Growing up between India and the United States, my parents taught me to value moral and heart-centered living over material and financial achievement. Our family, our community and our faith traditions all reinforced a simple idea: what you accumulate is never the full measure of your life. What matters is how you live, whom you lift and what people are able to say about you when you are gone.
That teaching came back to me in one extraordinary Texas week.
Two tech stories put Austin on the world’s front page within four days. Almost no one paused to notice they were telling the same story from opposite ends.
On June 12, SpaceX went public in the largest IPO in history. By day’s end, the company was worth more than $2 trillion, and Elon Musk became, on paper, the world’s first trillionaire. Four days later, on June 16, a small jet carrying six people crashed near Laredo en route to Austin after reporting mechanical trouble. Five survived. Capital Factory founder Joshua Baer, one of the people most responsible for making Austin a startup city, did not. He was 50.
Two Texas stories. Four days apart.
One measured monetary valuation. The other measured care, contribution and testimony.
Musk’s achievement deserves its due. SpaceX changed the economics of spaceflight. Tesla accelerated the transition to electric vehicles. Starlink brought connectivity to remote regions. These are not small accomplishments. They expanded what many people believe humanity can do.
But achievement is not the same as moral formation. That is where faith traditions become useful. They ask a different question than markets ask. Markets ask: What is this worth? Faith asks: What is this for?
Musk has also become a symbol of a colder public philosophy. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2025, he said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He called it the “empathy exploit” — a warning, he said, against compassion being manipulated. But the sentence traveled because it captured something many people feel growing in public life: the idea that compassion is not a civic strength, but a liability. (Podcasts – Your Podcast Transcripts)
That view deserves scrutiny, especially when voiced by someone whose companies have benefited from tens of billions of dollars in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits. The contradiction is still hard to ignore: the man most associated with auditing government waste also leads companies partly built by government investment.
Then there is Josh Baer.
Baer did not have a global stock ticker. He had a T-shirt that read, “I help people quit jobs,” and a habit of making whoever he spoke with feel like the only person in the room. He built Capital Factory into Texas entrepreneurship’s connective tissue: the first room, the first investor, the first yes, the warm introduction that turned an idea into a company. His philosophy was simple enough to fit on a card: “Plant lots of seeds. Water everyone’s. Repeat.” (LinkedIn)
After his death, the tributes crossed party lines and industries. People did not speak first about his net worth. They spoke about his presence. Josh opened doors. Josh made calls. Josh made Austin feel possible.
That is a different kind of wealth.
We are living through wars of faith, but not only religious faith. We are living through a conflict between what we profess and what we practice.
Musk describes himself as a cultural Christian and is embraced by many who see him as a defender of Western civilization. Baer was rooted in Austin’s Jewish community, though he rarely theologized about it publicly. He simply lived something close to one of Judaism’s highest teachings.
Maimonides described eight levels of tzedakah. The highest is not pity. It is helping someone become self-sufficient through work, partnership, opportunity or support. The highest form of giving is dignity.
And this teaching is not only Jewish. In many Indian traditions, seva is service without needing the spotlight. In Christianity, “by their fruits you shall know them” asks us to look beyond profession into consequence.
For one Texas week, two balance sheets came due.
One showed what markets can make a person worth.
The other showed what a life can become worth to other people.
When we are gone, no one gathers to recite our net worth. They gather to say what our life made possible for them.
Austin should remember that.