1 Million, Millions: Elon Musk and One Question

There's a number on a pay stub.

fifty four thousand and eighty dollars.

That's the reported annual salary of Elon Musk from SpaceX.

Tied to a California minimum wage.

The man who runs the rocket company pays himself like he's flipping hamburgers and hawthorn.

And here's the thing that's the point.

Because in June of twenty twenty six, SpaceX went public.

Biggest IPO in history, $75 billion.

And the man with the 50 hour, sorry, $54,000 salary became the world's first trillionaire.

Net worth passed a trillion United States American dollars.

Briefly hit 1.4.

So sit with that for a second.

A trillion, a trillion dollars.

If you spent a million dollars a day every day, starting when the pyramids were being built, you would not have spent a trillion dollars yet.

You'd still be going.

Let's see, a trillion dollars is a million million.

And his official salary is fifty-four thousand and eighty.

That's not a contradiction, that's a strategy.

A strategy gets taxed.

Stocks gains don't until you sell them, right?

So loans against stock don't, not ever really.

So the salary stays at minimum wage and the fortune climbs past a trillion to dollars, and the tax man.

And the rest of us who live in this country get pennies.

Bernie Sanders did the math on something else.

Musk, a trillionaire, pays the exact same amount into Social Security as a guy making $184,500.

Because the payroll tax stops there.

The cap.

Stock gains don't count, loan proceeds don't count.

So a school teacher in Ohio pays Social Security tax on every dollar he or she earns, and the richest human being who has ever lived pays the same flat amount as a mid level

manager.

fifty four thousand eighty dollars.

That number isn't a salary, it's a magic trick.

And we're about to watch it in slow

motion.

Welcome back, my friends, to The Overlap, the show about systems of power, labor, and American injustice.

I'm Joshua and I'm glad you're here.

Will is not with us again, um, so we're gonna be continuing on without him for now.

So a trillion dollars.

We don't really have a word for this yet, right?

Like trillionaire.

It sounds made up, like a like a kid's word for like a lot, a bazillionaire, right?

But as of June 12th.

2026, it is a job title.

It belongs to one solitary single person, one man.

And the reason that we're doing this now, the reason I couldn't just let it oh slip by is that the number itself has become kind of this fog.

It's so big, it just stops like meaning anything.

A trillion.

It rolls off the tongue.

And when a number

Stops meaning anything, right?

Nobody asks the obvious question.

How did that happen?

Not like, is he smart?

Not like, does he work hard?

Those are the questions we're handed.

The wrong questions.

The question is: how does a person accumulate a trillion dollars in a country where a nurse pays a higher tax rate than he does?

What machine creates that?

Who built it?

Who maintains this thing?

Because here's the thing.

And I want to be clear about this from the very beginning.

This is not a story about one guy being greedy.

Greed is boring.

Greed is universal.

This is a story about a system that takes greed and hands it a trillion dollars and a government contract and a tax exemption and calls the result a self-made man.

The self-made man.

We're going to come back to that phrase because almost

Every piece of it is a lie and the lie is documented and the documents are public and we just don't look at 'em.

So we're gonna look at We're gonna go back to the beginning.

We're gonna go to Palo Alto in the nineteen nineties, the first big check, and we're gonna walk forward year by year through the government loans and the NASA contracts and the tax

records and the union busting tweets all the way to a courtroom in Delaware and an IPO this June of this year of our Lord twenty twenty six.

And what you're gonna see is that the trillion didn't come from rockets, not really.

It came from us, from the public.

From the treasury, from the worker who got fired for an open letter and the agency that was supposed to protect him and got declared unconstitutional instead.

A trillion dollars.

And the question nobody wants to answer, let's go answer it.

But to understand the myth, we have to go a little bit further back than Palo Alto.

We have to look at the floor he was standing on before he ever slept in that office.

The story of the self made man.

Relies on the idea that the starting line was at zero.

It wasn't.

Musk didn't emerge from a vacuum.

He grew up in South Africa, in a home of uh significant means, a son of an electromechanical engineer and property developer whose portfolio included a stake in a

Zambian emerald mine.

That wealth provided more than just creature comforts.

It provided elite schooling.

And a financial cushion that made the starving entrepreneur narrative a choice, not a necessity.

See, this is the foundation that provided the security to take the risks that eventually became a trillion dollar fortune.

The seed wasn't just a garage, it was a safety net.

So let's start in Palo Alto, California, 1995.

Musk is 24.

He's got a brother named Kimball.

He's got a partner named Greg Curry.

Now they start a company called Zip2.

What did it do?

It put city guides on newspaper websites, like maps, business listings, like really genuinely boring stuff, right?

