Elon Musk doesn’t have $850 billion.
Not even close.
He’s cash poor (kind of lol)
Almost his entire net worth is $TSLA stock, numbers on a screen.
The ONLY way for him to turn those magical numbers into real, spendable money is to sell his shares.
And when he sells, someone has to buy.
That someone is almost always a retail investor, a regular person.
This is the mechanism: he dumps, they absorb.
He gets real dollars, they get an overvalued asset that was conjured from nothing.
Every time a billionaire CEO cashes out, they’re not pulling money from a vault.
They’re finding the next person willing to pay an inflated price for shares that were created out of thin air.
Elon isn’t the only one tho.
Bezos does it. Zuckerberg does it. Every CEO sitting on massive equity in an overvalued company does it.
Their wealth only becomes real when someone else agrees to buy it.