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We need to talk about the trillionaire

Happy Hump Day {{first_name | Toaster}} 🐪 ,

Technology is supposed to solve humanity's biggest problems. We build products to connect people, cure diseases, improve education, accelerate scientific discovery, and make life better. But what if our greatest technological achievement is creating a trillionaire?

Last week, Elon Musk briefly became the world’s first trillionaire, accumulating more wealth than any person in history.

Imagine explaining to someone 100 years ago that we'd have artificial intelligence, reusable rockets, blockchain, and near-instant access to almost any information. Then imagine explaining that hundreds of millions of people would still live in extreme poverty, women-founded startups would still receive roughly 2% of venture capital funding, and one person now holds a fortune so large that most humans can't meaningfully comprehend it. For context:

A million seconds is about 11 days.
A billion seconds is about 31 years.
A trillion seconds is more than 31,000 years.

When the first billionaires emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford), they changed what wealth meant. Before them, fortunes were large but bounded by geography, labour, and physical production. Wealth in the industrial age influenced infrastructure and became tied to systems: oil, steel, railroads, and eventually entire supply chains. It shaped cities, policy, and the structure of daily life.

Now, software, AI, and private space infrastructure are building the digital age. Every investment in technology says something about what we value and incentivize, what we believe the future should look like, who we trust to build it, and which problems attract the largest pools of capital.

The paradox of modern technology is that we've become extraordinarily good at creating value, but haven’t optimized the way that value is distributed. Somehow, we've collectively found billions of dollars to invest in a stainless-steel polygon on wheels, but not enough to fund the people and ideas tackling our most persistent human problems.

It’s worth considering what outcomes our innovation economy is designed to produce. What happens when the units we use to measure success don’t include human impact? Are we directing our brightest minds toward humanity's biggest challenges, or toward building increasingly expensive ways for rich people to commute?

The future of tech won't be defined by whether we create another trillionaire, but instead by whether we use technology to create more opportunity for everyone else.

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