I will never be rich.

Much as I might enjoy a private island and a chalet in Switzerland, I know that is not in my future unless I hit the Powerball jackpot. Journalism is not really the kind of career you pick with visions of wealth planning dancing in your head.

Like most people, I aspire more to keep what I have and to see my bank balance creep up more than skid down. I want to spend less and save more so that someday I can do the reverse. I want to be able to live my life, take care of my family, do things I enjoy, contribute to things that matter to me and pay my way.

Those are the things that compose the American dream the way I learned it from my parents and grandparents.

It is not everyone’s American dream.

For some people, the dream is to buy groceries without using the SNAP card that makes them a target of rolled eyes and heavy sighs. For some, it is finding a job at all, and for others, it is finding a job that pays enough to not have a second job.

Remarkably few Americans realistically dream of rocket ships that will take them to space. Elon Musk does, though. Time’s 2021 Person of the Year is swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck.

Forbes magazine put his Dec. 16 net worth at $247.3 billion, $7.7 billion less than the day before but still $51.7 billion more than Jeff Bezos. If you had all the money between Musk and Bezos, you would be No. 29 on the list of richest people in the world. The one day’s losses would sit you comfortably at No. 349.

Does that staggering wealth really make him worth the place that Time gave him? It’s a position usually accorded to someone for their impact — good or bad — in a particular year. Adolf Hitler had the title in 1938. Donald Trump took it in 2016 after winning the presidency, as did the ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020.

Musk isn’t the first billionaire on the list. Bezos was tapped in 1999 as Amazon.com changed the way people shopped. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook reinvented how people connect, grabbing him the honor in 2010. Bill and Melinda Gates were named for their philanthropy.

But what did Musk do in 2021? His SpaceX did make several ventures this year, but so did Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

We know his personal wealth ballooned from just $25 billion in 2020, and we know that he paid precious little in taxes. A ProPublica investigation showed he paid nothing at all in 2018 and less than $70,000 in 2015 and 2017. When U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren pointed this out on Twitter, he retorted that he will pay more than anyone in history this year. That’s possible, as no one in history has ever made $230 billion in one year.

The publication Insider puts that potential bill at $10 billion, but that’s barely more than that one-day loss I mentioned earlier, so it’s unlikely to sting.

I wouldn’t want to be Musk. I don’t discount a certain brilliance in what he has created and the innovation he has brought to enterprises like Tesla and PayPal. However, I don’t want to occupy a space so out of touch with other people that I think naming my child an incomprehensible string of characters is a good idea.

I am also not cut out to lose billions of dollars in a stock market hiccup. I am the kind of person who hems and haws over two packages of chicken with a 6 cent difference in price. But that lets me understand other people who pay their taxes and shop for groceries with an eye on the bottom line. There are a lot more of them than there are Musks in the world.

No, I will never be rich. At least, not that rich. I’m still buying a Powerball ticket, though.

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