Hey crew, here’s to another week of cutting through the noise and focusing on what actually moves financial minds forward.

No buzzwords, just the stuff affecting wallets, businesses, & the economy:

🤌 Trillionaire: Where Does Logic End?

📖 Inside Ethiopia’s New Budget

🚗 Luxury Item: New License Plates Are Second Costliest in the World!

Here’s to the 112th edition

Let’s dive in.

So some guy with Twitter fingers and a rocket company just added a few more zeros to his net worth this past weekend.

The feat was impressive, considering that the word trillionaire was used more in the satirical sense of the word not too long ago.

Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, xAI are all companies that were either founded or co-founded by Elon Musk, the South African immigrant who was rejected from a job at Netscape back in the day.

He is now humanity’s first trillionaire 🤑

SpaceX, which also counts xAI and X as part of its portfolio, IPO’d on June 13 by raising $75B at more than a $2T valuation (yes, that’s a big ‘T’ next to a number).

Elon’s stake in the company is approximately 42%, cementing his entry into the 4 comma club.

For context, Elon’s net worth is approximately 6.7x the GDP of Ethiopia ($149.74 based on 2024 data).

How Does This Affect Me? Well, hate to break it you, but these are realms that we just can’t put into personal terms without looking too far fetched.

Consider the median annual income in the US is around $45k (according to a 2025 data). Which means very few to none will get to experience the ‘Musk’ effect, at least not in this life time.

But one thing has revealed itself out of all this… want to get insanely rich? Build unicorn companies or invest in them and hope it goes on an IPO mission to space.

Absurd wealth aside, focus on creating value that can lead to financial freedom.

Whether you’re solving incredibly difficult problems or pursuing an idea (like SpaceX when it seemed like a pipe dream at the beginning), you can outsmart almost 99% of other human beings!

It’s official.

The Ministry of Finance just tabled a record-shattering Birr 2.34 trillion (~$14.85 billion) budget proposal for the 2026/2027 fiscal year (EFY 2019).

While we are waiting for the full approved document to conduct a deep-dive assessment, a few things are immediately clear from the headline numbers.

On paper, this is a massive 20.6% nominal jump, adding nearly Birr 400 billion to last year’s Birr 1.94 trillion budget.

But as any savvy observer knows, nominal growth doesn't tell the whole story.

If we factor in our projected 10% inflation rate for the coming year, the budget’s expansion in "real" terms sits at about 9.6%.

It’s a notable expansion of our fiscal space, signaling that the state is banking heavily on aggressive revenue generation, paired with fresh domestic and foreign loans.

Out of each and every one of our pockets.

To secure ongoing IMF loan payouts, the government is leaning hard into domestic tax mobilization and a sweeping upward revision of non-tax government fees.

If you’ve noticed your day-to-day administrative costs creeping up, you aren't imagining it. Government service fees including baseline utilities like electricity are steadily climbing.

We are also seeing highly creative avenues for cash collection dressed up as digital progress.

Take the new RFID and QR code enabled license plates. They come with a hefty price tag ranging from ETB 44,500 to 56,000 (and ETB 11,000 for public transport operators).

While security and modernization are fair goals, an upgraded ቦሎ system could have achieved similar law-enforcement results at a fraction of the cost to everyday motorists.

To be fair, this budget expansion isn't happening in a vacuum.

Ethiopia is trying to sustain its economic growth trajectory while navigating severe global market shocks. Most notably the economic ripples of the US-Israel war on Iran.

For Ethiopia, a volatile global market means two critical, non-negotiable imports will remain stubbornly expensive: fuel and fertilizer.

Compounding this, elevated global shipping costs are acting as a double-edged sword, driving up the price of everything we import while quietly eroding the competitiveness of our exports.

Ethiopia has started issuing new national vehicle license plates, which is how many of us discovered that the old ones were apparently a national problem.

For years, we thought they were just plates.

Apparently not.

It seems while we were busy worrying about fuel prices, rent, taxes, potholes, school fees, medical bills etc, our license plates were out committing crimes.

Officials say the old plates had problems: forgery, duplication, weak traceability, regional fragmentation, and poor durability.

To sort out this national crisis of the highest priority, the folks at the vehicle licensing authority put their minds to work and reached the only logical conclusion: new plates that come with RFID technology, QR codes, a centralized database, “ETH,” and “ኢት.”

“አሪፍ ታሪክ ነው, ወንድም.”

Then came the fee.

Private fuel-powered vehicle owners will pay 56,000 birr. Private EV owners pay 44,500 birr. Public transport operators pay 11,000 birr.

To put it gently, Ethiopia has entered the premium rectangle market.

At current exchange rates, Kenya charges roughly 3,750 birr for a pair of plates. Uganda’s old-to-new digital plate replacement is about 6,368 birr. A basic pair in the UK starts around 7,680 birr. California’s replacement plate fee is around 4,456 birr.

In fact, our plates are the second costliest in the world!

The income comparison is where the number becomes less funny.

The median salary of a formal employee in Addis is around 27,000 birr a month. That 56,000 birr plate is a little over two months of gross salary.

But nobody saves their entire salary unless they live inside their parents’ house, eat air, and have no social life. Best case scenario, if that person saves 20% of their salary every month, that is 5,400 birr.

At that rate, it would take more than 10 months to save for the private fuel-vehicle plate.

Ten months. For something whose main job is to sit on a bumper and identify you during traffic violations.

Now, yes, the median wage earner is probably not buying a private car. But in Ethiopia, every new cost has a way of finding the nearest innocent bystander.

Even compared to the car itself, the plate is no longer shy.

A 20+ year old Toyota Vitz costs around 1.6 million birr. That makes the 56,000 birr plate about 3.5% of the value of the car.

Petty theft may even need a strategy meeting:
“Gentlemen, the mirror market is saturated. We are pivoting to ታርጋ.”

Somewhere, a side mirror is finally getting a good night’s sleep.

The policy case maybe exists…it doesn’t. Nevertheless there is a difference between “this is useful” and “we solved a problem you didn’t know you had, and here’s the bill”

That is where the public frustration comes from. It is not only about the plate.

It is about the growing feeling that modernization often arrives first as a bill and only later, hopefully, as better service.

Think of the new electricity tariffs, and property taxes to name but two.

And Ethiopians are allowed to ask the obvious question: Why is this a priority? Is this really the thing that needed to be this expensive?

Public transport is overcrowded.

Traffic lights still work part-time.

Same for the train.

Parking is chaos.

The most reliable traffic management technology is still a tired officer and his trusted whistle.

So when the shiny new rectangle arrives with a 56,000 birr price tag, people are naturally going to ask whether the plate is solving the transport problem or just becoming the most expensive part of it.

Then there is the revenue question. The vehicle licensing authority stands to make about ETB 100 Billion from this initiative.

How much goes to imported plates?

How much to administration?

How much to government revenue?

And will any of it actually improve road safety, enforcement, or transport services?

Nobody knows where this money is going. At this price, transparency should not be an optional extra.

And if the fee must be this high, at least spread the pain through payment plans.

Let owners pay through annual registration renewals. Or monthly payments. Give people a way to plan instead of turning an upgrade into a household crisis meeting.

A 12-month spread would make 56,000 birr about 4,667 birr a month.

A 24-month spread would make it about 2,333 birr a month.

Still annoying. But planned annoying.

Modernization is good.
Cleaner records are good.
Fraud prevention is good.

But affordability is also infrastructure. Every reform shouldn’t arrive with a new payment counter.