The Sin Fueling America’s War On Success

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO will undoubtedly be the biggest IPO in history. 

What’s unusual about this particular IPO is that it is widely available to retail investors, such as the man on the street. Typically, in any IPO, a certain percentage of the company’s stock is offered to the public, and a large percentage of that stock is already pre-purchased by institutional investors.

The pre-market valuation of the IPO is likely to be in the $1.77 trillion range, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That is not a bad thing. It is an amazing thing. But you are going to hear from all the wrong people that it’s immoral, terrible, even evil. Why?

Envy. It’s a universal human emotion, and envy is bad and wrong, and God explicitly condemns it.

What could destroy the country and the global economy is what has always threatened humanity: Envy.

Jimmy Kimmel is a beautiful example of this. Jimmy Kimmel is a multimillionaire who works for billionaires, and he’s upset about a prospective trillionaire.

Kimmel is an obnoxious, non-funny, woke pope of late-night TV, who’s probably worth somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. He is paid by people worth tens of billions of dollars to complain about a guy who built a company that would be worth $1.77 trillion.

Kimmel mocked:

Elon Musk came to the United States from South Africa in 1995, the son of a humble emerald mine owner, and he is so grateful to this country that allowed him to become a trillionaire. Tesla paid almost no federal income tax over the past three years. You know, for a guy who has been openly cheering immigrants getting kicked out of the country for stealing from us, sure seems like an immigrant who’s been stealing from us, to me.

This is just obnoxious trash. It is not true. Elon did not, in fact, grow up wealthy. His dad was kind of a mess. And as far as the idea that Elon came to the United States wealthy, that is eminently untrue. He was living in some of the worst apartments in America when he came here. And then he didn’t get a job at Netscape despite applying. And then he ended up becoming this unbelievable success.

The notion that he is stealing from Americans by building several of the most successful companies in American history is totally crazy.

What has Jimmy Kimmel built? Ever?

But here’s what’s really going on: Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t like that Elon is really, really, really rich.

Kimmel continued:

Trillion dollars. It’s hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know a trillion is a number, but it’s so large. In the same way, we can’t fathom it the same way. We know, like Elon has a lot of kids when we can’t fathom him getting laid, right? So let me try to illustrate it. If you tried to count out loud to a trillion, you would be counting until the year 33,736. $1 trillion is 10 billion $100 bills.

I’m just wondering: Jimmy Kimmel is worth probably $100 million. If you counted to 100 million, it would take you about 3 years, if you counted one number per second and stayed up all night.

Why the envy, why the rage?

There’s certainly something political to it. Jimmy Kimmel was much nicer to Elon Musk back in 2013 when he had him on his show to talk about SpaceX.

He said to Musk:

You know, I want to go over some of your many accomplishments just for the audience in case they’re not familiar with them. In 1983, at age 12, you designed a video game and sold it to a computer magazine for $500. 1995, you quit the graduate program at Stanford to found Zip2. In 1999, you sold Zip2 to Compaq for $309 million.

You co-founded PayPal in 2000. You sold PayPal to eBay for a billion and a half dollars. You founded Space-X. You co-founded Tesla Motors. You helped create SolarCity, the solar power company. Well, it’s great to meet you. If you want to watch the launch, why wouldn’t you want to watch the launch of the Space-x rocket? On March 1 go to Space X.com and take a look.

Barack Obama toured SpaceX with Elon in 2010. The Democratic president of the United States marveled at it.

Musk was talking about reusable rockets back in 2010. That was not achieved for over half a decade. It was an enormous risk. And Obama was marveling at it at the time.

But now we’ve gone from that inspirational view to giant inflatable Elon Musks in Times Square with no shirt on and looking ugly.

What’s really going on here?

The answer is very simple: Envy.

There is a very interesting study in the journal “Frontiers in Psychology” from 2021 that discusses what are called “the two faces of envy.” The authors wrote:

Envy is like a wildfire destroying people. We feel envy for, a classmate who gets a good grade or, a neighbor who buys an expensive car. This kind of emotion drives our different behaviors, like small stones in the heart lake, ruining our peace of mind. … [Scholars] envy as “the intense, unpleasant feeling that one feels when one realizes that another has something that one strives for, pursues, or yearns for.” Envy is a painful emotion.

There are two kinds of envy. One is useful, and one is quite terrible.

One is benign envy: “The envious person may try to make themselves as good as the person being envied. Therefore, envy can increase personal effort, drive behavior to achieve the desired object, and to turn attention to the means of achieving it.”

