Bernie Sanders

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman and democratic-socialist senator Bernie Sanders probably weren’t ever going to see eye to eye on matters of wealth accumulation and distribution, and as it turns out, there’s a fair amount of daylight between how the two men view Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Sanders, for example, thinks the moment is emblematic of the destruction of America at the hands of the oligarchy, and Ackman thinks it’s a reason to break out the party horns and thank Musk for his service.

On X, the senator from Vermont declared that Musk’s “rise to trillionaire status is not a time to celebrate” but instead “a call to action to take on the unprecedented income and wealth inequality that now exists and the greed and power of a ruling class that is destroying the social fabric of America.” He added:

Our democracy cannot survive when one man, who contributed $290 million to get Trump elected, becomes $700 billion richer since Trump’s election.

Our economy cannot sustain itself when one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of our society, when 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major nation and when our kids will have a lower standard of living than their parents.

This is not just about wealth. It’s about power. Musk and his fellow Oligarchs want it ALL. Together, we must fight back. We can and must create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires.

That didn’t sit right with Ackman, who responded that Musk becoming a trillionaire with a t is indeed “a time to celebrate” — and not only that, but we should be thanking the SpaceX founder for everything he’s done for us. “@elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense,” Ackman wrote. He then called Musk’s trillionaire status “nominal,” explaining that the richest person in the universe “is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold” but “is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind,” which, okay! Bottom line, according to the hedge-fund manager? “Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.” (He also threw in: “Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.”)

SpaceX rose 10 percent on Monday, its first full day of trading, and by the end of the day Musk’s net worth stood at not just a paltry trillion dollars but $1.2 trillion. Last week, Oxfam calculated that at just a single trillion, Musk would be richer “than the poorest 46% of the world population, or 3.8 billion people, combined.” He’s also richer than the people at spots 2, 3, 4, and 5 on Forbes’ “Real-Time Billionaires” list combined.

Musk, of course, is far from the only person who made an inconceivable amount of money off of SpaceX going public, though obviously no one made nearly as much as him. Prior to the IPO, we learned that Musk’s longtime pal, Antonio Gracias, was set to see his stake in the firm hit $65 billion, while the company’s CFO and COO were expected to see their net worths hit more than a billion dollars each on paper. Other winners: inventors Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Josh Kushner, Hollywood execs, university endowments, and various current and former members of the Trump administration. (More than 4,000 SpaceX employees also just became millionaires, a group which includes, as Ackman put it to Sanders, “hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.”)