Here’s why we should thank the world’s billionaires

We should be grateful to our Rineharts, Pratts, Forrests, Lowys, Palmers, Packers, Triguboffs, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhars. Just hear me out.

Elon Musk, who was, at the last count, richer than anyone else anywhere ever. Picture: AFP

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Readers old enough to remember 1940s comics will know that Donald (and I refer to Disney’s Duck rather than Melania’s Trump) had a very rich rello called Uncle Scrooge McDuck, who had so much money he kept it in a silo. In coins, a form of currency now almost obsolete.

Uncle Scrooge, named for the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ 1843 novel A Christmas Carol, liked to sit in his silo and throw handfuls of coins into the air “and let it fall down and hit me on the head”.

Rich beyond the dreams of avarice, Uncle Scrooge couldn’t possibly spend it all – and had no interest in sharing his loot. If lucre was indeed filthy he was doing us a favour by keeping it in his bulging, bursting silo. Presumably he, like the current POTUS and all his fellow billionaires and oligarchs, had adroit accountants to relieve him of any concerns about income tax. After all, tax is what other people – fools and wage slaves, in other words – pay to keep society ticking over.

These days money is different (Who needs coins in the era of Bitcoin? Who needs paper money in the credit card age?) but greed is not. We should be grateful to our Rineharts, Pratts, Forrests, Lowys, Palmers, Packers, Triguboffs, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhars. By having the luck to have all that lucre, they’re saving us from its filth. We might think we’re financially rooted by its absence. But if love of money is truly the root of all kinds of evil, as the Good Book tells us (1 Timothy 6:10), the rich are doing us a great kindness by keeping all the evil stuff to themselves.

Billionaire Gina Rinehart.

Which brings us to Elon Musk. Who was, at the last count, richer than anyone else anywhere ever (he has a current net worth of more than $US400 billion, according to Forbes). He’s the latter-day Midas, the alchemistic mystic who can, at a single touch, turn base metal into more gold than is buried at Fort Knox. Unless, perchance, those ingots have been swapped for Bitcoin.

Elon owns just about everything – from an electric car company to a space company and the social media platform X, previously known as Twitter. And he also owned, until recently, the Oval Office and its illustrious incumbent Donald Trump. Until that lucre lovers’ titanic tiff. (Assuming there was a prenup, one anxiously awaits details of their divorce settlement. Who, for example, will get custody of Air Force One, that recent gift to the President from Qatar? Presumably both sides have hired top attorneys).

As the problematic private lives of both Elon and Donald prove, money does not buy happiness – though it certainly pays the deposit. Eight billion of us who are not billionaires can attest it would be a big improvement on poverty. I recall something Kerry Packer told me during his brief incumbency as Australia’s richest person: “Great wealth is a heavy burden – but it’s not a burden I’m anxious to unload.”

It’s a view that I’m sure is echoed by the 161 – yes, 161 – billionaires in Australia in 2025.

A wise person once cynically commented, “If you want to see how little God thinks of money, look at the people He gives it to.” And Seneca, the great philosopher of ancient Rome, agreed: “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more that is the poorer.”