Ben Steverman, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek in February, reflects on how Americans reacted to the wealth of John D. Rockefeller, the world’s first billionaire (main link to Apple News+; Bloomberg subscribers; Internet Archive):

The Rockefellers and other industrialists faced fierce backlash — and politicians in both parties acted on it. In 1903, a Democratic congressman from Indiana proposed “to condemn as a public nuisance and a public peril” anyone worth more than $10 million, with the government confiscating the rest. President Theodore Roosevelt launched a legal assault on the “trusts,” including Standard Oil, and urged an estate tax on “those swollen fortunes which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate.” […]

For rich Americans like the Rockefellers, the transition from the first Gilded Age to the Progressive Era was harrowing. By the early 1900s, Rockefeller was one of the most hated men in America, after muckraking journalists exposed the cutthroat tactics he had deployed building Standard Oil.

Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, is likewise detested. The Rockefellers managed to reform their image by donating vast sums:

The Rockefellers leveraged their fortune in other ways. Saying he wanted his money used “for the benefit of mankind,” Senior gave $540 million to charity in his lifetime, mostly to the Rockefeller Foundation and other grantmaking organizations under his son’s control. Another $500 million went to his family, almost all to Junior, who went on to donate $537 million himself […].

Lists of small Rockefeller donations fill thousands of pages in the archives, while major beneficiaries include the University of Chicago, Spelman College, Rockefeller University, the Acadia and Grand Teton national parks, the Museum of Modern Art and the Met Cloisters museum in uptown Manhattan. Rockefeller grants transformed the social sciences, the study of public health and especially medical research, eradicating diseases and funding several medical schools, including the Peking Union Medical College. The builder of the (for-profit) Rockefeller Center, Junior particularly loved ambitious construction projects, such as the restorations of Colonial Williamsburg, the Palace of Versailles and the cathedral at Reims. Junior also ensured the United Nations would be headquartered in New York by donating the tract of land along the East River where it sits.

Can you imagine the anti-Black-woman Musk donating to a historically Black women’s college? I don’t expect we’ll see such acts of largess from Musk, who has always struck me as anti-intellectual, tasteless, and lacking in joy.