He may not be personally running a farm. But if much of his wealth is invested as is usually the case for the richest people (no way it's just sitting around as cash), then he's indirectly supporting many productive endeavors. Even if it was all just cash deposited in a bank, it's not doing nothing. Farmers and others need loans, banks need deposits (well ... before QE)
Almost all of his wealth is in stock. Start taking that and it becomes valueless, because things that are legal to steal at any moment are not worth buying.
Right, so his true wealth isn't that liquid ordinarily, and he'd get a lot poorer if people started selling those stocks. His enormous wealth could be just that he's a beneficiary of the 'Stonks go up' stimulus/QE driven world we live in, and Elon Musk might just be one giant malinvestment, to be revealed if the market was actually 'allowed' to fail by the Fed, with an end to artificially cheap credit and cheap margin debt. Or he's truly onto something and he really is that valuable... I know which one I'd pick.
