Pope Leo XIV got into a wee spat with the $434 billion man, Elon Musk, this week, to the extent that Mr. Musk was forced to resort to Scripture.
In his first wide-ranging interview with the press, conducted by Elise Ann Allen from Crux, Pope Leo was asked about the problem of social and political polarization, which he first associated with a general loss of meaning and value, “a higher sense of what human life is about.”
But he suggested a “couple of other factors” were at work as well. One he described as “very significant” is “the continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive.”
Pope Leo, perhaps thinking of a recent analysis from the Institute of Policy Studies, worried that “C.E.O.s that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving” now are paid “600 times more.”
Trillionaire milestone
The disparity is actually a tad worse than the pope recalled. According to an I.P.S. report, “Executive Excess,” chief executives at the 100 S&P corporations with the lowest worker compensation are earning 632 times more than their employees. The average C.E.O. at one of the “Low-Wage 100” now earns $17.2 million, while the typical worker receives only $35,570 a year.
Looking more broadly at the S&P 500, an AFL-CIO analysis concluded that executives are earning 285 times more than their average workers. (For perspective, the C.E.O.s of Europe’’s leading companies earned 110 times more than the typical E.U. worker in 2023.)
“Yesterday the news [said] that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world,” the pope continued. “What does that mean, and what’s that about?”
What is it about billionaireism or the coming age of trillionaires that worries Pope Leo? The pope’s first concern, of course, is with the souls of the same. “If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble,” he said.
Or as Thomas More might have put it: “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, but for Tesla, Elon? For Tesla?”
Mr. Musk did not take the pope’s gentle reproach lying down. Turning to X, the powerful social media platform that he owns, he reposted a comment that described the church’s fabulous wealth at perhaps $2 trillion, a figure apparently calculated by the value of anything church related like parish schools, museums, hospitals and miscellaneous properties.
The world’s wealthiest person counter-scolded Leo: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3-5). Oh snap.
Perhaps Mr. Musk does not realize that Pope Leo, even as he stands at the top of the global Catholic hierarchy, does not personally own all the properties, art works and brand intangibles that constitute the church’s wealth.
Few of us are ready to sell everything and follow Jesus, but most of us know somewhere in the depths of our being that a life lived only for the accumulation of wealth will not prove a life truly well lived. As the pope says, meaning and value matter. There are ineffables in life that resist a dollar sign.
But the pope was provoked to ponder the meaning and impact of wealth when asked about a corrosive social antipathy at play in the world. That suggests he is also thinking about the practical problems related to unrestrained wealth accumulation.
The “polarization” context of the pope’s comments is important, said David Cloutier, a Catholic moral theologian teaching at the University of Notre Dame. The pope’s fundamental concern in his unintentional confrontation with Mr. Musk is that vast disparities in wealth “inherently bleed over into conflict,” Mr. Cloutier said.
Democracy imperiled?
The pope recognizes, Mr. Cloutier said, that extreme wealth creates political inequalities “that are incompatible with democracy and that ultimately end up in social conflict that isn’t solved at the ballot box.”
It’s a problem that surely predates the Trump administration. It even predates Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision in 2010 that opened the floodgates of political influence buying. But the Trump administration has been especially clear about its willingness to engage in a kind of transactional plutocracy.
Billionaire donors literally share table fellowship with Mr. Trump at the White House, and several of the world’s wealthy known to have the president’s ear, or at least the vice president’s, have expressed increasing skepticism of the value of democratic order. It tends to result in nagging demands for equity and wealth redistribution that they would rather not contend with.
“I think that what we all fear when we talk about the breakdown of democracy is that at the end of the day, our political conflicts will get solved in some other fashion besides who gets the most votes,” he said. Avoiding such outcomes relies on a capacity for producing systemic remedies through compensation and tax codes that protect the common good from extreme accumulation of wealth and political influence.
Ironically, even as Mr. Trump wines and dines figures that herald a new A.I.-driven Gilded Age, the political nostalgia invoked by the president’s Make America Great Again mantra harkens back to a different period. Under President Eisenhower, C.E.O. compensation was typically “only” 20 times average workers’ pay, and mere millionaires were all America had to contend with. The top marginal tax rate, a limiting factor on wealth concentration, was 91 percent. After a parade of substantial tax cuts beginning during the Reagan administration, the current top rate is just 37 percent, and America’s top executives have trawled tax law to reduce tax burdens even further through deferred compensation, stock options and other tax avoidance strategies.
“The ’50s and ’60s were kind of a golden age, at least in terms of a kind of ethos of ‘We’re all in this together economically,’” Mr. Cloutier said. “It wasn’t, of course, that there weren’t rich corporations and corporate executives, and it wasn’t that there weren’t exploited poor people…but that certainly was an age that’s still in our imagination [when] there was a level of responsibility.”
“If you had great power at General Motors or General Electric, you also had great responsibility to take care of your workers in a certain way,” he said. “There was a social consensus that has broken down, that I think Leo, a son of that era of America, is pointing to.”
As a child in Dolton, Ill., Pope Leo experienced the end times of that corporate equity and stability. He grew up in the shadow of U.S. Steel on Chicago’s South Side. He was no doubt an eyewitness to the social and civic degradation that accompanied the former industrial powerhouse’s decades of decline, culminating in the gruesome shutdown of U.S. Steel’s South Works in 1992. That industrial loss threw 20,000 people out of work and left a 600-acre void on the Chicago lakefront.
Creating a world of complete equity has its own problems, Mr. Cloutier said, and Catholic teaching does not seek that outcome. It does, however, maintain that all wealth has to, in the end, be of service to the common good. “When the Gospels or the church Fathers talk about the problem of wealth, it’s not so much that having wealth is a problem,” he said. “It’s the effects of having wealth that you don’t share.”
Among “the underlying issue of riches and the Gospel stories about the danger of riches, the key question that should be asked of Elon Musk or any person who possesses a lot of wealth is what are you doing with it?” Mr. Cloutier said.
Mr. Cloutier recalled the parable of the farmer who achieves a great harvest and decides the best he can do with the accumulated grain is to tear down his old barns and build bigger ones to store it. After storing and stashing his wealth, the rich man receives his admonishment: “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” (Lk 12:16-21).
“The basic principle of Catholic economic ethics is the universal destination of goods,” Mr. Cloutier said, most briefly understood to mean that the goods of creation are intended to be shared by all people. “That teaching is compatible with private property,” he said, “but only to the extent that holders of private property use it for the common good.”
While many may not remember how many union organizers died while he built his empire, Andrew Carnegie’s libraries live on. More contemporary titans of the digital and financial industry, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have devoted their vast wealth to education, health care and more. How Mr. Musk may devote his billions, perhaps even his trillions, to the common good remains unclear, assuming he does not squander his vast wealth on adventures in transhumanism or a luxury space liner to Mars.
How much is too much? That’s a question, according to Mr. Cloutier, that Mr. Musk—and the rest of us—should be asking all the time.
More from America
- What does Catholic Social Teaching say about the economy? It’s more complicated than you think.
- Glaring Inequalities
- All of us have wealth. We just need to notice it.
- Market Assumptions: Pope Francis’ challenge to income inequality
A deeper dive
- Institute of Policy Studies: Executive Excess
- When We Are No Longer Needed: Emerging Elites, Tech Trillionaires and the Decline of Democracy
- Billionaire Clans Spend Nearly $2 BILLION On 2024 Elections
- In Chicago, a Former Steel Mill Looks to Make a Quantum Leap
- CEO earnings in Europe’s top 100 companies: How much do they make?
The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches.
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