Article

Character

Ethics

Generosity

Leading

26 November 2025

5 min read

Elon Musk and the trillion-dollar question

What happens when generosity becomes the ultimate power move?

Sam Tomlin

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

Musk eclipsing the moon.

Musk Foundation.

Human beings like to mark the first time things are done. The first moon landing has been immortalized; Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic; my football geekiness reminds me the first £1m football transfer was Trevor Francis from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest.

We leant recently that Elon Musk could be the first person to earn a $1 trillion remuneration package. It is not quite that simple, however, with Tesla shareholders only granting this if certain conditions are met over the course of a number of years, but the media like a good headline and seemingly this will contribute another ‘first’ for the history books. Reports suggest that Musk actually lives a fairly modest life (for a billionaire!) and he seems more driven by political and moral questions than securing a lavish lifestyle for its own sake, whether you agree with him or not.

Questions have arisen about what could be done with $1 trillion. Apparently, this could buy every single car sold in the USA in a year, 175 billion big macs or if you are more philanthropically minded, you could surely make a dent in world hunger or global debt. If we are waiting for a big give-away from Musk, we might be waiting a while, however. In 2022 he said that it is ‘very hard to give away money effectively’ if you want tangible outcomes rather than the optics of doing good.

What does Christian teaching have to say about excessive wealth or wealth more generally? There are over 2,000 verses in the Bible about wealth and a significant amount of Jesus’ teachings concern money.

In his book Money and Power, theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul suggests Christians tend to look at wealth through the lens of their society. In the West this means we look at it through economic systems. Individual action achieves little by itself so we look for systems to fix our problems, be they capitalism, Marxism, collectivism, or whatever: ‘All I have to do is campaign for socialism or conservatism, and as soon as society's problems are solved, I will be just and virtuous – effortlessly.’ As well as absolving individuals of their responsibility, this also fails to capture a key aspect of the Bible’s view of money: its personal character. Looking at wealth through economic systems assumes money is just a ‘thing’ to be used for good or bad and something about which we can approach with cool neutrality. The name Jesus gives to wealth is ‘Mammon,’ which he contrasts with God: you must choose to serve one or the other.

Mammon is described as an agent or power from which we need to be liberated. Some Christians argue that the liberation of salvation allows them to hold onto wealth because they can possess it without being possessed. This is the standard view of wealth in the Western church. Christians have largely lost any collective sense that accumulating wealth might be a problem probably because we live in a society where our economic model relies on our greed and consumption.

Why does Jesus say we have to choose between serving God and mammon? Quite simply because it cuts to the heart of where we put our trust. The repeated question of Bible is: where do you put your trust? In the chariots of princes, in alliances with other nations, in the health of your bank balance, or in God? Money provides the opportunity to direct the course of our lives to a significant degree. Most Christians in the West will sing about fully relying on God when in reality we put our trust in money which allows us to determine where we live, the friends we have, the very trajectory of our lives.

This, I suggest, is the essence of the Bible’s teaching on wealth or Mammon. Even before arguments based on giving to alleviate poverty (which are far from unimportant) the question of wealth is intrinsically linked to belief that God can be trusted or not. It is not impossible to be wealthy and faithfully follow God. It is also possible to be materially poor and far from God. It is a smaller step, however, to faithfulness and the Kingdom of God from a simple life than from one of abundance and control that money gives you. When you have little, you have little other choice than to rely on God. Trust and lack of human control are literally built into the fabric of your everyday life in a way that is alien for those who live with more than they need. Learning to trust God therefore will come more naturally as it is a pattern that is familiar.

This is not to romanticise poverty. I am a Salvation Army officer and see the crushing reality of debt, addiction and need on a regular basis. William Booth, co-founder of this Christian tradition once said, “It is impossible to comfort men's hearts with the love of God when their feet are perishing with cold.”

In light of this, there is an act which strips the power of money more than anything else according to Christian teaching, and that is giving. It is more blessed to give than receive, says Jesus. The reason this is the case is the same for anything that can take control of our lives, be it sex, power, status or whatever. By giving we show Mammon its rightful place: service of God and humanity. If we are prepared to give something away it does not have power over us. This is why Christians consistently give portions of their income away to their church; on top of this many give to charities and/or store a pot to give away spontaneously as God leads. While it is not mandated for all, a number of notable Christian figures in history have felt a call to give the majority of their wealth away as a sign of their own freedom: St Francis, Melania and Pipanius, Leo Tolstoy to name but a few. Giving is good for the soul in Christian teaching.

I am not an economist and don’t claim expertise on the efficiency of grand systems to alleviate the world’s problems. Despite the inherent unease at the prospect of such vast inequality represented by Musk, simply projecting all of society’s ills onto others absolves us of our complicity in inequality. From a Christian perspective maybe Musk and any of us who store up more than we need in barns as Jesus puts it, can be reminded that giving robs wealth of its tendency to ensnare and control, and this freedom can be enjoyed right now. As Paul reminds the Christians in Galatia: ‘It is for freedom you have been set free, do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery,’ by which Mammon and other distractions long to trap us.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.