Dear Elon,
Elon Musk (Wikimedia Commons Photo)
You don’t know me. I’m a pastor in Louisville, Kentucky, with a Substack newsletter and a pesky habit of writing letters to people who probably won’t read them. So we’re already on familiar ground.
I’m writing to you because on Friday, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq, and your net worth crossed one trillion dollars, making you the first human being in the recorded history of the world to achieve that particular distinction.
One. trillion. dollars.
I’ll give you this: You built things. Real things. Rockets that actually go to space and an electric car company that forced an entire industry to take seriously what it had spent decades dismissing. Whatever else is true about you, you’re not a man who coasted. The ambition is real, as is the engineering. The sleepless, manic, occasionally unhinged drive to make things that didn’t exist before is real.
I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.
So, credit where credit’s due.
But here’s the thing I can’t get past, Elon.
On Friday, when your net worth crossed a trillion dollars, Oxfam released a calculation. They ran the World Bank data and figured out that 10% of your fortune, $100 billion, would be enough to end extreme global poverty for an entire year. All of it. Every person on earth currently living on less than $3.00 a day, lifted above the line, for one full year, for a tenth of what you’re worth.
You could do that and still have $900 billion left.
You are now, by one measure, wealthier than the combined net personal wealth of the poorest 46% of humanity... combined. That’s 3.8 billion people. You have more than all of them put together!
Your wealth grew by over a million dollars a minute over the past year.
And while your wealth was exploding, you’d recently led DOGE, pushing to cut $700 billion from Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment insurance. Your team canceled a billion dollars in funding that helped schools and food banks buy fresh produce from local farms. The HHS agency that coordinates aging and disability services, including programs that Meals on Wheels relies on, was gutted by layoffs. Oxfam says that the dismantling of USAID, which you helped engineer, means a child under five could die every 40 seconds by 2030.
A million dollars a minute for you. A dead child every 40 seconds for everybody else.
I keep trying to find a way to say that without it sounding hysterical, but you know what? Screw it. As we’d say in the mountains, “That’s sorry and trashy, is what that is.”
(c) 123 RF Stock Photo via The God Article
Poverty
Look, I get that I’m a pastor in a country that produced this outcome. I drive a car. I have a retirement account and a house. I benefit every single day from an economic order that generated Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune and the systems that made it possible. The same systems, not coincidentally, that have kept 3.8 billion people poor enough to add up to less than one man’s portfolio.
No, I’m not Elon Musk, but I’m not the impoverished Lazarus either, lying covered in sores by the gate.
I’m somewhere in the middle, if I’m honest. I’m close enough to the feast to smell it, but far enough from the gate to be able to forget about the person lying outside it.
But here’s the thing: The Hebrew prophets didn’t spend their careers denouncing foreign empires. Amos didn’t take a road trip to Assyria to lecture them about their fiscal policy. The prophets generally spoke from inside the community’s failure, using the first person plural: we have gone astray, we have trampled the poor, we have sold the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals. Not because Israel’s failures were the worst in the world, but because repentance has to start somewhere close to home.
So, I’m not letting myself off the hook here just because I’m mad at you. I am furious. But that doesn’t make me innocent.
⸻
There’s a story Jesus tells in Luke 16 about a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus.
The rich man feasts in luxury every day. Outside his gate, Lazarus lies in the dirt, hungry and covered in sores, hoping for scraps. Both men die. Lazarus ends up in Abraham’s embrace. The rich man ends up in torment, looking across a chasm he can no longer cross.
What jumps out at me isn’t the reversal of fortunes, as satisfying as that is. What I love about this parable is the detail about the rich man. A detail Jesus slips in almost casually.
The rich man has no name. In the Latin tradition, he’s called Dives, which isn’t actually a name. It just means “rich man.” In other words, his identity has collapsed entirely into his wealth. That’s all he is… a bank balance. So, that’s all that’s left of his life: a swipe badge that says, “Rich Guy.”
But Lazarus has a name. El-azar in Hebrew. “God has helped.”
