I saw it first on an elevator at work—Elon Musk has been declared to be the first trillionaire, as judged by Forbes and Bloomberg Billionaires Index and other such sources. There are articles written about it and about politicians’ opinions on the matter. It seems to be considered newsworthy.

“Social” media agrees. Unfortunately for my sanity and perspective, I’ve recently let myself backslide into scrolling on FB and Instagram, and I’ve seen memes talk about what Elon Musk could do with these trillion dollars that he now, supposedly, has. A few of these memes seem to conflate him having a trillion dollars of net worth with making a trillion dollars a year. Many of them talk about what he “could do” with that money, or how he “stole” it, or other similar things.

My only respite in this matter is the Atlantic article on the topic, which actually engages with the actual realities behind this news. This article, at least, uses a proper caveat, saying “Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper” (emphasis mine). And it engages directly with the marketing and image that made him a paper trillionaire.

For all the other articles I’ve seen, you get the impression that they actually believe that Elon Musk’s trillionaire status is to be taken at some level of face value. Even if they make a perfunctory caveat (which many don’t even do), they then proceed to talk about this “trillion dollar” number as if it meant a trillion dollars, including this Bloomberg article that uses this as an excuse to talk about how much money a trillion dollars is, even though that’s an amount of money that, again, Elon Musk does not have.

I get it—it’s easier to use the big number to make your point about wealth concentration or tax policy (or even just as an excuse to discuss the bigness of big numbers) than it is to engage critically with what this event actually means.

I do worry—especially from the memes—that some people aren’t in on the joke. While you, the reader of this blog, are too sophisticated to believe this claptrap at any level of depth, I think there are a huge number of people who believe that, at some level, Elon Musk has a trillion dollars. I hope I’m wrong, but this is the impression that I am getting.

And this bothers me, because rankings and net worth calculations of paper billionaires and trillionaires were already bordering on meaningless before this, Elon Musk becoming a paper trillionaire is a whole new level of meaningless. And the real story—which the Atlantic at least engages with—is much more relevant and upsetting than the standard left vs right argument over whether billionaires are good or bad for society.

I’m going to back up a little and start with the basics. There are 23 million millionaires in the United States. That’s a little under 1 in 10 adults. If you are an American, you probably know a millionaire or two socially, even if you don’t realize it.

Of course, most of them don’t have a million dollars in cash in a suitcase somewhere. They also don’t usually have a savings account balance of a million dollars or more. What they have is a million dollars or more in net worth. In theory, this means that, if they sold everything they had, and cashed it out all the way, they’d have a million dollars to put in a suitcase—although, many millionaires, if they actually tried to do this, would sink below a million due to taxes—and they would then also not have a house.

Here, you begin to see that it matters where the million dollars are. Most of these millionaires have most of their net worth in their house. Others have significant chunks of their net worth tied up in retirement accounts, which they can’t cash out early without paying penalties. Some of their net worth hasn’t been taxed yet, and will become subject to tax the minute they try to turn it into cash.

Nevertheless, most millionaires, if they sold and cashed out all their assets, would still have a lot of money to put in their cash suitcase or savings account. The amount they’d lose to taxes or to penalties (or from the work of having to fix up their house and sell it) would only be a moderate ding to the total value of their assets. In the end, they’d have somewhere between 40-70% of their original net worth in the cash suitcase, depending on the specific balance of their assets.

(Of course, it’s probably more useful to have a house than a pile of cash, or a retirement fund that will pay out in retirement rather than a pile of cash now.)

I think people understand this about millionaires, more or less—though I think there are children who think that they have a million dollars in a cash suitcase, and a surprising number of adults who think they have a bank account balance of a million. Sometimes, it seems that other adults don’t have immediate access to this knowledge when they talk about millionaires, but I would wager that most people understand this.

So, you might think, that this applies to billionaires as well. That their “paper wealth” is maybe twice as much as the actual amount of money they would get if they sold everything, three times at a stretch. But, for most billionaires, it doesn’t. For most billionaires, their paper wealth would evaporate immediately.

For most millionaires, their assets are things you can actually sell—a house that someone else will want to buy for around what they think it’s worth, or a retirement fund with stocks that you can sell on the market. For billionaires, the biggest assets are generally controlling stock in the billionaire’s business, and they can’t sell that without crashing the price.

