapable of learning from past disasters. And that is the most ignorant form of stupidity.
You can hate Musk or Steve Jobs, but they did achieve things that people wanted. Political and cultural elites haven't managed to do much of that lately.
Is he worth it? Maybe, maybe not.
Is it a smart thing to do? Maybe, maybe not.
Does it seem crazy/weird/uncommon? It does to me, but I don't sign the check.
Is he stealing/extorting/counterfiting/defrauding for the money? No? Then, fuck off. Its none of my business.
Stocks are held as leverage to earn capital or wield control.
To answer Achilles’s point about capital taxes: the federal government collects over $500 billion a year from the corporate income tax, another $500 billion or more from taxes on dividend and interest income, and property taxes yield about $800 billion. Then there’s $200-300 billion from capital gains taxes. It’s true that some people get labor income taxed as business income, but some do the opposite.
None of these obscenely wealthy billionaires could possibly get so rich without the reliable efficient and abundant human and technilogical infrastructure built by Americans over the last 250-years.
Motherfuckers have way too much money and power, they think they can make everybody dance like a marionette and can go on raping young girls without consequence.
Musk is a bit of a unicorn in this situation given that most of the uber wealthy are only money changers who do not create wealth they hoard wealth
The ability for someone to get this rich is something that has been growing for 150 years. It's the power of modern technology, and especially the speed since the industrial revolution and now the electronic one. It's infinitely easier to develop enormous wealth today, and at faster and faster speeds. Once it took a family generations, then a lifetime, and now you can be there before you can grow a decent beard, and it's now possible for women and minorities. This is revolutionary, and it's also more egalitarian and accessible than ever. If you want to be rich, it's better than ever. If you don't want anybody richer than you, it's a crisis.
The majority of Musk's fortune is effectively inaccessible to him or anyone else. He can lose it, and he can even use it to an extent, but he can't spend it or give it to anyone without destroying it.
Steven said...
@Christopher B - I like Musk fine. I'm not a lefty. I'm an actual conservative. It's you maga people who've become socialists and statists. It is my hope that you will realize that the "emotional mush" you recognize on the left applies to your own resentments.
maga is a movement motivated by resentment mob that hides their lawlessness behind a facade of pseudo-conservative rhetoric. But you are not conservatives.
What, pray tell, have you "conservative" people ever actually conserved?
"Yancey Ward said...
How much cash do you think Musk could raise if he sold $1 trillion dollars of Tesla's stock (at today's valuation) over the next 10 years?"
I'm not really a financial guy so I don't know if this analysis makes sense but I'll give it a whirl. 1 trillion dollars over ten years is 100 billion dollars of stock sold each year. At current valuation of about $400 per share that is 250 million shares that need to be sold each year. The internet tells me there are 252 trading days each year, so that is basically a million shares that need to be sold each trading day. That sounds like a lot but the internet also tells me that average daily volume for Tesla is 88 millions shares. 1 million shares a day represents 1.14% of the average daily volume of shares. I don't know how much affect this would put on price, but my guess is it isn't negligible but also not a large impact. Tesla stock could also go up over that ten year period so I could very well see after those ten years of sales of stock of significantly more than $1 trillion in cash being raised.
I understand it's performance based, he has to hit performance marks to get the dough. Every teacher that wants to have their salary be determined on performance should step forward (and performance should be factored by the quality of the students they work with).
I think there’s a huge amount of low-hanging fruit in the tax system that could easily raise more revenue than a wealth tax ever would. The estate tax, for starters, is completely broken.
Right now, people can transfer enormous fortunes to their heirs while avoiding almost all taxation—especially capital gains taxes. We keep capital gains rates low supposedly to encourage investment, but the ultra-wealthy are going to invest their money regardless of the tax rate. Where else would they put it?
Look at real estate, the world Trump has lived in his whole career. There are extraordinary ways to dodge taxes in that industry—mainly by depreciating assets that are actually skyrocketing in value.
I’d even consider taxing large philanthropic gifts. I know that sounds wild to some people, but when billionaires give massive donations today, they get huge tax breaks, which means the rest of us are effectively subsidizing their personal philanthropic priorities.
Take Warren Buffett. He’s made well over $100 billion. Almost none of that will ever be taxed because he’s transferring the shares directly to charity. He never has to sell them, never triggers capital gains, and he alone decides the fate of that fortune.
