Elon Musk is a divisive figure. Simply mention his name on Twitter, and you’ll summon both his haters and his fans. But the controversy he excites signifies the start of a very positive trend – a trend that in the seventeenth century helped sustain the Industrial Revolution, and which in the late nineteenth century gave us much of the infrastructure for science and knowledge-creation that we still use today.
To put Musk into perspective, we should bear in mind that the vast majority of the wealthiest people throughout history have largely been content to just make their money, hoarding it for their own families or spending it on themselves. Most new fortunes were traditionally sunk into country estates, expensive private schools, and perhaps on gaining a few aristocratic titles. Many of the richest people today continue to do something similar, largely retreating from public life once their millions or billions have been made.
As Nadia Asparouhova notes, “the default state of a suddenly wealthy person is to quietly buy the boat or the vineyard in Napa, raise a family, and avoid confronting the power they've been given.” Even the now-famous industrialists of the Gilded Age, like Carnegie or Rockefeller, had to deliberately campaign to persuade their fellow fortune-makers to become philanthropists like them, endowing libraries, universities, and museums. Paying a few million to charity or into a named foundation may now be par for the course for the wealthy with no idea how to spend it, but it was not always thus. Philanthropy had to be normalised first, by those with the imagination and inclination to do so.
Indeed, it was from very similar initiatives amongst a handful of the wealthy that we got much of the technological progress of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Medici were far from the first oligarchs to seize both riches and power, but they certainly stood out both then and today as being among the most devoted to spending their wealth on the arts, encouraging others with similar power and wealth to do the same.
One of the things that once differentiated Britain from the rest of Europe was the much greater early willingness of the nobility, gentry and wealthier merchants to spend their wealth on encouraging inventors. Eventually, when many inventors soon found themselves with fortunes of their own, they tended to refrain from simply becoming mere landed gentry, instead encouraging the next generation of inventors as well. Britain may not have been the only country to have inventors, but it is where innovation most dramatically accelerated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – partly thanks to the philanthropic habits of their major success stories. James Watt made his fortune from steam engines, but he also later supported an innovative pneumatic medical institute to combat tuberculosis – not just financially, but by designing some of its equipment. Watt thereby nurtured the careers of the next generation of innovators, including Thomas Beddoes and Humphry Davy.
Given Elon Musk’s major investments in developing new technologies – Tom Chivers convincingly argues that for all his flaws, he’s been a major force for good in combating climate change – he has almost certainly already nurtured the career of a future Humphry Davy or two.
Philanthropy doesn’t have to be purely charitable, after all. Indeed, investing in risky ventures – even if the returns might be large – is something that a lot of technology-made rich people seem peculiarly willing to do. We would be much worse off if they cared only about preserving their wealth, as it would be much wiser for them to invest in something much more boring (but less world-changing) things like land, bonds, or listed shares.
Of course, many dislike Musk not because of anything he actually does, but because he has become a billionaire in the first place. They are concerned that our economic system can produce any such person at all, able to wield extraordinary influence on a whim (though personally I find it encouraging that so many of the wealthiest people in the world today are entrepreneurs and inventors, rather than just landed aristocrats and magnates’ heirs).
So long as billionaires exist, however – and I don’t think that will change anytime soon – it’s a good thing that Musk and his ilk wish to take some responsibility for their power, and devote their funds to the public good, and even that they wish to be in public life at all. The default alternative, as Asparouhova warns, would be much worse: “The failure mode of today's ascendant wealth class would be a backslide into aristocracy, perpetuating the bloat and disquiet of generational wealth”.