A TRILLION dollars is usually used to describe the GDP of the largest economies in the world, but now it can equally be applied to the net worth of one man.
Last week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, an unprecedented accumulation of wealth that has been decades in the making.
The surge to Musk’s net worth came after he floated SpaceX on the stock market, but the Tesla owner’s finances have been growing at a rapid rate since Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office – a venture that the Twitter/X owner himself played a large part in financing.
SpaceX became the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) of all time, raising $85.7 billion, shattering the previous record set by Saudi oil giant Aramco of $29.4bn.
Three years ago, Musk’s total assets were estimated to be about $250bn. The scale of his accumulation of capital in such a small space of time is unparalleled.
While Musk’s net worth is tied up in stocks and ventures, that one person could reach such a staggering amount of wealth should be a warning call across the world that the current economic system is inherently broken.
For Susan Newman, professor of economics at the Open University, the scale of Musk’s personal wealth is “absolutely insane”.
“Anything after 10 or more times the cost of an average home becomes so completely intangible,” she explains. “Adding these extra zeros is almost meaningless. It's really difficult, isn't it, to grasp the scale of this.”
It is just below the GDP of Switzerland – $1.15 trillion – and Poland – $1.13trn.
Al Jazeera created an interactive tool which tries to put the scale into a digestible context. If you had Musk’s net worth ready to spend, you could purchase six international space stations ($150bn each), rebuild Gaza 14 times over ($70bn), and give everyone in the world clean water for a year, at a cost of $20bn, for 20 years.
You could buy 100 billion bags of rice at $10 a pop, or 200 billion $5 fast-food burgers.
Musk’s extreme personal wealth – while undeniably headline grabbing – is a symptom of a much larger structural problem.
“It's not that some people are just getting rich, it is a few people getting much richer, while a lot of people are getting much poorer, and they do have the same root, that's the key,” Newman explains.
“These are not just coexisting phenomena, they really are structurally related.
“I think when people look at the billionaires, they often fail to connect it, except in the most moralistic way.”
It is not luck that has allowed Musk to generate the fortune that he has, but decades of financial deregulation, cuts to taxes for the super-rich and a hoarding of wealth among a privileged few.
For Newman, this is “not a coincidence”, as the rise in the power of the financial sector since the 2000s has had a fundamentally “tangible” impact.
“What's more scary is that it's been allowed to happen,” she added.
“And not only that, it's no accident that the sort of political changes that we're seeing around the world are taking place, because they're very much reinforcing, supporting, protecting this particular mechanism of wealth capture.”
According to Oxfam, billionaires' fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the average annual rate of the five years prior to Trump’s election in November 2024.
The charity’s report earlier this year – Resisting the Rule of the Rich – found that while US billionaires saw the sharpest growth in their fortunes, elsewhere in the world, billionaires saw double-digit increases to their personal wealth.
It said that the “actions of the Trump presidency, including the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation, have benefited the richest around the world”.
Jamie Livingstone, head of Oxfam Scotland, explained that extreme wealth is one of the “driving forces” of inequality.
“While millions of people globally are struggling with rising costs and governments are cutting back support, vast fortunes are growing at breakneck speed,” he said.
“Wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, and with it comes growing political and economic power. That's bad for democracy, bad for the fight against poverty and bad for the prospects of building a fairer society.”
He added that this “doesn’t happen by accident” and is the result of “political choices”.
“No society can thrive when extraordinary wealth for a few comes at the expense of everyone else,” Livingstone said.
What about Scotland’s wealthiest people?
EVEN Scotland, a country of just over 5.5 million people, has several billionaires and the wealth gap is stark.
The most recent Scottish Government wealth inequality data showed the wealthiest 2% of households have more wealth than the poorest 50% combined.
Fashion tycoon Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish billionaire, saw his fortune grow to an estimated £8.287bn over the last year, up from £7.704bn in 2025. He is Scotland’s largest private landowner and wealthiest individual.
