{"id":2778,"date":"2026-06-15T14:06:55","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T14:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=2778"},"modified":"2026-06-15T14:06:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T14:06:55","slug":"elon-musk-trillionaire-and-avatar-of-the-ai-gilded-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=2778","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk, trillionaire and avatar of the AI Gilded Age"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<div>\n<p><span><i>This column is from Trendlines, my business newsletter that covers the forces shaping the economy in Boston and beyond. If you\u2019d like to receive it via email on Mondays and Thursdays, <\/i><i>sign up here<\/i><i>.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=2776\">Fox to buy streaming pioneer Roku in a $22 billion deal<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Musk were inescapable last week as SpaceX\u2019s record-shattering initial public offering made Elon the world\u2019s first trillionaire.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The good Musk is a visionary who has pulled off what many thought impossible \u2014 turning Tesla into the world\u2019s most valuable car company and pushing the frontiers of the space economy with SpaceX\u2019s rockets and internet satellites.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span>The bad Musk is a shameless troll who traffics in hate and conspiracy theories. He\u2019s the man who spent $44 billion to buy Twitter (now X), gut it, and turn it into a virtual neo-Nazi night rally and a cesspool of AI-generated porn. And he\u2019s a fan of authoritarian leaders here and abroad.<\/span><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><span>Get Starting Point<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span>A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.<\/span><\/div>\n<div>\n<div><label>Enter Email<\/label><\/p>\n<div><button>Sign Up<\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><span>He is, in other words, the perfect avatar of our new Gilded Age: someone to idolize or despise, depending on how comfortable you are with an economy increasingly controlled by a cabal of right-leaning tech and media oligarchs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><b>The latest:<\/b> Musk retains a loyal following on Wall Street and among individual investors even as his transformation from electric-vehicle prophet to edgelord made him a hugely divisive figure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The demand for the SpaceX IPO was many times more than the $75 billion supply of shares, the largest amount ever raised in an IPO. The stock climbed 19 percent on its first day of trading Friday, yielding a $2.1 trillion market valuation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The gain was a perfect IPO pop \u2014 big enough to please investors who got shares at the initial price, but not too big that SpaceX left a lot of money on the table.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Still, many individual investors were left out in the cold. They submitted IPO orders for $100 billion in shares, according to Bloomberg, but were set to receive roughly $15 billion.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>This unmet demand should help support the stock in the coming days, as should SpaceX\u2019s accelerated inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 and FTSE Russell indexes. The shares gained 5.5 percent in early Monday trading. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><b>Faith vs. financials:<\/b> The efficient market hypothesis says stock prices reflect all known facts. The AI boom, on the other hand, has been fueled by what investors hope will be true.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=2774\">Rhode Island is about to see a massive political reshuffling<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>SpaceX is unprofitable and is bleeding cash. Its shares trade at more than 100 times last year\u2019s revenue, compared with about 23 times revenue for Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>To be a long-term investor in SpaceX is to believe that Musk will deliver a sci-fi future in which humans colonize Mars and orbiting data centers power artificial intelligence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>That faith is rooted largely in Tesla\u2019s stock, which has risen an average of 44.5 percent a year since its 2010 IPO, three times the return of the Standard &amp; Poor\u2019s 500 index. It discounts Musk\u2019s disastrous acquisition of Twitter and his Grok chatbot\u2019s also-ran status in the AI world. Both were bailed out by SpaceX.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><b>Historical echoes: <\/b>Americans have long resented, if not outright loathed, the uber wealthy, even if we\u2019re fascinated by how they make their fortunes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>John D. Rockefeller, the first man widely considered to be a billionaire, was reviled as a ruthless monopolist. His biggest source of wealth, Standard Oil Trust, led to the first US antitrust laws. Henry Clay Frick\u2019s violent suppression of striking steel workers made him one of the country\u2019s most hated industrialists. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Henry Ford was lauded as a business genius for his introduction of the moving assembly line and adoption of the $5 workday. Yet his legacy was irrevocably damaged by his personal beliefs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Ford was a rabid antisemite, a hatred he promoted through his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. The parallels with Musk are obvious though not exact.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><b>Final thought:<\/b> The wealth inequality that separated Gilded Age robber barons from the rest of the country pales in comparison to today\u2019s oligarchy. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>From The New York Times over the weekend:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><i>At the height of the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, the richest handful of Americans had a net worth equivalent to about 3 percent of the country\u2019s annual economic output, according to data compiled by the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez. Today, the fortunes of the same 0.00001 percent \u2014 about 20 individuals \u2014 make up roughly four times as large a share, equivalent to 12 percent of annual output.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>No wonder anti-billionaire sentiment is roiling. Eight of the 10 richest people in the world founded tech companies. AI has made them unfathomably wealthy, while ordinary Americans worry that the technology will put them out of work. The anger, for some, is stoked by the many of the oligarch\u2019s backing of President Trump. (See: Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison attending the White House Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on Sunday night.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=2772\">Photos: Tartan Army marches on Fenway for Scottish Celebration Night<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>This is the US economy in mid-2026. Elon Musk is its poster boy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The entrepreneur and right-wing Internet troll is far richer than Rockefeller or Ford \u2014 and probably more hated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Elon Musk, trillionaire and avatar of the AI Gilded Age - Boston Relocation Insider<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=2778\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Elon Musk, trillionaire and avatar of the AI Gilded Age - 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