It wouldn’t be crazy to say: sure, you can give away, say, $5 million in appreciated shares each year tax-free. But beyond that threshold, you have to sell the shares, pay the capital gains tax like everyone else, and then—if you still want to—you can donate the after-tax proceeds to charity.
The government can only reduce income inequality by leveling down, that is, making everyone poorer or the same. The government will spend the new money on stupid things to get re-ellected and we will be in the same budget position, just poorer.
If we confiscated all peoples money over $10mm we would theoretically get $55 T. But in reality much less because no one could afford to buy the stock and real estate that would need to be sold to pay up.
If you want to tax wealth it needs to be world wide so that no one can escape, and small enough to not disrupt markets. But due to greed it would quickly evolve into world communism. World communism would equalize income, except low income bosses would live in state provided palaces.
Imagine the howls from the left if Musk set up the equivalent of Soros' Tides Foundation, and started funding hundreds of right-leaning NGOs.
"Wait!!! That's not the kind of wealth sharing we are talking about!"
I ran businesses. I know exactly how much tax businesses pay on corporate income.(Hint: it is all expensed and income = 0)
****************
Explain the metric called "earnings per share".
As the CEO of Tesla, Musk is a company employee selected by the board of directors, and compensated in accordance with the voted wishes of the shareholders, for whom he works. What the hell business is it of anyone else, other than the shareholders, what the shareholders decide to pay Musk? Everyone else: stay in YOUR lane!
MAGA is founded on resentment of the elites?
Nonsense. MAGA people DO resent the "self proclaimed" elites who are not, in fact, elite. I have no problems with actual real talent. I do have problems with people claiming to be elite and telling me what to do because they say they are elite when really they are not.
Just to flesh out a point boatbuilder made early on:
IF Musk makes his benchmarks an earns the $1t…
And IF we confiscated every penny (which we can’t)…
And IF Musk continued to do the same again. And again. And…
It would still take us 400 years to pay off the federal debt, ignoring interest. And that’s assuming we don’t take on any more.
Peachy said...
“Sandy Cortez(D) from Westchester…”
Sandy O’Casey. If we’re using only one family name, I was taught that we should use her apellido paterno, not her mother’s name.
Mary Beth said... 953rd vote - yay me
:-)
If Musk earns a trillion, the teachers and investors will have unearned income of trillions, and everyone will have a choice of products and services of varying degrees of utility present and forward-looking.
"If Musk earns $1 trillion over the next decade... an average of $100 billion each year... [he]could make $3 billion more each year than all 1.4 million elementary school teachers in the nation combined...."
I haven't read all 200+ comments and I'm wondering- has anybody explained yet how what Musk earns running his businesses affects what teachers make?
I mean- aside from providing income to his employees, allowing them to afford the property taxes that pay teacher salaries? That part is obvious enough to anybody (excluding some teachers, maybe) who thinks about things for a minute.
The real reason the wealthy have obtained more wealth than fifty years ago is the unprecedented innovation that has occurred since then. In 1975 nobody knew wtf an operating system was. Now ancient history is a two three guys buying one somebody one other guy wrote sitting at a desk, then sold it to…everyone else on the planet…every year or two. Now multiply this story by say 10,000, not necessarily in magnitude, though many stories are bigger and wealthier…
Will they confiscate my property and haul me off to jail if I refuse to pay Musk's salary? Because they sure as hell will if I don't pay those poor, poor teachers.
The commentariat here lives for resentment of the elite.
Are you mental? Or just thick? Because that is the exact opposite of what's going on here.
The first comment at the link just now:
"Sickeningly stupid to award anyone this kind of money, it's completely nonsensical."
Has to be a leftard who wrote that, sane people in the private sector understand that they are paid for doing a job, the money they get is not an award like it is for the "no-show/work from home" public sector.
Progressives seems to get the difference between average and marginal tax rates wrong. Billionaires in the US pay an *average* rate of 23.8% on income according to Zucman (and I would guess that his estimate of the share of the corporate tax borne by owners is probably on the low side), but there is no way the ‘average’ person in the US pays an average tax rate of anywhere near that. For a start, fewer than half of people in the US pay any income tax at all. Further, the tax rates of 30% -45% she mentions so glibly are a total fiction: you have to earn $197,000 as a single filer (double that if you are married) to pay a marginal rate of 32%, at which point your average tax rate is closer to 17%. Average labor income in the US is around $60,000, for whom the average tax rate is probably around 10%. (If we add FICA taxes, fully ignore the value of social security benefits, and fully impute the employer portion into employees, this adds 12% or so).