For example, Elon Musk. Most of his “trillion dollars” in “wealth” is his stake in his now publicly-traded company, SpaceX. He owns 42% of the company (4.76 billion shares), and his shares, at the price at which they’re currently trading ($185/share), are worth $880 billion. This one asset, his stake in SpaceX, covers the vast majority of his supposed “trillionaire” status. It’s valued at $880 billion by a mathematical operation you may have heard of: multiplication. If one share costs $185, and he has 4.76 billion shares, they must together be worth $880 billion.

For most people, multiplication is a great way to find out how much your stocks are worth. The current price tells you how much you could get for selling 1 share, but you have 10 shares, so you multiply the price by 10 to see how much money you have. The problem with applying this to Elon Musk is, the “current” price represents orders to buy and sell stock on the actual market, and those orders are for maybe 100 shares, maybe 500 shares, but certainly not 4.76 billion shares.

If he tried to sell all 4.76 billion shares, only the first trickle of them would sell for $185. Stock traders would soon notice what he was doing, and the stock price would immediately crater. Rather than get 50% of his “net worth” in his resulting pile of cash, he’d get peanuts. Less than 10%. Maybe even less than 1%. And honestly, probably some kind of criminal investigation, because he just sold these shares to the public claiming they were valuable, and it’s suspicious to want to get rid of them so soon.

To be clear, this is how most billionaire “net worths” are calculated—large stakes in publicly traded companies, with the value estimated through naive formulas like this. This has no direct connection with how much money SpaceX (or these other companies) make, nor with how much money they have. It instead has to do with how much money somebody is currently willing to pay for a share of SpaceX.

So, now for my opinions. First off, this is completely divorced from reality. Using this kind of math to calculate net worth is useless for all practical purposes. It doesn’t establish how much money someone has. I don’t think it even really establishes how much power someone has—though Musk as leader of SpaceX has real power, I don’t think this way of calculating the magnitude of that power is particularly valid. The numbers that this mathematical technique creates are so disconnected from reality that they only serve as talking points—excuses for politicians to say things that take these numbers way too literally, and a juicy source of huge numbers for Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaire Index to use for their dick measuring contest.

Every time someone makes an argument that seems to hinge around Elon Musk having a trillion dollars, or having access to a trillion dollars, or even having power or wealth proportional to a trillion dollars, I die a little inside, because that number is fake.

Here’s a headline that engages with how fake it is: Each $1 gain in SpaceX stock adds $4.76B to Elon Musk’s net worth. Does that rub the point in enough yet? Hopefully, after Gamestop, we know that market stock prices don’t have to have anything to do with value.

Gamestop demonstrates another principle. For boring stock, their prices tend to be accurate. For stock with a lot of hype, the prices tend to represent the hype. For someone to be a paper trillionaire, which is more likely—that they really own assets that are “worth” that much in terms of their actual ability to make money in the future or any other objective metric? Or that they got really good at the hype game?

To be clear, Elon Musk has done a lot of things to inflate the price of SpaceX. Even though the company has a profitable business in space, most of the “value” in its valuation comes from “AI.” The Nasdaq index recently changed its rules to allow SpaceX and other AI companies to join the index early, meaning that many retirement funds will automatically invest in them in a move that this article at the Guardian calls a “scam” and this article at the New York Times explains how to try to dodge.

Left-wing memes love to claim that billionaires get their vast net worths through crimes. I’m often frustrated by this talking point, because it is probably true in many cases and here are more—but in the memes and arguments I’ve seen, this claim comes with the weirdest “now therefore.” Instead of calling for enforcing anti-trust law, investigating wage theft and pollution, creating new laws and regulations, and generally actually doing something about these crimes, the memes generally cite this as a reason to tax billionaires more. This might or might not be a good policy (I think it depends on the tax), but generally isn’t what we do with criminals.

In this case, however, Musk got his “trillionaire” status partially by lining up retirement funds to buy into his already-inflated company before they normally would have. I would say, on a moral but not legal level, that this amounts to stealing from everybody’s retirement funds. To be clear, he didn’t actually get a trillion dollars from this—as we’ve established, he doesn’t have a trillion dollars—just bragging rights. But getting indexes to lower their standards so that retirement funds invest in your dodgy company is not an honorable way to get bragging rights.

This isn’t an argument for or against taxing billionaires or trillionaires more. This is something to the side of that. This is an argument for not talking about paper billionaires or trillionaires as if they had all that money. This isn’t even a particularly left-wing argument—though I think a left-winger with good principles should be happy with it. I just think multiplying stock prices by number of shares is a particularly stupid way to calculate how much “wealth” someone has, so stupid as to be a meaningless metric for any purpose besides posturing and dick measuring bragging rights.