Elon Musk Confirms Ancient Concerns About the Superrich

[ancianita]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/21/opinion/elon-musk-trillionaire-wealth-plato.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sFA.SwhD.nHfWL-ZPwyh4&smid=url-share

... Mr. Musk’s net worth is five million times as large as that of the average American family.... As a historian of political thought, I immediately thought of Plato, the first Western philosopher to really grapple with economic inequality. In his “Laws,” through the character of the Athenian Stranger, Plato contended that in a thriving republic, if anyone acquired more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens, he should donate the surplus to the city. Not five million times the wealth of the typical family — four times the wealth of the poorest...

...Plato grew up in Athens, a city that once was nearly torn apart, as Plutarch wrote, by the “disparity between the rich and the poor.” It was saved by a heroic lawgiver, Solon, who canceled all the debts of the poor, to the great chagrin of the rich. And in Plato’s youth, as the city fought the Peloponnesian War, it suffered three successive class-based civil wars — an oligarchic revolution of the rich against the poor, followed by a democratic revolution of the poor against the rich, followed by yet another oligarchic revolution...

For Plato, the source of inequality was a disease of the soul that the Greeks called pleonexia — a kind of insatiable greed. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” ... Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, “a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,” because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth. As a consequence, Plato wrote, “it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.”

Plato’s fears about insatiable greed have been vindicated by Mr. Musk, who has already set his sights on $10 trillion.
He has confirmed Plato’s concerns about the moral failures of the superrich by characterizing empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” With his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, he put the U.S. Agency for International Development program “into the wood chipper,” as he gleefully put it, contributing to the deaths of an estimated 600,000 people. Such carnage is a predictable outcome of a society that has chosen to place no upper limits on wealth...."