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Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire after his company SpaceX was listed on the NASDAQ. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has raised 75 billion US dollars (£56 billion) ahead of its record-breaking 1.8 trillion US dollar (£1.3 trillion) US stock market debut on Friday as it looks set to become the biggest flotation of all time. Ali Miraj invited listeners on his LBC show to discuss the question: should anyone be allowed to be a trillionaire? Callers Jo from Woking and Joshua from Birmingham got into a heated debate over the topic and Elon Musk's global impact. Listen to the full show on the all-new LBC App: https://app.af.lbc.co.uk/btnc/thenewlbcapp #AliMiraj #ElonMusk #Debate #Money #Finance #Politics #UKpolitics #UK #Science #LBC LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK. Join in the conversation and listen at https://www.lbc.co.uk/ Sign up to LBC’s weekly newsletter here: https://l-bc.co/signup
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Should anyone be allowed to be a trillionaire
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Yes, we're talking about Elon Musk, who is now the world's first trillionaire
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SpaceX listed yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. The shares soared 20% on Friday
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the biggest stock market debut in history, giving Elon Musk's rocket and AI group evaluation
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in excess of 2 trillion, making him the world's first trillionaire. What do you make of all of this
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0345 6060 973, text 84850. So, Joe, a first-time caller in Woking
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Joe, warm welcome to you. Good afternoon. What would you like to say? Thank you, Ali
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I love your show. Thank you. I just wanted to say, no, not everybody, but yes, Elon Musk, definitely
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Why? Because I think he's done more and will do more socially for people
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than any politician or government could ever do. What's he done socially for people
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So, as far as I can tell, he bought Twitter so he could preserve freedom of speech
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Hold the... Yeah, go on. Yeah. And obviously, he attracts a lot of criticism because of that
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He's developing electric, self-driving cars. I foresee that means that women will be able to catch taxis at some point
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without the risk of having some driver like Warboys who goes and drives them to a rich area
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Well, that's actually a really good point, which I should have thought about
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but hadn't from a positive point of view. I was just looking at these cars going around thinking
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this is a bit scary, to be honest, but I suppose we'll all get used to it, but it's a very good point, yeah
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Well, he's also, you've got what, a million people in this country with
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dementia, and he is someone who's going to make the elderly able to still
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be able to get around in some form. Is that via Neuralink, is it
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Jo? I don't know. I don't know enough of the details. Nor do I
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He is championing big ideas that nobody else can fund. He's also going to stop
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China and other countries taking over in space, which we can all be grateful for
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given what happened with John Healy this week. Okay. Joe, hold on the line. Don't go anywhere, because I want to bring in Joshua
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Joshua and Birmingham, good afternoon. Hi, Ali. Well, I mean, look, your current caller and caller
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I think it was the caller but one, both sound like they swallowed the Kool-Aid to me
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But listen, that's their choice. They believe what they want to believe. To my mind, you know, I don't necessarily have a view
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on whether people should be allowed to be trillionaires per se but Elon Musk being a trillionaire a man who is a noted white supremacist in my view based on the evidence that I have available to me the man that has given Nazi
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salutes, the man that caused all sorts of chaos with his failed Doge scheme that nobody seems to
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report on properly. You know, I've listened to LBC for many, many, many, many years, and then
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you know, Simon Marks does some excellent work, but the rest of it is woeful, quite frankly
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on all of the damage that he caused in that very early era of Trump's presidency
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The man is completely malign, completely malign. He's in bed with Vladimir Putin
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He's in bed with all of the most malign people in the world. He wants to get Tommy Robinson and restore Britain into power in the UK
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He wants to get the AFD in power in Germany, which he failed miserably
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The man is a complete and utter menace. Now, you know, the idea that he bought for X to improve freedom of speech is laughable
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And you, Ali, are an utter disgrace for not picking up on that because you know better
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You are a disgrace for not picking up on that. You know fully well better, but you have to please your audience at these hours
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who sound like they haven't got brain cells, quite frankly. No, Joshua, I may be a disgrace according to you
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I'd take exception to that, but you're entitled to your view. It's a free society. And just like X, I believe in free speech
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You're allowed to call me whatever you want within reason. And I'm allowed to say that I completely disagree with you
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And I think you're completely smoking some sort of weird crack, which I don't know what it is
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But anyway, that's fine. It's a free speech world. Joshua, Jo has a different view
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Jo? Yeah, I mean, I think that charming caller could think twice about..
