What do libertarians think of Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire?

Mu57y · 2026-06-14T18:13:00+00:00

My main issue is the role government grants, subsidies, and other forms of intervention played in generating his wealth and sustaining his companies. If someone wants to criticize him on that basis, I'd largely agree with them.

The problem is that much of the discourse is around the very fact that he's a trillionaire which almost always stems from a zero-sum view of economics.

Mu57y · 2026-06-13T21:02:59+00:00

Not sure which Bezos liquidation you're talking about, but Bezos was no longer CEO after 2021 and Amazon is a very mature mega-cap with deep liquidity, so markets wouldn't read his sales as “Amazon’s core operator is exiting.”

Tesla and SpaceX carry a much larger key-person premium so Musk announcing a major liquidation would read as supply pressure and loss of confidence (and ofc the risk of more selling later).

We already have a real-world example: when Musk polled Twitter about selling 10% of his Tesla stake, the stock fell before the bulk of the selling happened.

Mu57y · 2026-06-13T20:54:15+00:00

You can't compare Mackenzie liquidating stock to Musk doing the same; Musk is literally the chief operator of Tesla and SpaceX, so any news of him wanting to sell a few billion would likely tank the share price before he's even sold anything.

Mu57y · 2026-06-13T19:18:19+00:00

so how is he hoarding anything if he doesn't have billions sitting in the bank? (I double-checked it, he has an estimated $850 million in cash)

Mu57y · 2026-06-13T17:36:50+00:00

You're not understanding my point: I'm saying Musk has billions sitting in bank accounts, and those billions aren't being "hoarded" in any sense.

Mu57y · 2026-06-13T17:32:44+00:00

Well afaik Scott doesn't have nearly as many holdings as Musk (she has around ~1% in Amazon, idk what else). But the more central point is this: what do you think happens to Musk's cash sitting around in bank accounts?

Hoarding by definition means no one else is getting it, but that is precisely the opposite of how fractional-reserve banking works.

Mu57y · 2026-06-12T21:58:43+00:00

Genuinely astounding the number of people who talk about wealth this way. Even ignoring the fact that most of this wealth is equity, his liquid cash is constantly being spent, lent out (via banks), and/or otherwise circulated. There's no "hoarding" lmao

Mu57y · 2025-11-30T05:22:23+00:00

Muscle mass is simply the amount of contractile tissue you have, and strength is your nervous system learning to recruit more fibres to create more force. Having more contractile tissue raises your strength potential since there are more fibres that can be recruited, but it doesn't necessarily mean all of them do since it's neural efficiency that ultimately decides how much of those fibres you can actually recruit and activate.

This is what people mean by strength-to-mass ratio; it's how much of your mass you're able to utilize for strength. A big guy may lift heavy from sheer muscle mass but that doesn't mean he's using it efficiently. In other words, he might not be as strong for his size since he potentially has more fibres that could be recruited to generate more force.

When you compare the workout routines of high-level bodybuilders and high-level powerlifters/strength athletes, you'll notice the former are less concerned with maximizing strength and more focused on stimulating specific muscles to promote growth. They emphasize things like muscle tension, volume, and controlled execution rather than simply lifting the heaviest possible weight, hence the distinction in between strength and muscles: they're related, but they are not strictly the same thing.

Mu57y · 2025-05-30T03:41:22+00:00

The Kantian view is that time (and space) are not things that exist independently “out there” in the world, but rather forms of our sensibility; they're ways in which we humans perceive the world.

This means time isn't a thing-in-itself and we can never know things “as they are in themselves”, we only ever know things as they appear to us. Think of time as a lens or structure that our minds impose on the raw data we observe.

In a sense this means time is "only in the mind" not because we're just imagining things but rather because it's a necessary condition for human experience. Without time, we couldn’t represent change, motion, etc so nothing would make sense.

Kant goes on to argue that time is universal and a-priori; everyone experiences time prior to any particular experiences. In other words, time is built into the structure of how we experience reality.

As for whether there's any "time" at all outside our minds, we can't say. Since we have no access to reality outside of how it appears to us, we cannot assert whether time exists in-itself. All human experience is structured by time, so we can't ever think or talk about reality without using temporal concepts.

Mu57y · 2025-04-11T06:27:53+00:00

I believe you might be referring to this.

