Freude, but not schaden.

Did it catch on fire or something?

We all know capitalism, like as a thing, is broken, right? I'm not an economist and I'm basing that broad statement on the idea that a system in which two or three riches control more wealth than the poorest fifty percent of the country is unsustainable on a fundamental level and will come crashing down at any moment. Wait, wait, where are you going? Don't worry, this one isn't all dreary wealth disparity, I'm mostly going talk about Elon Musk and how he lost $12.6 billion dollars of money in like a twenty-four hour span. I mean, how does that even happen?

And look, I know this is going to sound like schadenfreude, but it's not. That means shameful joy, and there's no shame taking pleasure in the country's richest (and world's second richest) person loosing more money than one hundred and twenty average Americans make in a year. What I'm feeling is the reasonable joy one feels when someone who shouldn't have that much money looses a bunch of it.

Do the Germans have some clever word for that? Der richistfuked, or something?

Space is cool and all, but maybe throw
some money at cancer or climate change?

Anyway, I guess the story is that terrible first quarter earnings--which are business words I definitely understand--from Tesla, combined with the Blue Check thing with Twitter, and the fact that his SpaceX rocket exploded four minutes into its flight on Thursday all combined to drop Musk down a bit according to Bloomberg's billionaire index. Don't worry, he's still the richest United States-ian, but just slightly less so. What's that? What's Bloomberg's billionaire index? Welp, it's just what it sounds like: a list of the who's who of the who's offensively rich. 

If history is any indication, there may come
a day where you don't want to be on that list

It's updated daily and tracks the ultra-wealthy's ups and downs, you know, if you care about such things. Some French guy called Bernard Arnault is the numéro un on the list, but after him is a straight line of seven Americans including Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc. which, great, U-S-A! U-S-A! except when you stop and remember how Americans have to do kickstarters to cover medical expenses. Sorry! I'm Bernie-ing out there, aren't I? And after I said I wouldn't. But I'm not wrong, right? There is such a thing as toxically wealthy.

It's wealth so great that a bad day can cost you twelve billion dollars and you don't even feel it or lose your place on the to guillotine list. If anyone else lost that much in one go, we'd say they were just bad at business and--wait, is Elon Musk bad at business? Because unless there's some secret long game he's playing that involves blowing up spaceships, loosing money on cars, and alienating Twitter users, it kind of seems like he's not so much a business genius as he is just really good at gaming a really bad system.

But what do I know? Everything I learned about business comes from Ducktales:

1. The best way to invest your money is to convert it to gold coins and then swim in it.

2. All dogs are criminals. Never trust them.

3. The real treasure is family. Or something, I mean, treasure is also treasure I suppose.