NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 14: NY Attorney General Letitia James speaks during a press conference on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at Manhattan Federal Courthouse on February 14, 2025 in New York City. James was joined by Connecticut Attorney General William Tong for a press conference ahead of a scheduled court hearing as they discussed their ongoing lawsuit with 17 other state attorneys general to stop Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing personal data housed in the Treasury Department. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
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Why is Elon Musk so rich? Clown question, right? He started amazing companies.
It all sounds so simple, except that the explanation fails to explain Musk’s individual wealth. A much bigger driver of it is that with SpaceX and Tesla, both were expected to fail.
As CNBC’s James Cramer said in 2010 when Tesla floated its shares, “Tesla is a sell, sell, sell.” Except that if investors had bought, bought, bought 1,000 Tesla shares that day, they would have $5.8 million today.
What you’ve just read is neither a dig at Cramer, nor the investors who passed on Tesla. Cramer and investors broadly were in a very real sense correct about SpaceX and Tesla. Both nearly died more than once due to a lack of investor interest in keeping either alive.
Of course, that’s why Elon Musk is so rich today. When he needed capital the most, interest from capital sources was cruelly slim such that Musk was able to sell fewer shares in each than he would have liked.
Musk is the world’s richest individual not because he started two amazing corporations, but because he started two corporations that investors weren’t much amazed by. They couldn’t see the future that Musk saw. In business, the future is the picture definition of opaque.
Which brings us to the Trump administration and its stance on antitrust. It’s gradually utilizing it less, and that’s wise. See Musk once again. Antitrust implies a vision of the commercial future inside government that doesn’t even exist among the world’s greatest investors.
Take the Administration’s 2025 effort to block HPE’s acquisition of Jupiter Networks. If we ignore that the combination didn’t even make it dominant in the U.S. wireless business networking market (Cisco could claim a 50 percent market share at the time of the DOJ’s enforcement action), and if we ignore that the combination would also face strong competition globally from Huawei, we can’t ignore the conceit about antitrust.
Antitrust presumes that the future will mostly look like the present. Except that particularly in the U.S., it never does. See SpaceX and Tesla yet again.
In a sense the Trump administration has. It ultimately got out of the way so that HPE could purchase Juniper Networks. All is well? Unfortunately, no, and that’s not solely because the Trump administration hasn’t retrieved all its antitrust enforcements.
Instead, it’s because State attorneys general, seemingly eager to keep the spirit of Joe Biden-era antitrust alive, are beginning to challenge combinations (including HPE/Juniper) that federal regulators have already reviewed and settled. Even though Biden exited the 2024 presidential race, and even though his Democratic Party came out the loser in 2024 as Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris, State AGs including Rob Bonta (CA) and Letitia James (NY) are operating as though Harris won, and worse, as though Lina Khan’s (FTC Chair under Biden) antitrust vision remains in place.
Which is unfortunate. It’s not just that antitrust enforcement deprives businesses of the ability to discover a future that is once again opaque, it’s that the restraint implied in antitrust renders businesses sitting ducks, unable to prepare for a future that elected and appointed officials couldn’t possibly divine.
As Barack Obama once observed, elections have consequences. The one in 2024 was a rejection of a wide variety of policies, including the suffocation of corporations with antitrust. State AGs should abide the message of 2024, and retreat from antitrust actions that pretend Biden is still in the White House.