Whisky heir Glenn Gordon saw his estimated wealth drop to £4.745bn, down from £6.398bn last year, while industrialist Sir Ian Wood has an estimated fortune of £1.876bn, a drop from £1.914bn the year before.
Lady Philomena Clark and family, Arnold Clark’s owners, saw their estimated fortune of £1.733bn increase from £1.656bn in 2025, according to the latest figures.
Transport entrepreneurs Sandy and James Easdale – who own McGills and donated to Scottish Labour ahead of the Holyrood election – have an estimated fortune of £1.47bn, little changed from last year when it was £1.46bn.
Mahdi Al-Tajir, an Emirati businessman who owns Keir House in Perthshire, is estimated to be worth £1.641bn.
Roz Foyer, the general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), argued that Musk’s trillionaire status is a “damning indictment” of an economic system “that allows unimaginable wealth to pile up in the hands of a few while millions of workers worry about paying the bills”.
"Nobody earns a trillion dollars; fortunes on this scale – complete, unimaginable wealth – are built on the backs of workers, sustained by rules designed to funnel wealth and power upwards,” she explained, adding that in Tesla’s American, Swedish and Germany factories, Musk has used “every dirty trick in the book” to stop workers from unionising.
The STUC has repeatedly called for wealth taxes to invest in public services, and Foyer argued that the continuing rise of billionaire wealth exposes the “lie” that there isn’t enough money to go around.
“In Scotland, the wealth of our richest 10 people exceeds £23 billion,” Foyer added.
“The money exists. The question is whose interests our economy is designed to serve.
“Right now, it serves the wealthy, not the workers and unions across the world are working hard to correct that imbalance and ensure Musk becomes the last trillionaire to exist.”
Oxfam has also backed calls for a wealth tax, with the initial focus on scrapping the “outdated and unfair” council tax system, which is based on valuations from 1991.
“Scotland may not be home to trillionaires, but we are home to billionaires, and people here still live with the consequences of an economy where wealth and power are becoming ever more concentrated, with the impacts falling most heavily on those already pushed to the margins,” Livingstone told the Sunday National.
“Extreme wealth and extreme inequality are two sides of the same coin. When wealth concentrates at the top, inequality deepens, opportunity narrows and governments are left to choose whether they let that continue or change the rules that allow it.”
Money buys influence
ONE thing that Musk has used his fortune to buy is Twitter/X, one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. Since the Tesla owner took over in 2022, far-right figures have been prioritised and promoted, and feeds have been filled with anti-immigrant, inflammatory content and disinformation.
Rupert Lowe, the leader of the far-right Restore Britain party, has made £59,509.764 on Musk’s platform since he was elected as an MP, according to his register of interests. Musk frequently retweets Lowe, whose posts get hundreds of thousands of views and interactions as a result.
In the UK, far-right agitators have blamed migrants – particularly those who cross the English Channel – as the root cause of inequality, claiming they are taking jobs or housing from those who are in poverty in the UK.
We have seen increased anti-immigrant protests, outbreaks of violence in Glasgow where the victims were attacked solely on the basis of their skin colour and houses set on fire in Belfast following a stabbing attack that was used as a reason to whip up anger and hate online.
At the height of the 2024 riots in England following the horrific murder of three young girls in Stockport, Musk wrote that “civil war in Britain is inevitable”, on Twitter/X, and has called for a violent uprising led by the far right.
In October last year, he urged the "English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all die”. His post had two million views within an hour.
Foyer described Musk as “the inglorious, reprehensible example of how money can be used to buy patronage, purchase influence, shape political agendas and subvert democracy in favour of those with the deepest pockets rather than those with the purest principles”.
As Oxfam’s report put it: “While the majority see through the lies and many fight back, the sad truth is that these dirty tactics serve as a distraction from the real cause of hardship for the many – extreme levels of inequality.”
And that plays right into the hands of the world’s first trillionaire.
