Who gave Elon Musk the money to assume political power in America? What backers handed him this position? The answer can be found not in the secret files of conspirators, but in the most prosaic of places, such as the asset allocations of British pensions.
This is a story about investment, and the supreme power of financial markets in the modern world. The roughly £3trn held in British pension funds has to be invested somewhere – indeed, to be safe it has to be invested in lots of places – and one of the most popular places to put the national nest egg is in American stock markets. The same goes for the roughly £450bn in stocks and shares ISAs held by British savers. Our MPs pay into a pension fund (the Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund), more than half of which is invested in “global equities”, which for the most part means shares in American companies.
Hundreds of billions of pounds of British savings are invested in US companies, much of it through passive funds that track stock indexes such as the Nasdaq-100. Tesla, the electric car company from which Elon Musk derives most of his prodigious wealth, is one of the “magnificent seven” companies that dominate these markets, together accounting for almost a quarter of the value of the S&P 500 index of America’s 500 largest publicly traded companies. If your pension wasn’t invested in these stocks, it probably should be – they are the reason your fund manager can keep your pension growing at about the rate of inflation. The biggest UK pension fund, the Universities Superannuation Scheme, invests in a fund in which Tesla is the fifth-largest holding. Tesla’s legal battle with the BBC did not stop the broadcaster’s pension fund investing tens of millions of pounds in the company in the years that followed.
You may be a bien-pensant lib, but you are almost certainly to some extent invested in Elon Musk. Your money, and that of hundreds of millions of other Europeans and Americans who use financial markets to save for retirement, flowed into Tesla as it grew into one of the most valuable companies in the world, giving Musk the largest nominal net worth of anyone in the history of American capitalism. The quiet money behind Elon Musk is you.
Musk’s story is about the supreme power of market confidence. When he became the world’s richest person in January 2021, his company was yet to make an actual profit from selling cars. Add up Tesla’s net income from 2009 to the first quarter of 2021 and it amounts to a loss of about $5.4bn, but by then the market valued the company at more than $800bn. The number of cars actually sold was insignificant in the face of the promise being made to investors – a future of electric, self-driving cars.
The market’s confidence in that promise soared on the night of 5 November, as it became clear that Donald Trump had secured a second term as president – helped by Musk, who had used X, the social media platform he owns, and an estimated $132m of his own money to support the Republican cause. Tesla shares rose in aftermarket trading by around 14 per cent, which translates to an overnight increase in Musk’s net worth of about $22bn.
Trump – who referred to Musk in his victory speech as a “super genius” – has said he would offer Musk a position in his new administration. The role in a yet-to-be-formed “Department of Government Efficiency” may involve cutting large numbers of government jobs. Musk is a friend of the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, whose programme of extreme austerity (in which 70,000 public employees could lost their jobs) he admires. Musk has already told investors that he plans to introduce faster regulation – or remove it – where it impedes the progress of self-driving cars. The huge overnight jump in Musk’s wealth is thanks to market participants seeing his new capacity to make good on this promise, and allocating capital accordingly.
Many of these market participants are you and I, or people who invest on our behalf. People in Western countries are on average living longer, and Western governments are heading ever deeper into debt. There has never been such an abundance of tradeable securities or such demand for them. This is especially true in the US, which far outweighs all other countries as a destination for capital, comprising about 40 per cent of the world’s fixed and equity markets (its share of global GDP is about 26 per cent). America’s retirement assets have risen by around $15trn in the last decade alone. The total capitalisation of US equity markets has risen from $15trn in 2009 to almost $50trn today.
While Europeans may want, for example, better regulation of technology companies, their retirement savings might prefer the less regulated economy of the US. You might have issue with Facebook’s politics, but do you want Mark Zuckerberg to stop delivering the returns in your pension?
If Elon Musk and his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have a unique talent, it is not for engineering or design but for telling these markets a story about the future – selling investors risk in the expectation of reward. His victory over Kamala Harris was a structured trade, a gamble on the value of his equity against future conditions. For him, it has paid off.
[See also: What the Trump presidency could mean for the UK economy]
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