It was the thing newspapers needed in nineteen ninety-five and didn't know how to build it themselves.

So here's the part of the story that everybody knows.

Musk slept in the office.

He showered at the YMCA.

He coded at night.

The legend, the grind.

And I'm not gonna tell you that he didn't work hard because he did.

That part's probably true.

But work hard is not where the money came from.

In February of nineteen ninety nine, Compaq, does everybody remember Compaq?

Yeah.

They bought Zip two for three hundred and seven million dollars in nineteen ninety nine.

And Musk owned 7%.

So he walked away with $32 million.

At 27, right?

From a company that put maps on newspaper websites.

Now, I want you to hold on to that number because everything after it is built on it.

That 22 million is the seed.

Every rocket, every Tesla, every tweet that moved a stock.

All of it grows out of that one payout.

The self-made part of the self-made man's story is what?

Four years of sleeping in an office?

And then a check the size of a small town's annual budget.

Right?

So what does he do with it?

He takes twelve and a half million and starts an online bank.

He calls it X.com.

He loved that letter, I guess, even then, and X.com merges with another company, Confinity.

Run by two guys named Peter Teal and Max Levchin.

And they merged and they became a company you've heard of, PayPal.

And in October of 2002, eBay eBay buys PayPal for one and a half billion dollars.

And Musk's cut this time.

180 million dollars.

So let's tell let's tally the self-made fortune so far, right?

22 million from Zip2, 180 million from PayPal.

Call it, you know, two hundred million dollars by the time he's thirty one.

And I'll be honest with you.

If the story ended there, it would just be this tech story, you know, a guy makes good websites, he sells them, he gets rich, fine.

America is full of those kind of people.

Not nice not in the AI era, but at the time, that's the casino working as advertised in the dot com bubble.

So, but here's where it turns, right?

Here's where the public sort of enters the story.

Because what Musk did next is he takes that 200 million and he points it at two things at once.

He founds SpaceX.

There's that letter again.

And he pours money into a little electric car company called Tesla.

And both of those companies, listen to me, both of those companies would have died.

Both of them, without the government.

Let me give you SpaceX first.

2006, SpaceX has not really successfully launched a rocket.

Has not, right?

They're blowing up on the launch pad.

They're a startup with a dream and a lot of really boomy, explosion y things, right?

And NASA, the United States government, awarded them a contract worth $287 million before the first successful launch.

I'm gonna say that again.

The government bet $278 million of public money on a rocket company that had never put a rocket in orbit.

That's not the free market rewarding a winner.

That's the public funding research and development, right?

That's you and me being the venture capitalist.

And when it works out, the upside doesn't actually come back to us.

It goes

To the 7%.

It goes to the guy.

Now, Tesla, this one's even better, and by better I mean worse.

2010, Tesla is, by all honest accounts, about to tank.

And the Department of Energy, under the Obama administration, gives Tesla a low interest loan of 465 million dollars.

How did that loan happen?

Musk.

Didn't sit back and wait for the bureaucracy he pushed.

He had daily meetings.

There's a detail in the reporting that I found in my research for this episode about Christmas, when some critical EPA certification was missing and the loan was at risk of

being lost.

So Musk went straight to the agency administrator personally at Christmas, working the government like a lobbyist because.

That's what he was being.

And a former Tesla employee said it as plainly as you can say anything else, and I quote Tesla would not have survived without the loan.

It was a critical loan at a critical time.

Wouldn't it have survived?

So I want to go back to that phrase self made man.

Self made.

The seed was a buyout.

The growth was a NASA contract before he'd actually proven anything.

The survival was a federal loan he personally hustled out of the Department of Energy at Christmas.

At every single life or death moment in this history, the thing that saves him is public money.

That's not self made, it's public made.

That's a man made by the Treasury and then handed the deed and told it told him to call it his.

And I don't say that to take anything away from the engineering, right?

The rockets they now land.

The cars they now drive.

Real things got built.

But the question of the show is never did the thing get built.

The question is who paid for it, who profited from it, and who got left holding the bill.

And the answer over and over and over from nineteen ninety nine forward is public paid.

The man profited, and we're about to see who got left holding the bill.

Because the bill comes due in the next part, and the bill is the worker who got fired.

The bill is the tax that didn't get paid.

The bill is the agency that got declared unconstitutional for trying to protect eight people who wrote a letter.

Hold that in the back of your brain.

We're going there now.

So in February of twenty twenty five, the Washington Post published an investigation.

And they tried to do something almost nobody had done.

They tried to add it all up.

Every government contract, every loan, every subsidy, every tax credit that had flowed to Musk's companies for more than 20 years.

