By Theresa Rézeau
When Elon Musk's estimated wealth crossed one trillion dollars, I found myself thinking not of a contemporary entrepreneur, but of a painting made almost five centuries ago.
Two men stand before us in expensive clothes. Between them are objects associated with knowledge, navigation, mathematics, music and the attempt to understand the heavens. They appear composed and prosperous, surrounded by the instruments of a world expanding around them. Across the floor at their feet lies something altogether stranger.
Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1497/98–1543), the German-born artist who became one of the great portraitists of the English Tudor court, painted The Ambassadors in 1533. The monumental double portrait, now in the National Gallery in London, depicts Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to England, and Georges de Selve, a French bishop and diplomat.
Dinteville stands on the left in sumptuous clothing, his hand resting near a dagger. De Selve leans against the upper shelf in darker, more restrained dress. Between them Holbein assembled an extraordinary inventory of sixteenth-century knowledge: celestial and terrestrial globes, mathematical and astronomical instruments, books, a lute and other objects associated with learning and measurement. The precision of their arrangement gives the impression of a world being examined, ordered and understood.
Europe in 1533 was experiencing profound religious, political and intellectual upheaval. New geographical knowledge was changing European conceptions of the world. Astronomy and mathematics were expanding humanity's capacity to measure it. Religious conflict was fracturing old certainties. Dinteville himself was in England during the period surrounding Henry VIII's break with Rome.
Holbein gives us two men surrounded by instruments designed to impose order upon an uncertain world. Nearly five centuries later, our instruments have changed, but the desire to measure has not.
We measure markets by the second. Companies acquire valuations larger than the economies of some nations. Algorithms process quantities of information that would have been unimaginable even a generation ago. Satellites circle the Earth. Artificial intelligence can generate language and images. Private companies build rockets intended to carry human beings beyond the planet.
We have also become extraordinarily precise in our measurement of wealth.
A trillion dollars is almost impossible to imagine intuitively. Write it numerically and the abstraction becomes stranger still:
$1,000,000,000,000.
Whether rulers such as Augustus or Mansa Musa possessed wealth equivalent to such a fortune cannot be established with meaningful precision. Their power belonged to economic systems in which wealth could mean control of territory, taxation, labour, armies, mines or trade routes. Attempts to translate those forms of power into contemporary dollars inevitably become speculative.
What is distinctively modern is not simply the existence of extraordinary wealth, but our confidence that we can calculate it. A fortune can appear beside a person's name on a screen, rise by billions as markets move, fall again and be recalculated almost instantly. We have developed extraordinarily sophisticated ways of assigning numbers to ownership and calling the result value.
Holbein would have understood the fascination with measurement. The objects between his ambassadors belong to a civilisation increasingly determined to locate itself. The celestial globe looks upward. The terrestrial globe looks outward. Mathematical instruments divide time and space. Books preserve knowledge. Every object suggests that the world can be examined, calculated and made intelligible.
Yet evidence of imperfection sits among these instruments. One of the lute's strings is broken. The detail is small, but in a painting so carefully constructed it is difficult to ignore. Harmony and disruption occupy the same shelf.
Across the foreground, another object interferes with the order Holbein has created. Viewed directly, the pale, elongated form barely resembles anything recognisable. It stretches diagonally across the floor and appears almost like a mistake in a painting whose technical control is extraordinary.
It is not a mistake but an anamorphic skull, deliberately distorted so that it becomes recognisable only when viewed from a particular angle. From the conventional position it resists us; change your position and death becomes visible. The painting changes because the viewer does.
That manipulation of perspective makes The Ambassadors an extraordinary image through which to consider the arrival of the trillion-dollar fortune.
The interesting question is not whether Elon Musk deserves admiration or criticism, nor whether any individual should possess such extraordinary wealth. Those questions belong to politics, economics and ethics, and reasonable people will answer them differently. The more revealing question is what the number tells us about ourselves.