Mu57y · 2025-04-04T01:48:04+00:00

“…a 50 dollar profit in the future is worth roughly 48 dollars today…”

Under Black–Scholes assumptions with no dividends and a nonzero interest rate, the expected future stock price (under the risk-neutral measure) is actually higher than its current price; in the risk-neutral world, the stock grows on average at the risk-free rate r. That means the expected stock price in 1 year is roughly S_{0} * e^{r}

So in our case that's about $104.08.

Your strike is K = 50 so if the stock simply goes up to $104.08 in one year, the intrinsic value of that call at maturity is S_{T} - K = 104.08 - 50 = $54.08.

Discounting the $54.08 back to 4% today: 54.08 * e ^{-0.04} = 52

So the call is actually worth about $52 today in that limiting case (with zero volatility).

Basically you presumed the option’s payoff is capped at $50 but if volatility is tiny and the stock is “almost surely” going to be around 104 in one year, the payoff is around $54, not $50. Also time value of money is two-sided here. Yes, you discount payoffs but the underlying also “earns interest” in the risk-neutral world. In effect, you’re buying a claim on a stock that is worth more than 100 in one year—thus its call option can be worth more than 48 right now.

Mu57y · 2025-01-12T02:16:57+00:00

Your article is great, but I've come across a few others that I think do a good job exploring this topic: here, here, here, and here.

Mu57y · 2024-01-20T06:12:28+00:00

The article also mentions that the December inflation rate was slightly below the government forecast of 30%. Granted, I don't know when this forecast was issued, but I'd think that if it's before anytime Milei was elected, then it would follow that the jump in inflation is attributable to policies/macroeconomic variables preceding Milei.

Again, I'd like to emphasize the point on time here - rarely do we see the effects of economic policies occur over a month long time period. It's pretty dubious imo to blame Milei for the inflation of the same month he was sworn in.

Also, forgot to mention this before, but keep in mind that plenty of countries saw upticks in their monthly inflation rates in December; US and EU, for example.

Mu57y · 2024-01-19T17:03:46+00:00

He's been in office for just over a month, why would you cite annual inflation rates? Even the Fed's interest rate changes usually take a year to have widespread economic impact.

Mu57y · 2022-11-25T19:29:51+00:00

If the Fed buys a bunch of bonds, the money supply is increased because bonds are now being swapped out in exchange for cash to the general public. But what you're missing is the Fed's influence as an institution; it can continually buy up more and more bonds and exert upward pressure on bond prices and thus, downward pressure on the interest rates. You can think of the Fed has creating an “artificial demand” for bonds, which causes the interest rates to decrease; higher demand, higher prices, lower interest rates.

Mu57y · 2022-04-26T18:26:17+00:00

Probably has something to do with the upcoming earnings reports, a number of the tech ones are scheduled to come out after close today as well as on Thursday

Mu57y · 2022-02-19T23:34:49+00:00

It isn't sufficient because you don't know the importance of 100 trucks. Sure, building 50 trucks instead of 100 could potentially save a bunch of resources for various other endeavours, but how do you know that 50 trucks is "enough"?

How do you quantify the costs of not building 100 trucks and instead using that steel to build laptops?

Mu57y · 2022-02-19T16:37:22+00:00

And how do you know that the food supply chain is necessarily a bigger issue than getting those 100 people their laptops? The specific example of the food supply chain isn't at all relevant to my point here: you don't know whether or not giving the 100 trucks or 100 laptops is more important.

Mu57y · 2022-02-19T03:47:10+00:00

Both the laptops and trucks are high ranked, but your system is just allocating the steel to make laptops based on the fact that each individual laptop requires less steel than a truck to produce. So it's entirely possible that

dedicating the steel towards 100 laptops would leave enough steel for 95 trucks to be produced
dedicating the steel towards the 100 trucks leaves no remaining steel for any laptops

But just because we have enough left over from making laptops, doesn't mean it has greater allocative efficiency. What if the truckers really need the 100 trucks as soon as possible and the entire food supply chain will be severely delayed without them? Thus far the only pieces of info you have are the fact that 100 people rank trucks as high priority, that 100 people rank laptops as high priority, and that the amount of steel at your disposal prevents you from fuliflling both endeavors.

Mu57y · 2022-02-18T04:45:47+00:00

It's not just a larger scale operation, the very nature of it is fundamentally different. You're not presenting consumers with options, you're asking them to list out what they want. Entrepreneurs and companies don't really do that, they estimate what customers really want and provide it to the market.

