Plutocracy Gone Crazy

Realising thatthe disruptive effectof Tesla’s AL-enabled robot Optimus onthejobmarketwas sureto draw theireof lawmakers, Muskwasquickto add that Optimus wouldsoon eradicate globalpoverty,and make top-class medicalcare available to everyone. Tesla shareholders, and acolytes like New York-based financial analyst Dan Ives, whosee Musk asa ‘modernday Albert Einstein,a Thomas Edison,’ supportMusk’s vision

- DEVENDRA SAKSENA

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is slated to get richer. Witha current worth of nearly US$500 billion (roughly Rs 44 lakh crore), Musk has been voted a pay package of US$1 trillion (roughly Rs 88 lakh crore) by Tesla shareholders, over the next ten years, subject to his achieving certain tough targets. To put things in perspective, the Indian budget for 2025-26, which caters to the needs of 145 crore people, was only Rs 50.65 lakh crore (US$575 billion). According to Forbes, the richest Indian, Mukesh Ambani, was the 17th in the list of world’s rich people, and had a net worth of US$109 billion ie., Rs 9.6 lakh crore.

The market capitalisation of Nvidia Corporation, a US company manufacturing graphics processing unit (GPUs), systems onchips (SoCs), and application programming interfaces (APIs), is US$4.57 trillion (Rs.402 lakh crore) ~ slightly more than India’s GDP. Currently, all the world’s ten most valuable companies, have market caps exceeding USS$1 trillion. There has been a quantum increase in the wealth of tech companies, and their owners since 2020; the richest person in 2020 was Jeff Bezos of Amazon with wealth of US$113 billion, and the largest corporate was Apple with a market capitalisation of US$2.25 trillion. Back in 2015, the richest man was Bill Gates, with a worth of US$79.2 billion and Apple had the highest market capitalisation of US$598 billion. Thus, it would appear that the size of tech biggies has skyrocketed over the years, with their top bosses raking in the moolah by the bucketful.

This trend is reflected in India too, though therise in market capitalisation of corporates, and net worth of the rich, has not been so pronounced, probably because we do not have tech companies of a similar gigantic scale. Currently, with a market capitalisation of Rs.20 lakh crore (US$229 billion), Reliance Industries Ltd. is India’s most valuable company; in 2020 the market capitalisation of RIL was Rs 12.6 lakh crore, and in 2015