Every civilisation rewards what it believes can shape its future. Agricultural societies concentrated power around land. Industrialisation created enormous fortunes through factories, railways, oil and manufacturing. Finance produced another architecture of wealth. Our age increasingly assigns extraordinary value to technology, data, artificial intelligence, digital networks and the possibility of extending human activity beyond Earth.
Musk's fortune exists within that transformation. The companies associated with him operate in industries that have become central to contemporary ideas of progress: electric vehicles, rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence and digital communication. Markets are therefore doing more than pricing companies. They are placing enormous financial value on particular visions of the future.
The ambassadors in Holbein's painting inhabited a civilisation similarly fascinated by expanding horizons. Their instruments speak of navigation, astronomy, mathematics and discovery. They stand among the technologies through which their own century attempted to understand what might come next, at a moment when established religious, geographical and political certainties were under pressure.
But Holbein does not allow achievement to occupy the entire canvas. The distorted skull intrudes upon the magnificent display without cancelling its significance.
It does not tell us that the globes are worthless. It does not mock knowledge or condemn ambition. Nor does it suggest that exploration, scholarship, wealth or political influence become meaningless because human beings eventually die. That would reduce a complicated painting to a simple warning about mortality.
Instead, Holbein allows human achievement to matter while reminding us that it remains temporary. The tension between those realities is more interesting than choosing between them.
A trillion-dollar fortune can represent astonishing economic power. It can finance companies, research, infrastructure and technological experimentation on a scale unavailable to almost anyone else. It can also become a symbol onto which societies project admiration, resentment, aspiration and anxiety. The number itself, however, cannot tell us what the fortune means.
Numbers are excellent at measuring quantity but less capable of measuring consequence. A market can tell us what investors believe a company is worth today. It cannot tell us what that company will mean to civilisation in a century. A ranking can tell us who possesses the greatest estimated fortune. It cannot tell us which human contribution will endure longest.
The contradiction is already present in Holbein's painting. He filled it with instruments of measurement while placing at its feet something that exposes the limits of what measurement can tell us.
That contradiction becomes even more striking when we consider how obsessively contemporary culture records success. Wealth rankings are updated. Followers are counted. Companies are valued. Influence is quantified. Productivity is measured. Attention becomes data. We have become exceptionally good at producing numbers for things earlier generations could only approximate.
Yet measurement can quietly become confused with meaning. The largest number begins to look like the greatest achievement. The most visible person appears to be the most consequential. Market value begins to resemble human value, even though the two have never been the same thing.
Holbein interrupts that temptation through perspective.
From one position, The Ambassadors is a magnificent portrait of accomplishment. Two important men stand surrounded by the intellectual instruments of their age. Their clothing announces status, their possessions announce education and their posture projects worldly authority.
Once the distorted form is recognised, however, we cannot return innocently to the first version of the painting. The globes are still there. The books remain. The men remain powerful. The fabrics remain luxurious. Nothing has disappeared, but everything now exists in a different relationship.
This is not an argument against ambition. Civilisation depends upon people willing to attempt things that appear unreasonable to everyone else. Exploration, invention, scholarship and entrepreneurship all require some refusal to accept the boundaries of the present.
The more difficult question arrives after achievement.
A fortune of one trillion dollars invites fascination because its scale appears almost superhuman. But no amount of wealth removes its owner from the oldest conditions of human existence. Time continues. Bodies age. Reputations change. Technologies become obsolete. Empires contract. Companies disappear or transform. The future judges the past according to standards the past cannot control.
Five centuries have passed since Holbein painted Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve. The diplomatic crises that occupied their days are now subjects for historians. The objects that represented sophisticated contemporary knowledge belong behind museum glass. Their clothes no longer signify immediate political authority to the crowds who pass before them.
Yet people still stop before the painting.
They look at the instruments, examine the fabrics and study the faces. From directly in front of Holbein's painting, we see the ambassadors, their knowledge and everything their world taught them to value.
Then we move.
The distortion resolves itself.
It is a skull.
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