The Sin Hidden Inside the War on Elon Musk

Transcript

You know, the headlines this week said Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire after the SpaceX IPO.

And almost immediately, some commentators and politicians reacted as if someone had opened a vault, pulled out a trillion dollars in cash, and stolen it from the poor.

We should slow down right there.

Catholics can ask serious questions about wealth: workers, stewardship, greed, the poor, and the common good. The Church is not afraid of any of that.

But much of what we heard this week was something else wearing the clothes of justice.

It was envy.

And envy is one of those sins that almost never introduces itself honestly.

Nobody says, "I am angry because another man has a good I do not have." Nobody says, "His success makes me feel smaller, so I want it reduced."

Envy usually arrives with better manners. It says, "This is about fairness." It says, "No one should have that much." It says, "Surely something immoral must have happened, because I cannot stand the thought that this good may be legitimately his to steward before God."

Catholicism does not teach that every billionaire is virtuous. Scripture warns the rich severely. A wealthy man can be greedy, proud, unjust, and forget God entirely.

But the opposite error is dangerous too. Wealth is not automatically theft. Ownership is not automatically exploitation. Resentment does not become holy because it borrows the language of justice.

Start with the simple fact almost everyone skips.

A stock valuation is not a bank account.

If the market says a man's shares are worth more today than they were yesterday, that does not mean he woke up with a trillion dollars in checking. It means investors believe the company tied to those shares can produce enormous value.

That value can rise, fall, or disappear. It is tied to a company's future, not a pile of cash sitting in one man's account.

You can criticize the company. You can criticize the man. Catholics should ask whether the good being built is ordered toward the human person. But we should at least tell the truth about what happened.

A company was built through vision, risk, labor, investment, technology, and many workers' contributions. Investors judged it valuable. The shares he already owned became more valuable.

That is not the same thing as stealing food from a hungry child.

The Catholic tradition helps because it refuses the cheap answer on both sides.

The Catechism teaches first that the goods of creation are destined for the whole human race. No one owns anything as if he were God. Private property is legitimate, but it is never absolute. It exists under the higher law of stewardship, justice, charity, and the common good.

Ownership makes a person responsible before God.

The owner is not God. The market is not God. The state is not God. Public authority has real duties, but no human power owns creation the way God owns it.

Every person who holds anything, whether a house, a business, a skill, or a company worth billions, will answer for how he used it.

Envy cannot handle that kind of responsibility. Envy does not really want stewardship. It wants reversal.

The old definition is simple: envy is sorrow at another person's good. Another man's blessing feels like an accusation. If he has more, I feel like I have less. If he succeeds, I feel diminished.

And once a culture becomes envious, builders become suspect simply because they build.

The man who risks, creates, organizes, fails, tries again, hires people, and makes something that did not exist before is treated as if his fruitfulness is a crime.

Then another temptation appears. I do not mean the poor, the worker, or the person genuinely wronged by injustice. Catholics must defend them.

I mean the spiritual temptation to treat another man's success as automatically illegitimate and therefore ours to control. It sees value and wants power over it. It sees fruit and calls the tree immoral.

That is not justice.

Justice gives each person what he is due: the worker his just wage, the poor their dignity and help, the owner his legitimate property, and God the final judgment over it all.

Envy hates that another person is due anything at all.

So Catholics should be careful with the word fairness. Sometimes it means justice for the weak. Sometimes it means comparison baptized as virtue.

A Catholic response to Elon Musk, or any extremely wealthy man, should not be flattery.

We do not need to canonize entrepreneurs. SpaceX can build rockets. It cannot save the soul.

But we also do not need to treat building as suspicious and fruitfulness as immoral.

A man who owns a valuable company should be asked hard Catholic questions.

Are you serving the common good? Are you treating workers justly? Are you using wealth as a steward before God? Are you humble before the Lord, or are you beginning to believe the myth of your own divinity?

Those are Catholic questions.

But the critic has questions to answer too.

Do I want the poor helped and wrongs corrected, or do I mostly want the successful humiliated?

Do I want goods ordered rightly, or do I want another man's good destroyed because his existence bothers me?

That examination matters, because envy shrinks the soul.

It makes gratitude harder. It trains us to see every blessing as an insult. It turns another man's success into our personal injury.

And a culture that calls envy justice becomes very good at tearing things down and very bad at handing anything on.

The Catholic answer is better.

Build what is good. Use what you have as a steward. Defend the poor. Refuse greed and resentment together.

And when another man receives some great worldly good, examine the first movement of your heart.

If it is concern for justice, bring it before God and let it become charity.

If it is envy, name it before it names itself fairness.

Because envy does not become holy when it learns political language.

It remains what it always was: sadness at another man's good, and a refusal to stand before the God Who will judge every gift, every talent, every possession, and every injustice.

Sources: Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2402 through 2404; traditional Catholic moral teaching on envy as sorrow at another's good; current public reporting on the SpaceX IPO and criticism of Elon Musk's resulting valuation.