Last Friday, SpaceX went public and began offering shares on the NASDAQ. It was the largest IPO in history, which generated a lot of buzz and attention. But one of the more dramatic angles of SpaceX going public concerned Elon Musk, the company's chairman, CEO, and chief technical officer.

Musk already had the highest net worth in the world before SpaceX went public. But after the company priced its shares at $135 and the market quickly began trading them at even higher prices, the roughly 5 billion shares that Musk already owned brought his estimated net worth up to roughly $1.1 trillion—making him the world's first genuine, US dollar-denominated trillionaire.

Predictably, the crossing of this threshold was met with dismay and anger from establishment Democrats, progressives, and leftists of all kinds.

Gavin Newsom pointed to the news as proof that "the system is rigged." AOC and Zohran Mamdani jumped in to push, yet again, for raising taxes on the rich. And Elizabeth Warren made the same point in a video where she implied that the extreme wealth being "held" by Musk and his peers is the cause of all the economic pain everyday Americans are feeling—or, at the very least, the reason why the pain persists.

This progressive narrative is not new. It has been around for a long time and has already been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked.

The eye-catching dollar amounts reported as the net worths of the richest people in the world, like Elon Musk, are not large piles of cash sitting around in bank accounts gathering dust. They are mostly the present value of the companies they own. It is not even possible to tax or confiscate these assets without destroying most or all of the initial value.