And the number that they got was at least 38 billion dollars.

38 billion dollars in public support.

That's welfare, is another word for public support in case you.

Hadn't figured it out.

And here's the the detail that really makes me grind my teeth at night.

Nearly two-thirds of that 38 billion came in just the last five years.

This is not ancient history.

This is accelerating.

In 2024 alone, one year, federal and state governments committed 6.3 billion dollars to Musk's venture, a record high.

Now

Why does this still happen?

That's the question that I think we all should sit with.

Because by 2024, the man is the richest person on earth.

He doesn't need it.

So why does the public keep writing checks to him?

And the answer in 2025 gets so brazen, gets so ludicrous, gets so loud that it actually stops being a metaphor because in 2025.

Elon Musk wasn't just receiving government money, he was running part of the government.

Doge The Department of Government Efficiency Trump appoints Musk as the de facto head of it, in case you've been under a rock for the last three years, a special government

employee, and the job of Doge was to slash federal spending.

To go through the government and cut it all out.

Now stop.

Hold both of these in your head at the same time.

At the moment Musk is put in charge of cutting government spending, his companies are holding fifty-two active contracts worth a potential eleven point eight billion dollars,

including nine and a half billion in defense department contracts.

So the man cutting the budget is one of the largest single recipients of

The budget.

He's holding the knife and standing at the front of the buffet line.

And when reporters and ethics experts raised these questions, and they did very loudly, there was a guy named Noah Bookbinder among them, great name by the way.

And they pointed at the obvious, like screaming, Hey, this is a conflict of interest, right?

Trump's answer was that Musk would identify his own conflicts of interest.

I feel like I should say that again because it's so stupid.

It's almost cute.

The conflict of interest problem would be solved by the conflicted party identifying his own conflicts.

That's like asking a fox to file an incident report after the hen house.

And there's no evidence Musk ever filed the ethics disclosure forms that he was required to.

None, right?

That's the machine.

That is how it works.

And it's not not even remotely subtle anymore.

We used to at least pretend

Christmas phone call to the Department of Energy in in 2010, right?

At least there was still a wall there.

I mean, it was a thin one between a man asking the government and the government deciding to give them the money, but twenty twenty five the the man was asking the government

deciding and the government deciding to give them that money are the same person.

Now let's talk about the other half because the contracts are how the public money comes in.

The tax code is how it never, ever goes back out.

ProPublica.

The secret IRS files leaked records, and what they found about Musk specifically between 2014 and 2018.

His fortune grew by $13.9 billion, and he paid $450 million.

In federal income tax.

That sounds like a lot.

$455 million.

And unless you've like ever tried to figure out how division works, right?

Because that's a true tax rate of three point two seven percent.

Three point two seven percent income tax rate on thirteen point nine billion in wealth growth.

And in twenty eighteen, one of those years, he paid nothing.

Zero federal income tax, like zero.

And how?

It has a name, it's a strategy.

It's called buy, borrow, die.

Now, I know all of us want to speed up to the third step, but you essentially buy assets like stock.

You never sell them, right?

Because selling triggers the capital gains tax, which is like 31 to 37 percent.

Instead

You borrow against the stocks that you own.

Now the banks will lend a guy like Musk money against his Tesla shares at almost a 0% interest rate.

And loans, they're not income, right?

Loans aren't taxed.

When you go get a student loan, you're not taxed on that.

And if you if you were to get a car loan, you're not taxed on that.

You're taxed on the car purchase, but not the loan money coming to the dealership.

So you live extravagantly, infinitely on borrowed money, secured by stock that you will never sell and you pay nothing.

And then you die.

When you die, the tax basis resets, and your heirs get all of that stock clean.

Buy, borrow, die.

That's the whole game.

That's the trick from the cold open, right?

The fifty-four thousand dollar salary, the minimum wage paycheck in California, that's the borrow stage made wide open for you to be able to see.

You don't need a salary if you can borrow against a trillion dollars of stock.

It's not just him.

ProPublica actually found the 25 richest Americans paid a true tax rate of 3.4% over those years.

The top 400 billionaire families, and the Biden administration ran this number, averaged 8.2% in federal income tax, while the average American worker pays around 13%, not

including incidentals.

So I'll ask the question I keep asking, how does this still happen?

And I think the the answer the obvious honest answer is not

It's not the best looking one, it's it's the ugliest one.

It still happens because the people who'd have to stop it are the people who are directly benefiting from it, or the people funded by the people benefiting from it.

So I'll say what I normally say: the machine is not broken.

The machine is working exactly like it was designed.

It's it's perfect.

It's humming.

