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Elon Musk became a trillionaire today.

It’s hard to comprehend one person having control of that many resources, conjuring images of a dragon hoarding its pile of gold while the villagers starve.

When people hear about the ultra-wealthy, the first reaction is usually moral. If one person has more, everyone else must have less.

It’s an intuitive thought. It’s also incorrect.

David Foster Wallace’s famous “This Is Water” speech was about the danger of our unexamined assumptions. The young fish doesn’t know what water is because that’s what he’s always existed within. The most powerful ideas shaping us are often the ones we never even notice.

I think wealth is one of those things.

Many people carry around an implicit model of wealth as a fixed pile of stuff. If someone gains a larger share of the pile, everyone else necessarily gets a smaller one.

The mistake begins with treating wealth and money as the same thing.

They aren’t.

Wealth is the actual stuff people want: food, housing, time, medicine, transportation, entertainment. Money is a claim on that wealth.

The reason this distinction matters is that wealth itself is not fixed.

Imagine a parent who wants to give their child access to the world’s best knowledge. A century ago, that meant hiring tutors, buying expensive books, and sending them to elite schools. Today, an internet connection gives access to lectures, tutorials, and libraries of information that would have been unavailable to the richest families in history.

No money changed hands. Wealth was created.

If wealth were fixed, then the fact that today’s richest people control more resources than ever would necessarily imply that everyone else is poorer than they were a hundred years ago.

The opposite is true.

Ordinary people have access to technologies and conveniences that would have seemed miraculous to kings. We carry instant communication devices in our pockets. We can travel across continents in hours. We can cure diseases that were once death sentences.

The inventors of life-saving vaccines may become rich, but society becomes wealthier. Jeff Bezos may have become a billionaire, but I can tap a piece of glass and have any product I desire magically appear on my doorstep in 48 hours. Wealth is what people want, and I want time and convenience. Amazon made Bezos rich, but it also made me and millions of people wealthier.

That’s why extreme fortunes are worth thinking about. The important question isn’t, “How did one person accumulate so much money?” The better question is, “What was created in the process?”

If your default assumption is that every large fortune exists because wealth was taken rather than created, you’ll miss one of the most important forces shaping the modern world.

The companies that become enormously valuable do so because millions of people voluntarily get value from their products. Cars, software, medicines, smartphones, search engines, payment systems, and countless other innovations create value at extraordinary scale.

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Elon became a trillionaire today.

The number is mind bending.

But what interests me most is the system underneath it. Somewhere a young builder will see that headline and decide to create something ambitious.

They’ll want to build something useful enough that people will voluntarily choose to use what they’ve built.

That’s how wealth is created, not stolen.

And when wealth is created, the rewards don’t accrue only to the founder. They accrue to everyone whose life becomes a little easier, a little healthier, a little safer, or a little more convenient.

That’s a future worth rooting for.