Co-Founder & Managing Director, SIG (Susquehanna)
Jeff Yass: Elon Musk Being a Trillionaire Is a Great Sign for the American Economy (11 min) | 06-...
Steve Moore and investor Jeff Yass celebrate the triumphs of American capitalism, specifically highlighting the massive wealth ...
About Jeff Yass
Jeff Yass, co-founder and managing director of Susquehanna International Group, made several public appearances in May 2026 to advocate for school choice initiatives. In a May 30 interview on the "More Money Show," Yass argued that public school systems are failing students and that teacher unions prioritize political power over education. He said that "there really is no Democratic Party. There's just the teachers union and they hire the Democratic Party." Yass proposed a model in which per-pupil funding would be split, with half allocated as a school voucher and the other half placed in a savings account for each child, which he said would give graduates $300,000 for college or a down payment. On May 11, Yass received the Alexander Hamilton Award from the Manhattan Institute. In his acceptance speech, he praised Texas Governor Greg Abbott for "the largest victory in school choice history" and thanked President Trump for enacting a national school choice proposal. Yass claimed that New York City spends over $42,000 per child per year with poor academic outcomes, stating that "our public education system is not about education. It is a jobs program for the teachers union." He said he supports any politician, Democrat or Republican, who fights for school choice, and added, "I don't believe we can change Harvard's ways, but I certainly look forward to putting it out of business."
Transcript (35 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Narrator0:00
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Listen all you New Yorkers. Sleepy? Taxi? I'll take the Williamsburg Bridge. This is the 77WABC mini cast.
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Host1:11
We are back, folks. This is the More Money Show. Thank you so much for joining this weekend. My next guest is Jeff Yass. Jeff has been Jeff and I have been friends for I don't know, 25 years or so. He is the founder of Susquehanna Capital. He's been incredibly successful. He and his wife are very involved in school choice and have done amazing things to expand school opportunities for people around the country. So, thank you, Jeff, for everything you Janine have done in that regard. But I'm I wanted to bring Jeff on today because he and I have been talking about this whole issue of Elon Musk. It's first of all, Jeff, what an ode to capitalism we saw yesterday in the markets. The first two trillion dollar company, I mean, only in America.
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Jeff Yass2:01
Yeah, it's true, Steve. Thanks for having me. It was it should be a day we're celebrating.
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Host2:07
Yep. Yep. And yet, Jeff, I hear a lot of moaning at the New York Times and Bloomberg about, 'Oh my god, capital's a terrible thing because we have a trillionaire now. Oh, no, no, we can't have that. That's too much wealth for anyone to have.' But, what about the trillions of dollars he's making for other people? You know, there's an estimate I think it's almost 5,000 people have made been made millionaires by this guy. I mean, it's just unbelievable what he has done, the new frontiers. And thank god, as the Wall Street Journal said, you know, if if Elon Musk were Chinese and they were doing this in China, they'd say, 'Oh my god, we're falling behind China.' But, it's here in the USA.
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Jeff Yass2:44
Right, that's exactly right. The Bernie Sanders said if this doesn't prove we have an oligarchy, I don't know what does.
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Host2:51
Exactly.
So, there's been a so, that guy.
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Jeff Yass2:57
Yeah, I was going to say that you and I have been talking about it's a it's a big it's a really good lead into two things you and I have been working on together because you do a lot of policy work as well. So, one of them I'll just mention them both. We'll talk separately about it. One is, you know, how you could actually impose why not do like offer all these people who have made all this money in the markets a 15% capital gains tax if they and they basically fast forward, they pay forward their capital gains. We could probably raise, I don't know, 200 to 300 billion dollars in tax revenues because people would take advantage of that lower rate and the government would get additional money to reduce our deficit. I love that idea, Jeff. But, also well, well, first let's take on that one so because you really came up with this concept. How would it work?
Well, first of all, Steve, you're being too way too conservative. It's way more than two or three hundred billion dollars. I would think it's well over a trillion. Musk himself is just made a trillion dollars. If he handed in 15% of his stock, he alone is 150 billion.
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Host4:07
That's right. Just one person. Right.
J
Jeff Yass4:09
Right.
So, the way it would work, we would say to, you know, to anyone who you know, you know, if it's in your personal account or if it's if you're Elon Musk or anybody, instead of waiting to pay 23.8% capital gains tax, where you have these stocks that you don't really want to own, but you don't want to pay the taxes, there'll be a one-time tax holiday of 15% for the next year or so. And you don't have to sell your stock and give us cash, you can just give us stock. So, for example, Elon Musk owns a trillion dollars worth of SpaceX. He can just give the US government 15% of his holdings. So, instead of owning, you know, he owns 7 billion shares, he would own, you know, approximately 6 billion. The government would get a billion shares, non-voting, because we can't let the government.
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Host5:02
Non-voting. That's critical. Yeah.
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Jeff Yass5:05
And then the government, over time, sells these stocks like in an ETF, like an S&P fund, and they won't have to go borrow two trillion dollars next year to fund the deficit. They would just gradually sell out of these stocks, and you know, interest rates would go down because there wouldn't be two trillion dollars of demand for Treasuries, and people's portfolios would be balanced. They wouldn't be having, you know, with the money would be freed up to go to more productive uses, and we're going to need that capital because we're probably going to spend close to 10 trillion dollars over the next decade getting data centers compute and getting AI up to speed. So, we need the money.
