$34 billion. That was the damage for Elon Musk when the closing bell sounded on Wall Street Thursday.

I’ve incurred meaningful losses in my time as a direct result of not knowing when to shut up, but I can’t say I’ve ever lost one whole Iceland (or, perhaps more apt in the context of “Trump 2.0,” one whole El Salvador) as a direct result of running my mouth.

The good news for Musk is that it’s just a paper loss, and he can afford it. He was still worth $335 billion on Thursday evening, despite having spent the day trading highly personal insults with the President of the United States.

As the figure shows, this was an outsized drop even by the insane standards of Musk’s net worth, which is tied up in a volatile stock.

I’ve heard it said that one difference between Trump’s oligarchs and those of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban is that Trump’s pets made their own money, whereas the likes of the Yevgeny Prigozhin owe (or owed, past tense, in his case) their fortunes almost entirely to their authoritarian benefactors.

That’s true for, say, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. They made their own way. But Tesla and SpaceX, between them, count tens of billions in sales tied to federal contracts over the years. And besides, Trump could make life very difficult for Bezos, Zuckerberg and all the rest simply by wielding the powers of the state against their companies. Cutting federal contracts isn’t the only way to skin a cat.

I don’t pretend to know how the Trump-Musk feud will play out, but Trump might feel compelled to make an example of Elon lest any of the other billionaires who lined up to pledge allegiance at his indoor inaugural should get the idea the strongman’s not actually very strong.

It’s worth asking whether Trump’s threat to cut Musk’s government contracts might serve as a wakeup call to just how far afield America really is. In simple terms: This shouldn’t be happening.

Either Musk’s companies deserve federal contracts or they don’t. If they do, they shouldn’t be canceled just because Trump and Musk had a fight on social media. If they are (canceled), that’s the clearest message yet that American democracy’s under siege.

Of course, there’s a “couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy” dynamic here, where that means I’ll admit to taking some pleasure in seeing Musk humbled. And, as I’ve emphasized on any number of occasions, Elon’s a threat to democracy just as much as Trump, if not more.

And with that, “Thank you all very much, I love Teslur!”