In 2025, more than two dozen US CEOs received total compensation exceeding $100 million, including a record number above $200 million. I’m guessing that the Elon Musk haters didn’t see that story in their Tik-Tok feeds.

I know that people sincerely believe otherwise, but I have genuinely never understood the notion that a person could be too wealthy, or that someone else’s net worth increases came at my expense. As a child, I lived in a trailer park that is now a Walmart retention basin. Howard Hughes was the Elon Musk of my youth. There was certainly a great deal of income and wealth inequality between Howard Hughes and the Moons—and I was keenly aware of it. But I didn’t hate or envy Hughes; I read everything I could about him.

I don’t know if I was taught this or it was simply a prevailing social attitude at the time, but I never considered income inequality as some permanent state imposed on us by an outside force. Instead, I considered it a very obvious statement of fact that I could either accept or attempt to change. I am not suggesting that I was (or am) better than anyone else, but it simply didn’t cross my mind to complain about people who had more than us – even when their wealth was incomprehensibly greater than ours.

Today I find myself on the other end of that wealth spectrum—as do most Americans. Relative to most of the world, most Americans are the wealthy ones.

Median per-capita income in the US is around $46,000, twice the average in Europe and almost ten times the South American average. The typical American earns more than 100 times the per capita income of someone in South Sudan, where only 5% of the nation has access to electricity.

The World Happiness Report finds that South Sudan “happiness score” (on a 1-10 scale) is 5.1 compared to 6.8 in the US. How can that be? Why isn’t South Sudan a zero? And why isn’t the U.S. a 10?

In a finding that should have surprised no one, researchers in the UK largely blame materialism. Not only are higher levels of materialism correlated with increased levels of unhappiness, but the relationship appears to be causal. That is, we can diminish our happiness by choosing the wrong people to compare ourselves to.

If you live in sub-Saharan Africa and spend a significant portion of your day simply trying not to die, you don’t have the luxury of being saddened by your neighbor’s bigger house or someone else’s fancier vacation photos on social media.

To millions of people around the world, the average American is Elon Musk.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.