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Host5:49
Well, I love this idea. Now, that of course my friends on the left say, 'Oh, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich.' But, for one thing you're getting the money up front, you know, so there's a time value of money and getting the money now versus getting the money 20 years from now is very valuable to the United States. That's point number one. Point number two, a lot of people just end up they avoid paying capital gains tax because they basically die with the assets and then they get what's called a step-up basis at death. So, a lot of it capital gains is never really even collected on. So, it seems to me this is a win-win for the people who own the stocks. It's a win-win for the federal government. It improves the overall US economy. And people are worried about the budget deficit and the amount we're borrowing and I include myself in that camp, this would dramatically reduce federal borrowing.
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Jeff Yass6:36
Yeah, and it would also right, it's really not a tax cut because if you wait long enough paying 15% today is like paying 23.8% in 20 years or possibly zero if you use the stepped-up basis upon death. But, it also would illustrate to the people certainly not the hardcore leftists, but at least the people that we want entrepreneurs, we want people making a trillion dollars or you know, any amount so that we could collect these taxes and reduce the deficit. And that would mean a tax cut for everybody else because we'd be getting it from the Elon Musks of the world and it would show the people that capitalism is good. We need people figuring great things out to pay our bills.
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Host7:24
So, I mean that's a such an important last point you just made. I mean, I think about how the world has changed in the last 20 years and the most amazing thing to me Jeff as you look at you know, you look at these companies like Anthropic, you look at Google, you look at Apple, you look at Amazon, you look at Microsoft. All these companies, you know, I think like nine of the 10 top technology companies in the world are in the United States. I think 12 of the 15 most valuable companies in the world are here in the United States. And, you know, look, we don't have enough free market capitalism. Government's too big, but we probably are have the freest markets of any country virtually in the world.
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Jeff Yass8:01
Yeah, that's true. You know, we can certainly do a lot better, but we're not we're still way better than the rest of the world.
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Host8:07
Without France.
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Jeff Yass8:10
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the thing is, you know, they there was talk like the New York Times has stories, you know, Elon Musk could buy every baseball every sports team in America and still have $500 billion left over. All these things that he could do. Or with the trillion dollars in taxes they're going to collect from space SpaceX over time, they can give every family of four $12,000. Which is essentially what they're going to do. That's $3,000 a person, you know, 333 million people. So, if you're a family of four, you are eventually going to receive about $12,000 from Elon Musk. You would think we would be celebrating.
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Host8:56
Yes. Yeah, and instead a lot of people think it's almost fiendish that he's become a trillionaire. Now, I want to we only have about 4 minutes left and I wanted to mention the other issue that you and I have been working on that there's no it's so ironic that the two biggest stories right now this week have been number one this amazing IPO of of the SpaceX, but the other one being Social Security is going bankrupt. And I'm thinking, Jeff, what a tragedy. What a tragedy that the Congress did not take take up our idea. You and I have been working on this for 25 years. Why not let every single American instead of having to put their payroll tax money into this black box of social security, why not let them own things? I mean, think about think of how much wealth would have been created for average Americans if that money if their social security dollars were in owning companies like Google and SpaceX?
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Jeff Yass9:52
Right. Well, supposedly, you know, the story of social security is good for the poor, but what social security does is it takes about a trillion and a half dollars a year from you know, from people so you can not invest in the stock market. That enables rich people who want to invest in the stock market to get to make higher returns but they're not competing with that other trillion and a half dollars. So, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer because of the social security. Had we done, you know, the whole thing with the, you know, the wealth inequality is really largely caused by government interference preventing people from participating in the great bull market. They're now poor, the people who participated are rich, and instead of saying the government caused it with this crazy idea, they get and they get angry at the wealthy when they subsidize the wealthy and punish the poor.
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Host10:50
It's true. And you know, it's just a tra we did some numbers at Unleash Prosperity. We found that even someone who made a minimum wage job their whole life and there's not too many people in that camp. So, the worst-case scenario, even somebody who just made a minimum wage for the 40 years of working, they'd have a million dollars in these accounts.
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Jeff Yass11:09
I know. And they still won't admit it and they don't want to change it.
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Host11:14
Yeah. Well, it's never too late. We've got to do that. That's our next mission, Joffe, is to make sure that and I by the way, I would make it optional to young workers because the people are going to be screwed by the fact that social security is going bankrupt. Not me and you, it's our kids and our grandkids that are going to get screwed. They're going to make us pay more and more taxes for our kids and less out. How is that a good deal for young people?
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Jeff Yass11:37
No, it is not.
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Host11:40
Well, Jeff, yes, thank you for everything you do for making America a better greater place. I just think that what happened this week with respect to this and by the way, Anthropic's coming up, right? And though we've got two another two more big IPOs coming up.
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Jeff Yass11:58
Right, we have two more that should be close to a trillion dollars a piece.
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Host12:01
Wow.
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Jeff Yass12:02
And you know, it's only in America.
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Host12:04
Yeah, I love it. Okay, Jeff, yes, thanks so much for carving out some time on your weekend to come on the More Money Show. This is the More Money Show, folks, and we will be right back.
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Narrator12:14
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