Voices: A Christian response to trillionaires

When the news first broke about Elon Musk being the first person to have a personal wealth valued at a trillion dollars, the reactions came quickly.

As many people have noted, this doesn’t mean Musk is sitting on a giant pile of gold coins, backstroking his way through bullion and emeralds. But the emergence of the first trillionaire in the modern world raises important questions for Christians to ask about the nature of wealth, and particularly, whether being a trillionaire is a good thing to be.

To see this, we must start by asking what it means to be the kind of person God means for us to be. And traditionally for Christians, that’s involved certain characteristics we call the fruits of the Spirit, or in different corners, virtues. The virtues cover a wide range of aspects of being a moral person—that we are just, prudent, modest, courageous, patient, generous, and more.

But when we come to the questions of generating great wealth, these aren’t the virtues usually mentioned. What is routinely praised here is not their kindness or justice, but their ingenuity, industry, and thrift.

Musk, the argument goes, achieved what he did through working hard, making shrewd investments, and being smarter than his competitors. We don’t need to interrogate these particular claims regarding Musk, because, as we will see, whether he is smart, hardworking, or shrewd is beside the point.

Modern virtues

It’s worth noting these virtues of ingenuity, industry, and thrift are distinctly modern virtues, first emerging in the 1600s. What made them different from earlier classic virtues like generosity, patience, or truthfulness was these newcomers weren’t descriptive of a person’s character, but virtues that made a person a successful worker.

Being industrious, for example, doesn’t necessarily make you a good neighbor or parent. Being ingenious has a little more range but is still pretty specific to problem-solving situations.

Virtues like prudence, love, patience, by contrast, are universally features of what you are. Managing a household’s finances justly in a way that enables generosity? That’s as old as Scripture. But being frugal as a morally good character trait? That’s an entirely modern invention.

This isn’t to say there’s no reason to be industrious or ingenious, just that there’s no reason to connect it to generating wealth.

A person can and should be creative and hardworking on all kinds of things, particularly when it doesn’t benefit us financially. But defending wealth because people have been industrious or ingenious doesn’t really get at the core question of whether great wealth is good for us.

Working hard with the body and mind are inherently good for people to do, and the fact societies sometimes reward that is beside the point. But wonderful ideas and hardworking people don’t get wealthy all the time. That wealth sometimes follows hard work is a function of what societies value, but not necessarily what is good.

Against trillionaire-dom

Now that we see industriousness and ingenuity can’t stand on their own, we can see what Scripture wants to put before us.

The fact we can name Abraham and Job as examples of extremely wealthy people but also virtuous should clue us in that perhaps these are exceptions to the rule. For the vast majority of the time, when great wealth is mentioned in Scripture, being extremely wealthy is explicitly not the kind of thing you want to be.

The whole books of James and Amos, both versions of the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of Jesus, the Proverbs, and literally any prophet in the Old Testament—all warn against wealth as a real challenge for the people of God. You don’t even have to go as hard as James does to make the point he makes:

“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days.

“Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you” (James 5:1-6).

Notably, James couldn’t care less about defenses of industry and ingenuity. James is just rehearsing the prophets here, who say the same thing: to have excessive wealth is a sign something has gone wrong. For James, it’s that someone hasn’t been paid. In the prophets, it’s because someone used unjust weights.

For the medieval church, excessive wealth happens because they’ve forgotten their obligations to the public welfare. Wealth should be in social circulation, not accumulating and stagnating like a smelly cistern, as Basil the Great phrased it.

Two lessons

Scripture and earlier Christians offer us two important lessons here.

The first and most bracing lesson is this: if a person wasn’t just and generous, it doesn’t matter how hard they worked. If a person wasn’t prudent or kind, or spent their money in self-serving kinds of ways, it didn’t matter how ingenious they were.

When Jesus said it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man into the kingdom of heaven, Jesus is acknowledging the straightforward notion that wealth is, throughout Scripture, an obstacle and difficulty to loving and doing the right things, particularly when they don’t benefit us financially.

The second lesson is this: In the ancient world—in Israel, in Rome, up through the medieval world—when a person came into great wealth, they were expected—nay—obligated—to use it for public benefit.

Castles were enormous not because they were private residences, but because hundreds of people lived and worked in them.

Nobles funded great public works and underwrote public goods because it was generally understood they did not exist in a vacuum, and certainly not by their genius and singular creativity. Whatever the world gave was meant to be shared, not focused into one instance of spectacle that inspired other people to have the same.

The case against being a trillionaire doesn’t depend on whether Musk is a good person or not. The real case against the trillionaire is quite simple: By Scripture’s lights, the presence of a great accumulations of wealth is the sign of a corrupted culture that has declared excess wealth is not only admirable but justified.

To paraphrase Basil the Great, the goods of the world are meant to be shared, to circulate like water. When they aren’t, you have an algae-ridden pool, reflecting our opulence back at us.

Myles Werntz is director of Baptist Studies in Abilene Christian University’s Graduate School of Theology. This article is adapted from his Substack post titled “It’s Not Just *This* Trillionaire: It’s Trillionaire-dom.” The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.