OK, so let’s say you work in a company that makes cars. The workers make the cars. Their labour turns into products which the company then sells to make money. The company owner… Does nothing, basically. Management is done by managers, labour is done by labourers. Engineers designs the cars. Artists and marketeers sell them. Sure, maybe the owner is involved in a few tasks here and there, but even if they truly worked 120 hour weeks and obsessed over every little thing, their total contribution, judged as a percentage of the labour involved in making and selling those cars, would infinitesimal. Yes, they can make decisions about what new car to release, what direction to take the company, all of that, but they’re not the only person capable of making those decisions, they’re just the person who is allowed to make those decisions, because they own that privilege and no one else does.

And yet, that owner takes home billions, while the workers struggle to pay rent.

That’s the hoarding. That owner has those billions of dollars because their company sells cars. But they don’t make the cars, or even oversee the people who make the cars, they just… own it.

Now, I’m sure the counterpoint here would be that the workers have to use machines paid for by the owner. Except, the owner didn’t make those machines, they just bought them. Machines that were made with other people’s labour. If labour had access to the capital that the wealthy hoard, they could just start their own factory, sell cars that they make, and keep the profits (ie, a worker owned co-op). The wealthy owner isn’t providing, they’re gatekeeping. By controlling wealth, they control other people’s ability to deploy wealth, which in turn allows them to extract value from other people’s labour.

That’s the difference with something like Norway’s wealth fund. They’re publicly owned. The people of Norway benefit from what the wealth fund does. It’s a public good. But no one benefits from Elon Musk being rich. He didn’t even found Tesla; he paid the founders to give him the right to call himself the founder. This notion that he’s some kind of brilliant genius is a fabrication he invented about himself. He’s just a guy who had enough money to take ownership over the things that other people create. It didn’t take Elon Musk to come up with the idea of a company that makes rockets. We’ve been making rockets for thousands of years. But in a world where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, it requires an Elon Musk to permit people to make rockets, because he controls access to the wealth required to do so.