It was built to move public money up and keep private money from coming back down.

And it does that flawlessly.

38 billion up, 3.27 down, a trillion dollars.

And he pays into Social Security like he makes a hundred and eighty four thousand a year.

That's not a glitch, that's the design.

If you're driving while you're listening to this, I want you to just kinda take a breath.

If you're in the shower or in the bathroom or something, get some water.

In June of twenty twenty two, a group of SpaceX employees did something brave.

And in hindsight, kind of, you know, doomed to fail, they wrote an open letter.

In it, they called their boss, Elon Musk, a distraction and an embarrassment.

This was after a run of of sexually suggestive tweets that he had sent out.

They they were embarrassed.

I mean, they they worked.

For a serious company doing serious things.

And the face of it was just tweeting sexually explicit and suggestive things.

So they said so in writing together.

They gathered up and wrote a letter.

Eight of them got fired.

Now here's where it matters.

And here's where it stops being office drama and becomes a story about the law because under federal law, the National Labor Relations Act, workers have the right to band

together, to advocate collectively for better working conditions.

That's the whole foundation of American labor law since the 1930s.

Like you're allowed to get together with your coworkers and complain.

That's protected, that's a federal right.

So in January of 2024, the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that enforces that law, filed the complaint.

They said SpaceX illegally fired those eight people.

And what did SpaceX do?

This is the part.

The day after the NLRB filed its complaint, the very next day, SpaceX sued the NLRB in federal court in Texas.

And the argument wasn't.

We didn't do it.

The argument was that the agency itself, the entire structure of the NLRB, is unconstitutional.

You see the move here, right?

Don't argue you're innocent.

Argue the referee shouldn't exist.

And in August of 2025, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

They ruled the NLRB's structure unconstitutional.

So think about what it means for those eight workers.

They wrote a letter, they got fired.

The agency that's supposed to protect them tried to, and instead of defending the firing, the company got the agency itself declared unconstitutional in three entire states Texas,

Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Which means now any company in those states can do the exact same thing.

Get sued by the NLRB?

Well, just sue the NLRB back block the whole thing.

Eight people wrote a letter.

And and the cost of that letter was a hole-blown in federal worker protection.

For three states and millions of workers.

That's the bill from earlier coming due.

Remember, I said someone gets left holding the bill, right?

It's them.

It's the eight.

And this isn't like a a one-off.

Go to Fremont, California at the Tesla factory.

There was a United Auto Workers organizing campaign there, workers trying to form a union.

And the an NLRB judge found Tesla broke the law over and over.

Interfered with the leaf letting, banned union materials, threatened employees with being fired in March of twenty seventeen.

And then this is the one that that ties right back to the cold open, right?

In in May of twenty eighteen, Musk tweeted that employees would lose stock options if they unionized.

That tweet, the NLRB found the tweet violated federal labor law.

You can't threaten workers comp to stop them from organizing.

It's illegal.

The board ruled against Tesla in March of twenty twenty one.

And then October twenty twenty four, the Fifth Circuit, same court vacated the order, they threw it out, and in the dissent, a judge pointed out that Tesla had just quietly accepted

seven other labor violations in the very same case.

Seven.

They fought this one and let seven go, because the seven didn't matter.

This was about the principle.

Workers don't get to organize here.

Tesla and SpaceX have no union contracts.

None.

And Tesla pays its workers less than the big three automakers in Detroit who do have unions.

So look at what's happening in the exact same year, 2018.

The same calendar year, anyway.

Musk tweets the illegal threat about stock options.

Musk pays zero federal income tax, and the Tesla board approves a pay package for him worth.

fifty five point eight billion dollars, the largest executive compensation award in the history of public markets.

Same year.

He threatens workers stock, he pays nothing to the public, and he's handed fifty five billion in stock.

Let those three things sit in one room together, right?

A shareholder named Richard Tornetta sued over that package.

And in January of twenty twenty four, a Delaware court agreed with him, found the process was quote deeply flawed, found Musk effectively quote controlled Tesla, found the board

hadn't told shareholders the truth, ordered the whole thing rescinded a win.

Briefly.

For the idea that

That maybe there's a limit.

And then December nineteenth, twenty twenty-five, the Delaware Supreme Court reversed it unanimously, restored the package, which by then, because the stock had climbed, was worth

about a hundred and forty billion dollars.

And the court's reason was that canceling it left Musk uncompensated for his time and effort over a period of six years.

Uncompensated.

A hundred and forty billion dollars in the court's worry.

Was that the man might end up uncompensated?

The eight who wrote the letter?

They don't understand a word like uncompensated.

They just got fired.