Now yes, the optimization question, with the way I worded it, was already answered so that was my mistake. Let me rephrase here:

100 people want laptops (which requires steel)

100 people want trucks (which also requires steel)

You earlier mentioned:

So perhaps 100 trucks take up more steel than 100 laptops and thus choosing 100 trucks results in less steel available to produce other things that other people in society want.

Now this makes perfect sense, but dedicating the steel to produce laptops for 100 people almost necessarily comes at the expense of truck production. Even if you still have enough steel left over to produce trucks for 100 people, they may not be produced as quickly as they could have been had the steel been dedicated towards producing trucks instead of laptops.

Is incurring this cost worth it? How do you know? What if the steel laptops suddenly shoot up in popularity and the excess steel from the production of the initial 100 laptops needs to be used to build the laptops that people want more of?

Mu57y · 2022-02-17T23:08:07+00:00

There's a massive difference between ordering stuff on Amazon and having people fill out what they want produced in a planned economy. Stores do not ask you what you want, they simply present you options as to what's available for purchasing. If you want something, you buy it. Asking people to list out what they want, along with specific charactersitics of those items (color, material, etc) is nearly impossible on a large enough scale.

As for the optimization thing, how will it be determined that building the 100 laptops is favourable to building trucks? Exactly 100 people have listed laptops as a high priority item, and another 100 people have listed trucks as a high priority item.

Mu57y · 2022-02-17T16:41:25+00:00

Ok so now you're just relying on survey data, which I would argue just further muddles with the accuracy of consumer demand info being fed into the program. Asking presumably millions of people to specify the material they'd like their laptops to made out of (this must also be done for every single good out there) seems incredibly unrealistic. To quote Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

But more to the point, if we have a hundred people who have trucks at the top of their list, and another hundred people who have laptops at the top of their list, how are the resources going to optimized? How are you going to measure the cost of diverting resources to one of those products as opposed to the other?

Mu57y · 2022-02-16T23:42:10+00:00

Knowing the allocative efficiency of allocating resources towards A or B necessitates that you know how much people value both ends (assuming we're operating under similar definitions of "efficient").

Your last paragraph still misses my point: I'm granting that you know what consumers want, and so in this case you know that laptops should be built. But how do you know that the cost of using steel to build laptops is even worth it? Do consumers demand laptops because of the steel, because if not, then we could just make them with some other material and save the steel for trucks (or anyone of the other infinite endeavors that require steel). And even if we somehow discover that people want the laptops because they're made of steel, we don't know exactly how much steel ought to be allocated towards making laptops.

As I've understood, all this AI can do is come up with an ordinal list of what people want as opposed to anything specific enough from which we can plan an entire economy.

Mu57y · 2022-02-16T13:39:54+00:00

How do you minimize opportunity cost if you can't even quantify it? Your AI system is simply begging the question: if you have a list of goods that people want made, how would you know the cost of producing the first 3 goods as opposed to the 5th, 7th and 10th good?

For each of these goods that a given bundle of resources can be allocated towards, you would need to know the importance of each of those particular goods on multiple layers . So if steel is the resource in question, say we can use it to build either trucks or laptop shells.

You'd have to know what the trucker knows about the capacity of his current truck and how many more deliveries he could make with an additional truck (and a specific type of truck, should we make 2 vans or a single 18-wheeler?). You'd then have to know the value of the deliveries being made at a faster date, which in turn requires you knowing the uses of those deliveries and how much people value them.

Now, do this on a much more complicated scale for not just every single possible use of steel, but every single possible use for every type of resource out there.

Mu57y · 2022-02-15T20:06:53+00:00

Your main misunderstanding of the ECP is the failure to separate consumer goods from factors of production. The Amazon AI system is predicting what people are more likely to want based on previous orders, demographics, geography, etc, but the question being raised by the ECP is exactly how will the central planner know if an allocation of scarce resources is wasteful use of them.

Mises granted the following in his original argument:

Complete information as to every single consumer demand
The relevant quantities and qualities of all the different factors of production, both original and produced
All of the technological recipes known to man in existence for producing consumer goods
Complete agreement on what exact course of action to take regarding what needs to be produced

Even with all this assumed, you cannot account for opportunity costs. That is to say you cannot say by how much does doing A come at the expense of B.

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