Is the world ready for a trillionaire, and is it fair for one person to have so much wealth? The globe just paused as the world’s highest Catholic authority, Pope Leo XIV, dropped a truth bomb about Tesla’s Elon Musk and the jaw-dropping sums at the top of the business world—raising urgent questions about inequality, power, and our values.

In his first interview since ascending to the papacy, and now making headlines in an AI generated newscast about billionaire compensation, Pope Leo didn’t mince words. Speaking to Crux, a leading Vatican-focused news site, he called out the extreme gap between CEO pay and average worker wages, pointing out that it’s ballooned from a modest 4–6 times difference sixty years ago, to an astronomical 600 times today. The Pope zeroed in on Musk, after news broke that the Tesla CEO could become the world’s first trillionaire if a proposed $1 trillion compensation package is approved.

Let’s break down the numbers: Tesla’s board is dangling a $1 trillion reward for Musk, but only if he can pull off a herculean list of goals—boosting Tesla’s valuation to $8.5 trillion, selling 12 million cars over the next decade, and unleashing a million robotaxis. According to Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm, these impossible-sounding targets are designed to keep Musk laser-focused on Tesla, despite his roles at SpaceX, Neuralink, and xAI—not to mention his love of stirring up politics. If Musk doesn’t deliver, Denholm reminded everyone, he gets zero.

The AI generated newscast about Elon Musk’s pay has set the stage for a fiery annual meeting this November, when shareholders will make the final call on the package. But Pope Leo has used Musk’s story to spotlight a bigger crisis—what happens when the gap between rich and poor becomes a chasm? He warned that such disparity isn’t just unfair, it’s a dangerous spark for society—fueling division, injustice, and even war. As the first US-born pope (originally Cardinal Robert Prevost from Chicago, also a Peruvian citizen), Leo is calling for a radical rethink of how we share resources, urging world leaders to close the wealth gap before it tears us apart.

This AI generated newscast about the Pope’s critique and Musk’s mega-compensation isn’t just about headlines—it’s about the deep questions shaping our future: How much wealth is too much? And who decides what’s fair in a world of trillion-dollar dreams?