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My family ran a number of small businesses when I was growing up in Fort McMurray, Alta., so I learned early on that nobody hands an entrepreneur a paycheque. They put their own capital at risk, work brutal hours and live with the real possibility that it might all come to nothing.

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Unfortunately, that is a common result. However, if it works, they build something: jobs, a payroll and a stake in their community. That asymmetry — private risk, uncertain reward — is the engine of every economy worth living in.

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I thought about that when Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. went public last Friday in the largest initial public offering in history, raising roughly US$75 billion at a valuation near US$2 trillion, pushing Musk’s paper net worth past US$1.1 trillion. Some 4,400 SpaceX employees became instant millionaires on the listing.

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You might think the man behind a company that builds reusable rockets, connects remote communities and is reshaping the global auto industry would be grudgingly admired. You would be wrong.

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The reaction from the political left was immediate and uniform. The usual suspects sent out messages of a rigged economy, demands for a wealth tax and that the U.S. federal government is for sale.

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Here at home, one national newspaper ran an opinion piece under the headline, SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him before, later replacing the headline, conceding it did not meet proper editorial standards.

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Properly hate him. Reflect on that. A man builds rockets that land themselves and the instinct is to instruct readers in the etiquette of resentment. The replacement headline — asking whether a new trillionaire is “a bad look for capitalism” — was meant to sound reasonable, but it gives the game away more completely than the first.

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Its premise is that one person’s success is something the entire system must answer for, which is exactly backwards. Getting astonishingly rich by building things people freely choose to buy is not a bad look for capitalism; it is the whole point of it.

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Consider what Musk did. He did not find his US$1 trillion; he created it. SpaceX collapsed the cost of reaching orbit and broke a government-contractor cartel that had grown fat and lazy. Tesla Inc. dragged a century-old industry into the future. A satellite network now connects otherwise non-reachable areas.

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Across his companies, he employs more than 100,000 people and supports a vast supplier base. This is not wealth extracted from a fixed pie. It is a bigger pie and everyone who touched it is better off.

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You may dislike the man, but the dislike is almost always for his politics or his fortune rather than anything he built. That changes nothing about the work.

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It is worth asking what actually drives this negative reaction. Only one part is serious: the worry that concentrated wealth becomes concentrated power, that a trillionaire can buy politicians, platforms and outcomes the rest of us cannot.