The rich man walked past Lazarus every single day. Every day. Never bothered to learn his name.
The Hebrew prophets didn’t spend their careers denouncing foreign empires. The prophets generally spoke from inside the community’s failure, using the first person plural: we have gone astray, we have trampled the poor, we have sold the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.
I’d like to suggest to you that that’s the sin the text is actually naming. Not some abstract theological crime. Only this: A man so cushioned by his own abundance that the person suffering at the end of his driveway never became real to him. Never became a person whose name was worth knowing.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you don’t know their names either, do you, Elon? The children who’ll go hungry because the food bank funding dried up. The seniors who’ll lose Meals on Wheels. The five-year-olds in Sub-Saharan Africa who’ll die because USAID is gone.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the numbers on your net worth tracker dashboard don’t show any chyron with those children’s names.
But I mean, that’s not a character flaw unique to you. It’s what extreme wealth does to anybody’s moral vision. It builds a gate, tells everybody which side of it they belong on, and then convinces them that’s the natural order of things.
⸻
Jesus’s faith tradition has a word for this. Indeed, the Hebrew prophets had a whole career’s worth of words for it.
The land belongs to God. The harvest belongs to God. What you accumulate beyond your own sustenance belongs, by rights, to the community. That legal principle wasn’t radical among the children of Israel, not to mentino the law that formed the children of Israel into a people who prize justice above almost all else.
“Do not harvest to the edges of your field,” the Torah says. Leave something for the person who has nothing. Not because it’s charitable. But because it was never entirely yours to begin with.
The logic of a trillion-dollar fortune runs in exactly the opposite direction. It says: “I earned this. I built this. I deserve this. The harvest is mine to the last grain. (And frankly, probably some of your grain, too. I’m having my attorneys look into it.)”
Jesus doesn’t argue with that logic so much as he blows right past it. He just keeps pointing at Lazarus, keeps asking why the name of the person at the gate isn’t worth knowing.
⸻
I don’t know what to tell you to do with a trillion dollars, Elon. I’m genuinely not sure you’re capable of hearing it, even if I did. Not because you’re stupid, but because I think the magnitude of your wealth has altered the atmosphere in ways you can’t fully perceive from inside it.
But I’ll say this. The tradition I stand in doesn’t believe any of this is inevitable. That tradition doesn’t believe the chasm between you and the people dying outside the gate is woven into the fabric of the universe.
It’s frozen in place by choices made over time... by people with swipe-badges that say, “Rich Guy.”
You know who I’m talking about. The people who get to decide how taxes work, and for whom. The people in charge of which programs get funded and which get cut. The people who decided a trillion-dollar IPO was a triumph rather than a cancer diagnosis.
Not to mention the people who watched it happen and said nothing… because the dinner smelled good and the gate was far enough away that it didn’t distract us.
⸻
You probably won’t read this.
That’s fine. It’s not really for you.
It’s for the people reading it who, like me, are trying to figure out how to live faithfully inside a system that produces both a trillion-dollar fortune and a dead child every 40 seconds, and who need someone to say out loud that their moral nausea is a conscience, not a malfunction in the system.
And a conscience, even a badly outnumbered one, is how the world slowly remembers the names of all the people at the gate.
Be gentle and brave,
Derek
Sources
Forbes, “Forbes Declares Elon Musk as the World’s First Trillionaire”
Oxfam Ireland, “Soon-to-be trillionaire Elon Musk’s wealth grew by over $1 million per minute in the last year”
Oxfam, “A child under five could die every forty seconds by 2030 due to U.S. aid cuts”
Reuters, “USDA cuts over $1 billion in funding for schools, local food purchases”
Democracy Now, “Elon Musk Says DOGE Is Coming for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and More”
U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Democrats, “Musk Spent 130 Days Bringing Chaos, Cruelty, and Corruption to Government”
Houston Chronicle, “Meals on Wheels programs fear service disruptions after DOGE cuts”
Working Preacher, “Commentary on Luke 16:19--31”
World Bank, “Fact Sheet: An Adjustment to Global Poverty Lines”