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The world may soon have its first trillionaire. Tesla Inc.’s shareholders on Thursday approved a compensation package that would pay Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk $1 trillion dollars over 10 years if the company achieves certain benchmarks, adding to his current $461 billion fortune. Some people have an aversion to billionaires, so I doubt they’re ready for the next level of incomprehensible wealth. Ready or not, trillionaires are coming.“If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire,” pop singer Billie Eilish recently asked during an acceptance speech at the WSJ Magazine Innovator Awards. She was expressing a common sentiment among Generation Z, despite that most of them aspire to billions of their own. “No hate,” she insisted, “but yeah, give your money away, shorties.”Many of them will, eventually, but it’s trickier than it sounds. Billionaires, including Meta Platforms Inc.’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, who was in attendance, typically don’t have a cartoonish pile of cash lying around ready to hand out. They’re rich because they created products, such as Zuckerberg’s Facebook social media platform or Musk’s Tesla electric vehicles, that became wildly popular and made their companies – and their stake in it – wildly valuable.Their wealth is mostly in shares of their companies, the value of which depends on their continued growth, which is never guaranteed. Musk’s new pay package, for example, gives him more Tesla stock rather than cash as the company’s earnings and market value grow. More problematically, these founders can’t sell or give away their shares in any meaningful size without causing the value of the shares to decline, which would hurt all shareholders, including millions of ordinary workers who own stock funds in their retirement accounts.The same goes for most of America’s richest entrepreneurs, including Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison, Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet Inc.’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang. The upside of having their money tied up in stock, though, is that it grows a lot faster than cash when their companies do well.Live EventsBloombergAnd I mean a lot faster. Shares of Oracle, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta grew by more than 20% a year the past decade, including dividends. Tesla and Nvidia grew even faster, by 42% and 76%. At that rate, the leaders of these companies - already the world’s seven richest people - will very likely become trillionaires in the next three to five years. It will take a bit longer if the share prices of their companies grow more slowly in the years ahead or get caught in a down market. But trillionaires are inevitable. To be sure, there is something unsettling about these rapidly expanding fortunes when the top 0.1% already has a larger share of America’s wealth than ever. No doubt, wealth inequality is likely to widen further when the US starts minting trillionaires. But historically the mega rich have always had an outsized slice of the economic pie. When John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, his net worth was roughly 1.5% of the US’s gross domestic product. If today’s technology titans become trillionaires in the next few years, their wealth relative to GDP will be roughly a third of Rockefeller’s, assuming the economy grows by about 5% a year before inflation.In reality, most Americans don’t hate on billionaires. This is the land of celebrated inventors and swashbuckling entrepreneurs that gave us the internet and smart phones and electric cars and now artificial intelligence, to name just a few recent innovations. Would anyone seriously give back those goodies if it meant fewer billionaires? Count me out.I suspect what bothers people is not so much that successful entrepreneurs have unfathomable wealth, but that too many ordinary Americans struggle to get by. The focus should be on lifting the standard of living of everyday Americans rather than beating down billionaires and soon-to-be trillionaires.Sadly, it wouldn’t do much good anyway because America’s affordability problem is far bigger than the money controlled by billionaires can solve. By my estimate, perhaps as many as two-thirds of full time US workers don’t earn enough to sustain a family of four. Paying them a sustainable living wage would cost well more than the money that can plausibly be extracted from billionaires. Instead, we must look to companies – yes, including some of the tech giants controlled by billionaires – that are growing profits in part by suppressing wages. Government can provide incentives for companies to grow workers’ pay alongside earnings. BloombergAmerica’s great tycoons, to their credit, have a long history of giving away their money. Rockefeller and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie gave away most of their fortunes. More recently, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett pledged much of their wealth to philanthropies, as have Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison and Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg News. For those less generous, estate taxes should be rigorously enforced to break up big fortunes over time, not because it will help less fortunate Americans directly, but to prevent power from being concentrated in too few hands, a risk that will grow with the arrival of trillionaires. Prosperity is not a zero-sum proposition. We can celebrate, even nurture, our most talented entrepreneurs while raising everyone else’s standard of living with policies that encourage wider participation in America’s success – a worthy message for entertainers to promote.Add as a Reliable and Trusted News Source Add Now! (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel) Read More News ontrillionaireElon MuskMark Zuckerbergtech giantsrockefelleroracletesla bill gateswagesamerican wages (Catch all the Business News, Breaking News and Latest News Updates on The Economic Times.) Subscribe to The Economic Times Prime and read the ET ePaper online....moreless (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel)Read More News ontrillionaireElon MuskMark Zuckerbergtech giantsrockefelleroracletesla bill gateswagesamerican wages(Catch all the Business News, Breaking News and Latest News Updates on The Economic Times.) 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