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Does it? Begging is one of the least effective ways to get dollars possible. If dollars are so valuable to him, why not sustain effort to acquire them in quantity?
I think most of the people begging outside McDonalds value their time and short-term amusement more than they value dollars, straight up. Elon Musk is the exact opposite, valuing dollars and the things dollars buy more than idle hours and idle pleasures. Begging gets beggers what they actually want: continued freedom from all responsibility and, frequently, sobriety. That's why they keep begging, because it's what they want. Give them a million dollars, and they'll blow it all in short order, possibly killing themselves in the process, and certainly leaving themselves little better than when they started.
But that first single dollar means a lot more to that guy than it does to Elon Musk, since for him it’s the difference between eating and not eating right then and there whereas for Elon it’s not even a rounding error. You can be right about how Elon and the homeless guy value their time relative to earning money, but $1 still means a lot more to the destitute hungry guy than Elon.
I don't believe this is true. In a nation of ~350 million, my estimate of the number of people who've died of classic Dickensian starvation in the last decade is 0. Kids get neglected by unfit parents, elderly people get sick enough to stop eating, maybe a shut-in breaks a hip and no one notices, but near as I can tell, we have literally conquered bread. Food pantries and giveaways are ubiquitous, as are programs to hand out meals to the homeless. Some of the people panhandling on the side of the street might have missed a meal recently; I also miss meals when I'm on a gaming binge and am too lazy to actually feed myself. When they get hungry enough, food will be available for them. When they go hungry, that is a choice they have made.
This idea that a dollar is the difference between eating or not for the homeless guy is, near as I can tell, entirely fictional. Homeless people mostly live the way they live by choice, at least until the drugs burn out enough neurons that choices aren't really a thing they can do any more. Most of them appear to be stuck in a spiral of self-destruction; we should be taking them off the streets and putting them in a secure, structured environment where they can get their shit back together. Giving them free money often seems to only help them kill themselves faster.
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But it doesn't follow that the marginal utility is higher for the beggar than Elon Musk.
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Assuming that begging in front of a fast food restaurant isn't just a novel form of slumming, IMO this doesn't quite illustrate to what a degree those people are no longer even capable of choosing or valueing anything. That far down, it may seem psychologically unfeasible to climb up towards anything, no matter how modest. The body is degraded, the mind along with it, and they're probably all out of social contacts as well. With no resources to invest, no energy to spend, no faculties intact, nothing to offer to the market and nobody to rely on, what can you actually hope to accomplish? I think it's valid to observe that those people are no longer capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But there's a bit of a leap required to come to the conclusion that you must throw money at them.
And here I see utilitarians taking the easy way out. Has a utilitarian ever said "this person is beyond help, any resources invested here are wasted"? In my cyncical view, most utilitarians are simply humanitarians with a coat of rational paint, with many of their premises and conclusions going unexamined and only the the details getting the lightest touch of utilitarian calculus. Who questions the metrics of pain and pleasure as proxies for disutility and utility? Who quantifies them? Utilitarianism may as well just be a ritual of rationality, an act put on in order to feel better about indulging one's altruistic impulses. I'm sure I'm wrong about this and effective altruism is actually fully reasoned-out and I just don't get it, after all the people who do it are smarter than me, but I'm getting the same vibes from the so-called utilitarians that I get from those who want to help the starving poor the world over without having ever heard of utilons.
I wouldn't be surprised: that sounds like it could easily be a summary of the condition of a person who has been sentenced to be sacrificed to a bloodthirsty trolley. There are all sorts of repugnancies that utilitarianism can fall into; that's why I see it as, at the very least, something very slippery to deal with.
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