With a personal fortune now worth around 500 billion dollars, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. And, as highlighted by Forbesalways updating his fortune figures, the Tesla owner is “halfway to becoming the first trillionaire”, a reference to the fabulous trillion Anglo-Saxon that is equivalent to our billion. And at least a hundred countries in the world have a GDP lower than the personal wealth of the naturalized American South American.
Historian Fabrice d’Almeida, being the author of A World History of the Rich, a book that will be presented in Lisbon on Friday, obviously has to be aware of the Musk phenomenon. And it is interesting how you analyze it at this moment, in an effort to be objective, taking into account that the successful business aspect was not so brilliantly tempted by political intervention. “Elon Musk’s image is now distorted by his political commitments and the resulting difficulties: a disagreement with President Trump, the drop in vehicle sales and the difficulty of capitalizing on his investment in the social network He is a true guru of the future of the United States, shaping humanity’s dreams with the project of interplanetary travel. Mars became a possible horizon for him. All of this contributed to him gaining a fan base willing to follow him, even in his highly adventurous political experiences. His leadership qualities are therefore undeniable, even if his sense of history is more questionable. For the historian, he is undeniably one of the rich people who they are making history, they are changing the logic of societies”, says d’Almeida in an interview published today in DN.
The French academic’s book reports and analyzes how the rich asserted themselves in history. There was a time when the very rich were kings or emperors and only rarely did a banker claim to also be the owner of a great fortune, which usually ended badly. “When they grew too high, the king ordered them to be arrested and their assets recovered under false pretexts. This was the case of Jacques Coeur, the greatest financier of his time, finally defeated by Charles VII in the 15th century”, recalls d’Almeida. After the Industrial Revolution, there began to be another type of very rich without being crowned heads. First the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, names still synonymous with money today, then, in our time, extraordinary figures, coming from nowhere, such as the Spaniard Amancio Ortega, owner of Zara, and finally the personalities from the digital world, such as Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, who became the richest man in the world, now far below Musk on the list of Forbeseven though he owns 107 billion dollars (the dollar these days is around 86 cents of the euro).
There is a lot to say about the very rich, from the fact that they tend to want to leave their mark as philanthropists and today come from all possible and imaginary geographies. But from d’Almeida’s reflection I retain two very powerful ideas: 1) it is not having access to Rolls-Royce cars or beluga caviar and the best French champagne that distinguishes tycoons, but rather the power to choose. “Even asceticism can be a luxury”, emphasizes the historian; 2) The very rich are not afraid of revolutions, as they always have a jet at their disposal to take refuge somewhere in a distant palace, as long as they do not let themselves be caught off guard by the change in the social order. What they truly fear, d’Almeida points out, is something personal, ruin and degradation. That’s why they are always dissatisfied with what they have, no matter how much it is. They always want to earn more. “They have a falling psychosis”, adds the French author, mercilessly.
Does this last idea apply to Musk? How far can the desire to make history go? And does your fortune have limits?
Deputy Director of Diário de Notícias