So let me try to pull the thread all the way through from Palo Alto to the IPO because there's one shape here, and once you see it, you you kind of can't unsee it.

And the shape is the public takes the risk.

And the private man takes the reward every time at every stage.

NASA bets 278 million on rockets that hadn't flown.

Public risk.

The DOE lends $465 million to a company that's about to die.

Public risk.

$38 billion in contracts and subsidies over 20 years.

Two-thirds of it just recently.

Public money, public risk.

The reward?

3.27% tax rate.

Zero in 2018.

A $54,000 salary that exists only so the real money never gets taxed.

Buy, borrow, die.

The reward stays private, untouched uphill.

That's the machine.

Public risk in, private reward out.

And a wall in the middle.

The tax code, the courts, the gutted labor board, built specifically so the reward can never flow back down.

This whole trickle down economy, they've made sure that there is a one way valve on all of this.

Certainly not back to the people who actually took the risk, which is the public.

And here's the thing that should piss you off, because it's easy to make this about about musk, right?

Like being uniquely bad and uniquely greedy and lets the machine off the hook.

The machine made musk.

Period.

The machine would have made someone else if it hadn't been Musk.

The buy, borrow, die strategy is not his invention, right?

It's the standard playbook for the top 25 who all paid the same 3.4%.

The Social Security cap that lets him pay like a mid-level manager.

That cap applies to every billionaire.

The NASA contracts, the DOE loans, that's industrial policy.

That's how it works for everyone at the top.

Musk is just the purest expression of it.

The first to a trillion.

The one who ran the spending agency while collecting the spending.

The one who tweeted the illegal threat and got the referee thrown out.

He's not the disease, he's the symptom that you can finally see with your naked eye because it got so big that the actual machinery behind it became visible for the first

time.

And that's kind of a gift, right, if we use it.

Because for most of my life, this stuff has been invisible, hidden in tax records that nobody leaked, and contracts that nobody added up and court rulings that nobody will ever

read.

The fog of big numbers kind of did its job.

A trillion dollars.

So big it means nothing.

So big you just stop asking.

But the question, the question nobody wants to answer is so simple.

How did one human being end up with a trillion dollars in a country where a nurse pays a higher tax rate?

And now we know it wasn't genius, right?

Genius was in the room, sure.

But the trillion came from public contracts, unpaid taxes, suppressed wages, and a legal system that calls one hundred and forty billion dollars uncompensated and calls eight

fired workers nothing at all.

The self-made man, I told you we'd come back to it.

There is no self-made man in this story.

There's a public-made fortune wearing a self-made costume.

And the costume is the most expensive thing he owns because as long as we believe it, we won't ask for any money back.

A trillion dollars.

And the question nobody has been able to answer is why do we keep paying in?

So here's what I want you to watch more closely.

Not the net worth, forget the net worth.

It's the fog.

It's the thing designed to shock and awe you.

Watch the tax rate instead.

Watch the salary, $54,080, because that's the little number that tells you everything that the big number hides.

The big numbers for headlines.

The small number is the actual machine hiding in plain sight on your dime, your health care, your child care.

And the most absurd thing of all of this, the thing that reveals the logic of it and how rotten it is truly to its core is the Social Security fact, right?

Bernie Sanders is actually right about this.

The first trillionaire in human history pays the exact same dollar amount into Social Security as someone earning $184,500 because the tax stops at the cap, and stocks and

loans don't count at all.

So the school teacher pays on every dollar they make.

The trillionaire pays on 184,000 of his trillion.

That's not a loophole somebody forgot to close.

That's a wall somebody built on purpose and it's standing strong.

That's the lens.

Big numbers the magic show, small numbers the trick.

Now, you didn't come here for, you know, call your senator.

I'm not going to insult you with it.

So here's here's something real.

Two things.

One.

Go read about this buy, borrow, die strategy until you actually understand it, right?

Like not just the vibe of it, the mechanics.

Because once you understand how a man with a trillion dollars lives on borrowed money he never pays tax on, you will never again look at the phrase billionaire's income the same

way.

They don't have income.

That's the whole point.

Learn the trick and you can't be fooled by the magic show.

Two, the next time someone near you says self-made,

About anyone, ask them the Christmas question.

Ask them who made the phone call to the Department of Energy.

Ask who signed the NASA check before the rocket flew.

Make self-made a claim that has to survive one follow-up question because it almost never does.

A trillion dollars.

Public risk in, private reward out, and a costume in the middle.

Thanks so much for for sitting with me on this one.

Find us at FOF.foundation.

And I hope Will is out there getting some sun and keeping the lights on.

Please, my friends, do take care of each other, and we will talk to you again next week.

Bye.