Elon Musk’s Wealth Soars To $400 Billion

Plus, an Asian-American cultural moment; Iranian drones over New Jersey?

A Tesla Cybertruck.

“Elon Musk has become the first person to reach $400 billion in net worth, the latest milestone for the world’s richest individual,” Bloomberg News reports.

Paul Krugman recently announced his retirement from the New York Times, but it’s a pretty good bet that paper and other left-leaning outlets will use the news as an opportunity to complain about “crony capitalism”—by which they mean Musk’s relations with President Trump—along with inequality. They’ll call for a wealth tax or a Biden-Wyden-style levy on “unrealized” capital gains.

Here we prefer instead to marvel at what Musk has going. He’s got Tesla, an electric car and solar energy company. He has SpaceX, which dominates commercial satellite launching, and which also operates Starlink, a satellite internet service provider. He has X, the social media platform that also has an artificial intelligence product. And he helped Trump win the 2024 election and is helping him staff the administration and reduce the size of government.

Any single one of those four things, on its own, would be more than a full time job. Yet somehow Musk is managing all of them. This is an immigrant success story about technological innovation, excellence at execution, bold bets, and willingness to embrace risk. It’s a reminder that the biggest long-term fortunes are often accumulated by not worrying too much about volatility. When I wrote about Musk back in April 2024, it was to note that his estimated wealth had declined to $195 billion from a $300 billion peak. Roughly nine months later, the fortune had roughly doubled. (You can quibble about mixing and matching the Forbes or Bloomberg numbers or the accuracy of either estimate, but the basic point holds.)

Levellers frequently claim that these fortunes result from inherited wealth or luck, or from the luck of inherited talent or wealth. Musk has had some luck, and Tesla has at times benefited from the government push toward electric vehicles and against fossil fuels. He’s also made some of his money in Communist China, which is not a free country. But the overall story isn’t a shame or a scandal or a coincidence. It’s about hard work and making products and services that provide value to customers and disrupt the status quo. It is a tribute to what is possible in America for someone with ambition and imagination.

Recent work: “New York Times Undercounts Israeli Hostages, Smears IDF as Ferocious,” is the headline over my latest piece for the Algemeiner. Check it out there if you are interested in that sort of thing.

An Asian-American cultural moment: The New York Times list of 16 “Best Cookbooks of the Year,” includes Clarice Lam’s “Breaking Bao,” Kristina Cho’s “Chinese Enough,” Tuệ Nguyễn’s “Đi Ăn,” Mingoo Kang’s “Jang,” Nok Suntaranon’s “Kalaya’s Southern Thai Kitchen,” Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard’s “Koreaworld,” Betty Liu’s “The Chinese Way,” and Sonoko Sakai’s “Wafu Cooking.” Half of the year’s best U.S. cookbooks, the Times says, are Asian, though it’s me, not them, doing the counting and noticing the pattern.

Elsewhere, also in today’s Times, is a report on architectural plans for a major expansion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is “named the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing after that couple’s lead donation of $125 million,” the Times reports.

The business breakout success story of the year, Musk aside, may be Jensen Huang’s Nvidia.

The World Series championship went to the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose big star (admittedly among many) is Shohei Ohtani.

A Harvard dean reports that Harvard College’s fall 2024 class of incoming first-year students is 37 percent Asian-American. That doesn’t count foreign students (which Harvard calls international students) from Communist China, whose population has been soaring.

Columbia University says it had 9,961 foreign students from Communist China in Fall 2023. (There are just less than 5,000 students at Columbia College, and just under 36,000 total at the entire university, up sharply from 22,000 in 1999.)

I’m the farthest thing from a racial or ethnic determinist. I also realize that Asian-Americans are not the same as Asians, and that Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese are all different, and have internal diversity as well.

Yet if we’re trying to understand what’s going on on American campuses and culture, it’s worth paying at least some attention to the underlying trends. David P. Goldman has a piece up at lawliberty.org under the headline “China as It Is” that says:

China’s hierarchical system never developed a dialectical philosophy comparable to that of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Plato. Orders flowed from the Emperor to the provincial governor, from the governor to the local Mandarin, and from the Mandarin to the head of an extended family working a farm; its political system resembled nested Chinese boxes. The notion of an individual opinion had no practical value: There was no popular assembly, no Senate, no forum in which conflicting views might be debated. Chinese philosophy focuses on acceptance, hierarchical loyalty, or adherence to authority, in its respective guises of Taoism, Confucianism, and Legalism. It instantiates Hegel’s contention that Vernunft (loosely, critical reason) depends on freedom. America’s founders spent generations governing their affairs through church assemblies, town meetings, and provincial legislators before they ventured to create a republic. The Chinese in their 5,000-year history never had such an opportunity.

Clearly, there are some notable exceptions (the heroic Jet-Ski escape guy Kwon Pyong, for example; the Christian pro-freedom activists jailed in Hong Kong). Sweeping generalizations can be as dangerously misleading as they are seductive. America is pretty good at transmitting its own core values and also at incorporating the best of other cultures. But if you are trying to understand, for example, what has happened at Columbia University over the past couple of years, it makes sense to notice that nearly a quarter of the population is from China.

In the best case the foreigners learn about freedom and democracy here and bring it back to China. In the worst case they learn about hard science skills here and eventually use it to crush internal opposition and defeat us and our allies in battle. Or maybe in the best case they stay and start a company like Nvidia and then donate a wing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Iranian drones?: Jefferson Van Drew, a Republican member of the U.S. Congress from New Jersey, has written a letter to President Biden that begins, “It has come to my attention that the New Jersey drone incursions may be an operation by the Iranian government to undermine the security of the United States of America.”

Van Drew writes, “There are several pieces of circumstantial evidence that Iran is that adversary. First, the Coast Guard has observed drones coming into New Jersey from the Atlantic Ocean. Second, we have information that a sea-based Iranian drone mothership is currently missing from port, and that its embarkation timeline would align with the appearances of the New Jersey drones. We know that Iran has both the motive and the capability to execute such an operation. They have in the past brought vessels in proximity of the United States, and Iran has a sophisticated drone production partnership with China. And of course, it is the policy of the Iranian government to bring about the destruction of the United States of America. While I remain open to alternate explanations, I have not been presented a single credible, cohesive narrative except for that Iran is controlling these drones from offshore.”

The Pentagon dismissed the claims.

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