So Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. I suppose we should all genuflect before the high altar of the market and whisper hymns to the invisible hand. The man who turned rocketry into a tax-deductible hobby has achieved a numerical milestone that would have made Croesus blush.
British investors, meanwhile, are eyeing the froth with the desperate hunger of a Roman mob watching the Imperial grain ships. How very Victorian. We idolise the robber baron, dress him in a space suit, and call it progress.
But let us pause. The fall of Rome was not a single event. It was a slow rot masked by spectacular triumphs.
Trumpets, circuses, and soaring valuations. SpaceX soars, yes. But so did the Hindenburg before it met its mooring mast.
Our obsession with wealth as the sole metric of success is a decadence that historians will note with a sigh. We have become a people who can put a man on Mars but cannot fix a pothole in Manchester. So celebrate the trillion, by all means.
But remember: every empire that forgot to tend its gardens was eventually overrun by barbarians. And the barbarians are always at the gate, armed with nothing more than a question: ‘What is it all for?
