The world recently minted its first trillionaire, and the inevitable refrain afterward was clear - tax him However, taxing Elon Musk to fund anything chosen by the government is a waste of productivity. Elon’s money is the least valuable thing he owns.
Last year, Nvidia's Jensen Huang — a man not easily impressed by other people's computers — described what happened when xAI built its Colossus supercomputer. Obtaining a hundred thousand GPUs with hardware hitting the floor and training runs in 19 days. Huang called it "superhuman." A project like that, he said, normally takes years of planning before anyone touches a server rack.
That's not money. Plenty of people have money. That's a method: question every requirement, delete every part you can, simplify what's left, then accelerate. It's the method Elon used that made rockets reusable, electric cars inevitable, and satellite internet a thing you can carry in a backpack.
And it has never once been aimed at the biggest, most broken system on Earth - Healthcare.
The smartest companies in America — Amazon, Google, Walmart, CVS — have all marched their MBAs into healthcare and marched them back out again. Those MBAs weren’t Elon Musk though. They didn’t have the power to make the decisions needed, the capital to make the investments needed, or the confidence to follow a completely new path disregarding the current system altogether.
There are innovative models that currently exist in healthcare, like direct primary care. No insurance billing. No copays. No coding department. A flat monthly membership — like the ones Elon already sells for X Premium and Full Self-Driving Teslas. These memberships buy unlimited access to your own doctor. They delete the middlemen and suddenly wholesale medications cost 95% less than retail. Lab work drops just as far. Additionally, there is also a physician-owned surgery center in Oklahoma that posts its prices online at a fraction of what the nonprofit hospital charges down the street. And there are other islands of excellence in healthcare as well.
So here's the right request from Elon. Spend your time on healthcare.
Heck, you don’t even have to do it yourself. Pick one facility. Giga Texas, Starbase, the Fremont factory, dealer's choice. Give us one year and your employees. I'll bring the doctors, the wholesale pharmacy, the flat-fee memberships. We will publish every number in public just like the x algorithm— costs, outcomes, wait times, satisfaction scores — win or lose, for the whole year. This will be an experiment, but from the “experiments” that have already been performed the forecast is pretty clear. Costs will go down and quality will go up.
Now apply that to a workforce of Tesla's size, well over a hundred thousand people. and you're staring at savings deep into the billions per year, recurring, and compounding.
But the employee math is just the appetizer. Decades ago, a General Motors executive famously complained that the company spent more per car on healthcare than on steel. That's still the quiet tax buried in every American product, every paycheck, every job that moved overseas chasing labor that doesn't arrive with a $25,000 insurance bill stapled to it. Healthcare costs are the invisible anchor on American wages — economists have shown for years that premiums eat the raises workers never see. Every dollar deleted from healthcare waste doesn't vanish; it reappears as wages, hiring, and prices that stop insulting people.
Adam Smith called this the invisible hand.
Healthcare has resisted reform for generations partly because we've all accepted the premise that only government can manage something this complex. Education gets the same excuse. But complexity isn't a law of nature — it's a moat, dug by incumbents and maintained at public expense.
Which is why the "tax the trillionaire" crowd has the prescription wrong. Redistributing Musk's fortune into the current bloated government bureaucracy might solve things this month, but next month the problems will all return.
You've spent two decades proving that industries everyone called unfixable were just unquestioned. Healthcare is the last one standing — the biggest, the most broken, and the one whose repair would touch more human lives than everything else in your portfolio combined.
Josh Umbehr, M.D., is a family physician in Wichita, Kansas, a pioneer of the direct primary care model, and founder of Atlas MD.
