Billie Eilish Issues a Bold Wake-Up Call to Elon Musk as He Nears Trillionaire Status

Billie Eilish is not done poking the richest guys in the room. After taking a public swipe at billionaires during her WSJ Innovator Awards speech (with Mark Zuckerberg sitting right there), she just aimed straight at Elon Musk, who, depending on how Tesla performs, could be on a glide path to trillionaire territory. Subtle? Not even a little.

Eilish shared a post from the My Voice, My Choice campaign on Instagram, which lays out what someone with that level of money could actually do. Then she added her own caption, which did not mince words about Musk.

'pathetic' and 'coward'

Why she is going at him now

The timing is the point. Tesla shareholders recently approved a deal tied to Musk’s compensation, and if Tesla hits big financial targets over the next decade, USA Today notes he could end up owning about a quarter of the company. In that scenario, the company is framed at a potential $8.5 trillion valuation, which is how you get to people tossing around the word 'trillionaire' next to his name.

The pitch: what that kind of money could do

The My Voice, My Choice slides Billie shared are basically a reality check on scale. Their argument: if someone amasses that much wealth, the humanitarian upside should be massive. They point to these rough yardsticks:

• $40 billion per year to fight world hunger, sustained for 10 years
• $10 billion per year to vaccinate 140 million newborn babies annually for the next 100 years
• $53.2 billion to rebuild Gaza

It is a dramatic way of saying: this is what the zeroes could actually buy.

So what does Musk spend on, and how does he give?

Publicly, Musk likes to say he lives pretty lean. But he has had some heavy-spend eras: reports have tied him to a ranch purchase around the $100 million mark, a handful of distinctive vehicles, and multiple private jets. Minimalist, but make it major.

On the philanthropy side, the record is messy and heavily debated. Per BBC coverage and New York Times reporting, the Musk Foundation has given via stock donations and pledged millions to various causes, but critics point out that a lot of money has been routed into donor-advised funds. Translation: the cash gets an immediate tax benefit, stays under the donor’s control, and there is no deadline to actually move it to charities. That setup is legal and common, but it is also why you hear the 'self-serving' label thrown around.

Musk’s counter is basically: my companies are the philanthropy. He argues SpaceX and Neuralink exist to push humanity forward, which in his view is the real long-term good.

The bottom line

Billie Eilish sees a would-be trillionaire and is saying, loudly, that the moral math should change at that level. Whether you think that call-out is fair probably depends on how you view 'impact' — writing checks to immediate crises vs. funding moonshot tech and calling it a day. Where do you land on that?