And then there’s another type: malicious envy. This is where “The envious person may try to degrade the person being envied, to vilify or denigrate the other person’s advantages. Envy can increase schadenfreude behavior that leads to hostility and resentment. It can shift attention to the person being envied.”

By the way, it also leads to violence. There’s literally a full commandment among the Ten Commandments that is directly about envy: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s wife, his servant, his ox, his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

God takes the time to say envy is bad.

By the way, this is the only commandment that has to do with your feelings. All the rest are behaviorally driven: Don’t steal. Don’t kill, don’t blaspheme. Respect your parents and everyone else. This one is emotional. Why did God reserve one commandment for the emotion of envy?

Because it turns out the entire history of humanity relies on whether we can actually master our envy. This is the story of Cain and Abel. The story of Cain and Abel is about envy. Cain decides to sacrifice to God, and Abel follows suit. And God, for reasons we don’t understand from the Bible, accepts Abel’s sacrifice, but not Cain’s.

And then God says, “Surely if you do right, you will be uplifted. But if you do not do right, sin crouches at your door. Its urge is toward you, but you can be its master.”

What is that sin? It’s envy. And what does Cain do? Instead of going to Abel and saying, “What did you do right and I did wrong? How can I do better?” he kills Abel.

Envy is destructive. It is terrible.

What’s interesting here is when we get envious, because it’s not a universal timing thing; it’s a universal human emotion, we feel it all the time.

But it tends to kick in for anyone who’s just above you on the wealth index. So if you make 100 grand, you may be envious of the guy who makes 200 grand.

But it’s not every person who makes more than you.

There is a particular envy for people who take risks.

That’s because in our heart of hearts, we think we could have done that too. We look at Elon, we say, “I could have founded a SpaceX company. He thought of it, but I could have thought of it. I could have taken the risk. It’s something that’s within my purview.”

It’s really, really interesting to watch New Yorkers who just voted for a Democratic socialist like Zohran Mamdani, who riffs on Citadel CEO Ken Griffin all day long and roots for the Knicks this season. The Knicks are super rich. Really, really, really rich. Karl-Anthony Towns made $53 million this year. OG Anunoby made $40 million. Jalen Brunson makes $35 million a year. That is a lot of money.

But you’re not seeing jealousy or outrage in the stadium. People aren’t showing up and yelling at them about how they need to redistribute their income and pay more taxes, and how many school teachers are out of a job, and do we need more government-sponsored grocery stores.

So why are people so envious of these guys? Because everyone recognizes that these guys have unique talents given by God. You’re not seven feet, you’re not 270 pounds, and you can’t shoot the three.

But when it’s a smart person who doesn’t have exceptional physical qualities, then we get pretty jealous. “Why didn’t we get what he has? Why don’t we all get to be Elon Musk-rich? He’s not that much better than we are.”

But here is the thing. The reason that Elon is super-rich — and I know a lot of people who are as bright as Elon, I know a lot of very high IQ people, and Elon has a very high IQ, he is much richer than any of them — is because he took risks, huge risks, unprecedented risks.

And that is good because risk is what creates innovation. If you don’t have people risking, you don’t get better stuff. If you don’t have people taking out mortgages on their homes to sponsor and subsidize them, a company won’t get built.

If you don’t have people willing to put their own money where their mouth is, their own time, their own effort, you do not get new things.

We need new things. Not only that, we need a system that allows you to keep what you make.

For every single Elon Musk in any industry, there are 10,000 dudes who thought of it, risked it, and failed.

What is the only thing that will keep people risking it and trying to do the thing that actually builds? The only thing that incentivizes that is the possibility of making a lot of money.

That’s what generates people willing to take the risks that actually make the world a better place.

Risk-taking is risky. Take, for example, Blue Origin, run by another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, a competitor to SpaceX. A couple of weeks ago, we watched a Blue Origin rocket explode on the ground. Billions of dollars were lost in one millisecond.

That’s what it looks like when you take risks, because sometimes you fail. You know how many videos there are of Elon Musk’s rockets blowing up on the launch pad?

How do you incentivize a person to keep looking failure in the face over and over and over again? You have to have an American system, a free-market system that rewards risk-taking and punishes failure and rewards success.

That is what you require. People forget that Elon Musk risked pretty much his entire early fortune on SpaceX and Tesla.

This is risk-taking, and it’s awesome, and it should be rewarded.

No matter what Jimmy Kimmel thinks.