Elon Musk should teach for a year. It would do wonders for average teacher pay and may add to his net worth as his primary net income is investment related, not work related. Teachers can invest as well.
Does anyone really think the billionaires will let a wealth tax be in acted? They buy politicians for a reason. But what they WILL do is address the issue by taking a slice of everyone's IRA, say 0.5%, every year whether you're at retirement age or not. The government knows EXACTLY what your IRA is worth at year end after all.
The game is now fully rigged against the young. And they've noticed. And if roughly half the country supports Trump and the other half supports the opposite of Trump how can this be addressed? It's like the ICE raids which could have been easily avoided by a deal between Trump and the Ds after the 2018 election. Trump BEGGED for an immigration bill that he surely knew would have amnesty in it. But the Ds impeached him instead. Too late for that now. You almost shot him in the head after all.
Answer to "what was Babe Ruth's salary?"
He made a salary of $52,000 per year ($904,725 in 2022 dollars!) playing for the New York Yankees. The Babe spent the early part of the roaring 20s blowing through his tremendous salary. He was the highest paid player in baseball.
List of current salaries- 20 players per page. You have to scroll to page 26 to fins a player making a lowly million bucks a year: https://databases.usatoday.com/major-league-baseball-salaries-2025/
1930 was the first year baseball was played under the lights. Before then- a day game. Only. Then revenue increased from radio. The television. How much should entertainers make? Juan Soto making over 61 million this year. Is that fair? Fair to whom? Does that matter?
A lot more then teacher's make. It's a lot easier to become a teacher. Our local teachers must be doing a great job. 90 of 263 students in the HS. >1/3 of them, on an Honor Roll.
This was discussed the other day I believe. Reportedly 20% of US HS students take calculus. In 1973 in my suburban HS class of 400- <20 were taking calculus senior year. <5%. Some schools didn't even offer it. And now 20% of students take calculus. I, for one, don't believe it. Not when the average HS student I run into cannot use fractions in any meaningful way, and basic English units of measurement like Ounces and TSP and TBSP are beyond them. And I will mention most of the Amish/Mennonite students by 8th grade- when the Amish stop, have mastered fractions and basic measurement units. Including pecks and bushels. The Mennonite schools don't offer calculus.
"And now 20% of students take calculus. I, for one, don't believe it."
A University of California San Diego report warns that roughly one in eight incoming college students can’t meet middle school math standards. It found that the number of students needing to take remedial math courses increased "thirty-fold" over the last five years.
It also revealed that in 2024, 25% of students placed in Math 2 [a remedial course] had a 4.0 average in high school math. This meant many students’ GPAs did not match their actual proficiency in the subject.
From here: https://www.foxnews.com/media/uc-san-diego-report-finds-alarming-drop-freshmen-math-skills-one-eight-below-middle-school-level
Question for our hostess. The poll answers are far more lopsided then any other Althouse poll I remember. Of course, I don't remember all of them. Were you expecting this lopsidedness, or did that coma as a surprise?
Howard said...
Musk is a bit of a unicorn in this situation given that most of the uber wealthy are only money changers who do not create wealth they hoard wealth
This is the distinction I want made.
I want people who build and employ Americans to have all of the money.
I want government bureaucrats, educrats, insurance companies, and money changers to get fucked.
"I want government bureaucrats, educrats, insurance companies, and money changers..."
The existence of the first two enables the existence of the last two.
The teachers don't teach; the lawyers don't seek justice; the physicians agreed to have infants vaccinated against Covid, a disease they didn't get. And these people don't make as much as Musk.
Starlink works; Tesla works (and has charging stations); Space X works. They work and because they work, they can afford to pay Musk.
Maybe if teachers started teaching they'd create well-educated, prosperous workers and, as a result, a better world for themselves. But right now students are just lab rats for the faculty lounge theorists, same like the homeless. Why do the teachers think they should be better paid for doing a worse job than 15, 20, 40 years back?
The same basic argument applies to most in the other professions. mentioned.
"Musk is a bit of a unicorn in this situation given that most of the uber wealthy are only money changers who do not create wealth they hoard wealth"
Wealth does not = cash. It can be converted into cash, but once converted it's value as an investment is lost.
Billionaires contrary to common belief through their investment cause our economy to work.
Anecdotally I've known a couple of billionaires. The wealth they created dragged thousands of people up into the rarified air of millionaires. Giving thousands of people a solid middle and upper class lifestyle.
Worth every penny
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