Musk’s monolith: While a student at Columbia University in New York City, I took a course in architecture, and my final paper concerned the ongoing construction of the World Trade Towers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Few know this, but one of the original planning proposals suggested a single 200-story skyscraper, part of which would of course break the cloud cover over the city. This idea was discarded above all because of air traffic consideration and the presence of two major airports, LaGuardia and JFK, in the vicinity. But another concern expressed by several planners was that such a monolithic structure, well over 2,000 feet in height, would be “outside the realm of human imagination.” It might attract a cult following and even be worshipped as the towers of ancient scripture were, witness the Tower of Babel. I mention all this in light of Elon Musk’s achieving (then losing) trillionaire status. It, too, is in its own way outside human imagination, and despite capitalism’s unlimited nature, makes me wish a ceiling existed on human financial worth, precisely to avoid the kind of exaggerated monolith that Musk has become. Like the height of a skyscraper, capitalism should not be infinite, because that very infinitude can create impossible envy and, as a result, unhinge all those in its shadow.