YEAH, $1 TRILLION IS A LOT OF MONEY

Ralph Bristol

by Ralph Bristol, Facebook, 6/13/2026 - If I had a job earning $1 per second, I would earn more than $31 million a year, and it would take me more than 31,000 years to earn $1 trillion. 

Those are the kinds of numbers that fascinate journalists who reported with awe Friday about Elon Musk becoming the nation’s first trillionaire. True, that is an amazing concentration of wealth in one man. 

At roughly $1 trillion+, his wealth now exceeds:

• The next 5 richest people combined (Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison)

Or…

• The bottom 693 billionaires combined (those worth $1B–$1.4B)

It’s also the kind of wealth that feeds the toxic combination of wealth envy and wealth opportunism, the latter showing up in proposals by politicians to confiscate some of that wealth to help reduce the imbalance between government spending and revenue. 

The problem is one of 5th grade math.  If the government could somehow confiscate all of the wealth of Elon Musk and the next five richest men in the world, it would cover one year’s federal deficit. 

In the process, it would destroy the biggest wealth-producing machines in the world, which employ millions of people and produce hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue for the government every year. 

When Elon Musk, because of the wealth-producing value of the many companies he has built, becomes a trillionaire, that is huge news that dominates the financial airways and is reported on every national and local newscast in the country. 

But the federal government now has to borrow twice that amount every year to cover its spending.  That figure is no longer even considered unusual, and to many, like John Tamny, no big deal. As long as the bond market is willing to keep lending, there’s no sign of trouble.

Just the interest on our national debt cost $1 trillion last year. 

So yeah - $1 trillion is a shocking amount – worthy of attention by every reporter in the nation – but not because one man has amassed that much wealth for himself – setting him apart from all others – but because we now have to borrow that much every year, just to service the debt we have borrowed before.

I yearn for the day that $1 trillion landmark makes the same news splash as the one Elon Musk made Friday with his IPO of Space X. 

Ralph Bristol is the former long-time morning talk radio host broadcasting on Supertalk 99.7 WTN. He was one of the less provocative and bombastic of conservative radio personalities, more thoughtful and grounded in conservative ideas. He left talk radio in 2018 and retired. He lives in Nashville. 

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