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Address him directly, Jo. Address him directly. Go on. Is it Joshua
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Yeah. Joshua, I think the man is just making things more equal for people myself
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He's just addressing equality issues. Joe, can I come back at you very quickly
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And the thing is, Ali is a very intelligent man. He knows very much better than to allow you to just say that unchallenged
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He isn't making things more equal for people. The man is stoking riots on British streets
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Let's just deal with that particular thing first. He gave a speech at one of those insane yeehaw rallies in London
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saying that we should fight on the streets. He's never done anything other than promote white supremacist ideals
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Now, maybe you don't know what they are. You just talked about Neuralink. You said you didn know what it is So my guess is that you don know the detail about this man josh hold on one second so joe on the point that joshua is making he saying that he trying to talk about immigration well and musk is basically creating about that i talking
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about his his achievements but then joe can you separate the achievements from the fact that
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joshua thinks that he's a white supremacist who's trying to foment division and discord in this
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country which judging by what he said at tommy robinson's marches cannot be really described in
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any other way, including by myself, by the way. Okay, well, I
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haven't actually seen those. I mean, on that particular point, Joshua, I
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genuinely do think that it's incendiary, quite frankly, and people should have closed it down. However
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what do you make of Joe's argument, Joshua, that when it comes to tech
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and advances and everything else, this guy, I mean, he does come up with crackpot schemes that
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no one else believes in, and he actually pulls them off? Well
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look, he bought Tesla, so he didn't create the electric car. He revolutionised it. Come on
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I mean, he made that. Listen, maybe he did. And I'm not disputing these things
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but, you know, there were some amazing medical advancements under Nazi Germany that no one wants to talk about
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And why don't they want to talk about them, Ali? Joshua, let me ask you this then
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Just answer that question for me. Why don't they want to talk about them? I don't know. You tell me
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Well, come on. Because we know because of the evil that they did. Okay, but you cannot discuss
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The thing is, Joshua, you know, Nobody condones what the Nazis did or white supremacists
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But if somebody invents something that saves your mum, you'll probably feel differently about it
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Joe, let me just come back. So I'm a person of color, right, Joe? So I feel when I have a man who's the man that you're sort of hailing
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as a really important guy, you saw pogroms in Belfast this past weekend
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that were stoked up on his platform. The people were going around black people's houses
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knocking on their door and setting them alight. So I am a potential risk
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I'm at risk in this country because of that. Do you understand my concern
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I'm not into speaking about immigration, but I think that you're conflating two things
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You're conflating people who want violence with people who just contribute to society
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Well, I think both things can be true at the same time, and that makes it quite uncomfortable
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Joshua, let me ask you this, though, because you said at the beginning that you're not that bothered about trillionaires per se
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but you're bothered about Musk because you think he's a subversive force. If I zone out for a second and I mean Musk is the latest example but he won be the only one for pretty much for very long I would assume How do you feel about the trillionaire thing more broadly Well yeah I mean when I said I not that bothered
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I just meant in the context of this call. Of course, I'm concerned about wealth inequality
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I'm also, you know, I am a capitalist, don't get me wrong, but I think there should be a, I don't want to say a limit
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because, you know, but I do think we should be thinking much carefully
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as a society about how wealth is created and distributed in a way that does that will stop
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pitchforks at dawn because i'm telling you now that's what's going to happen very very soon
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once white working class people realize that the enemy isn't that person with brown skin
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but it's that guy with all of that green skin then we're going to have problems that they're
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going to have problems you already saw sam altman's house get firebombed the other week
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okay because of people concerns about ai joe joe what do you think about this pitchforks and
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tortures thing because you're right I mean you know whatever one thinks of Elon Musk and I'm not
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his biggest fan I do recognize the advancements that he's made in technology and you have to be
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completely outlandish in your thought I mean I couldn't do I wouldn't have the uh the brain cells
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or the or the chutzpah to do what he's done so he is unique in that sense but do you worry do you
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worry about uh this situation where if you have a a group of trillionaires now developing that we
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will have social unrest on the back of it at some point. No, I think the tech bros need moderation and they need to, I think a lot of them have
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had autism, etc. But I think they need to have some moderating forces around them
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How do we do that? I think it's a learning curve. It's a learning curve where they see what things are needed
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in order to moderate their behavior. Just like, you know, changing the genetics and
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deciding you're going to have a designer baby. These things have to operate in an area
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where people have got morals and ethics. And I think it will happen. And I wouldn't be at all surprised
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if after he has got his, you know, passion for space out of his system
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the money that he has accrued, he decides to put it towards, you know
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poverty, hunger and all of those sorts of things. Who knows? He might be doing it already
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and we just don't know. Okay, you're pretty hopeful. Last word, Joshua? Yeah, I just want to say
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the thing is, I get what Joe's saying, but we've not seen any evidence so far
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that these tech bros are being moderated in any way, shape or form
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They destroyed us with social media, and now that's moving into the world of AI
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I think we've got massive problems ahead. Thank you very much indeed, Joshua and Joe
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for a spirited head-to-head there. Thank you for that really interesting conversation
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Appreciate it
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