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extreme wealth
'Trillionaires Shouldn't Exist': Obscene Musk Milestone Spurs Calls for Aggressive Wealth Tax
"The level of wealth that Mr. Musk has reached requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression, anti-competitive markets, monopolistic control, price collusion, inadequate tax systems, and corruption."
Jun 12, 2026
Elon Musk's net worth surged past $1 trillion on Friday as SpaceX—the rocket company he founded and controls—made its debut on the public market, prompting global revulsion and calls for an aggressive wealth tax to rein in out-of-control inequality.
“Musk became the world's first trillionaire because our tax system shields the wealth of the ultra-wealthy from taxation while requiring working to people pay taxes on every paycheck," said Igor Volsky, director of the Tax the Greedy Billionaires Campaign. "Today’s milestone should serve as a wake-up call to us all."
"Unless we plan to cede control and agency over our future to a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals, lawmakers must pursue bold tax policies that actually meet this moment—not just slowing the accumulation of extreme wealth, but reversing it," Volsky added. "That means passing taxes on billionaire wealth ambitious enough to make the ultra-wealthy less wealthy, reduce the stranglehold they have over our economy and democracy, and restore the ideal that no one in America gets to buy their way to unchecked power.”
Reuters reported Friday that "most of Musk's wealth now rests with SpaceX, where he holds a stake worth roughly $866 billion."
"Along with Tesla and the rest of his properties, his net worth will exceed $1.1 trillion when the stock begins trading Friday," Reuters noted. "The tally includes stock components that would vest over time."
While Musk's on-paper fortune could drop below the trillion-dollar mark if SpaceX's stock price drops below $135 per share—which is highly possible, as experts argue the company's valuation is absurd—campaigners said Friday that the milestone is an appalling product of a society that has allowed the mega-rich to dictate policy, funneling immense wealth to the very top while millions worldwide face hunger, violent displacement, and preventable disease. Oxfam has estimated that just a 10% tax on Musk's fortune could lift 800 million people above the extreme poverty line.
“Eighty-six of Americans are worried about the price of food. Elon Musk is a trillionaire. These two things are deeply, inherently connected," said Erica Payne, founder and president of the advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires. "The level of wealth that Mr. Musk has reached requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression, anti-competitive markets, monopolistic control, price collusion, inadequate tax systems, and corruption. Mostly inadequate tax systems and corruption."
Musk's companies, including SpaceX, have relied heavily on and benefited massively from government contracts, subsidies, and research, while paying minimal taxes.
The New York Times reported last year that SpaceX "has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any, according to internal company documents." As for Tesla, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found earlier this year that the company "avoided almost all federal income tax on over $12 billion of US income over the past three years."
Musk, whose immense wealth is largely stock appreciation that is not taxed in the US unless shares are sold, paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2018, according to ProPublica. "Between 2014 and 2018, he had a true tax rate of 3.27%," the investigative outlet noted.
Writer Elizabeth Spiers argued Friday that "trillionaires shouldn't exist," noting in a column for The Nation that "as Musk's wealth multiplies, he continues to prosper on the public dime."
"Musk’s cosmic-scale wealth-hoarding is particularly abhorrent when you place it against the backdrop of how much damage he’s done," wrote Spiers. "It’s hard to quantify the scale of destruction and deprivation that he will never personally be held accountable for. How do you value the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who have died since Musk, in his words, gleefully 'fed [USAID] into the woodchipper'? How do you value the lives of people who will die because DOGE cut major biomedical research funding?"
"Musk has enriched himself via a rigged investment economy ensuring that those with the most contribute the least—or in many cases, nothing at all," Spiers added.
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Trillionaires at the Gates
The arrival of our first trillionaire could well mark the date America’s oligarchy becomes unbreakable.
Dec 30, 2025
I wrote my first post for Inequality.org, "Our First Trillionaire: Only a Matter of Time," over 12 years ago. I hoped, at the time, that the post would age poorly. After all, the presence of a trillionaire on American soil would certify that we had unquestionably reached an oligarchic concentration of our nation’s wealth.
Unfortunately, that post has aged remarkably well. If anything, I now see my forecasting as too timid.
Elon Musk’s personal wealth now sits at about $750 billion. That total represents an annual average increase of 23% over the $60 billion Bill Gates fortune of 2013. At that rate of increase, America will boast its first trillionaire at least a decade before 2039, the year I gave CNBC writer Eric Rosenbaum in 2014 as the date our nation would most likely see its first trillionaire.
Back in 2013, I worried mightily that the absence of a reliable mechanism in America’s tax system to limit the growth rate of extreme fortunes would cause the wealth share of the richest Americans to rise to ever-higher levels. Wealth at America’s economic summit, I noted, was growing at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth, and that rapid growth was bringing a disturbing arithmetic into play.
America now finds itself in a democracy-destroying downward cycle. Extreme wealth begets a political power that begets policy choices that lead to even more extreme wealth concentration.
“If the wealth of one group within a nation grows at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth,” I pointed out, “that group’s share of the aggregate wealth must increase over time. That’s a mathematical certainty. And the level of subsequent wealth concentration has no limit.”
Our country’s wealth concentration story has played out exactly that way over the past dozen years, as economist Gabriel Zucman has detailed. The nation’s top .00001%—a mere 19 households—has increased its share of America’s wealth from 0.1% in 1982 to 1.81% in 2024. Of the country’s $148 trillion total wealth in December 2024, those 19 households held $2.6 trillion. In the past year, their wealth total has increased to well over $3 trillion.
That increase has produced a stunning annual increase in the wealth share of that ultra-elite group, nearly 7% per year on average. To achieve that rate of wealth share growth, the wealth of our top .00001%—one ten-millionth of America’s households—has had to grow at an average rate nearly seven percentage points above the average annual growth rate of the country’s wealth.
Over a decade ago, I told CNBC that America’s march to oligarchy would revolve around a considerable increase in the concentration of wealth within the billionaire class. Those 19 households in our top .00001% comprise 5% of America’s top .0002% (380 households, or roughly, the Forbes 400). Their share of the wealth of that larger group of billionaires now stands at about 50% today, a quadrupling since 1982.
What has generated America’s increasingly oligarchic wealth concentration? The worst culprit, I’d argue, continues to be a federal income tax system that not only lacks a reliable mechanism to rein in the growth of massive fortunes but does the exact opposite, exacerbating wealth inequality when we most need it contained.
Specifically, our tax system applies an extremely regressive tax rate to capital gains, the principal form of economic income flowing to our billionaire class. The effective annual income tax rate on the capital gains of our richest often runs less than 5%. That reality has baked into America’s cake a continuing concentration of our country’s wealth.
In 2013, with Mexico’s Carlos Slim then the world’s wealthiest person, I contemplated the concentration of power that would accompany the arrival of American trillionaires.
“Unless basic US tax policy changes,” I noted, “the United States will be mathematically certain to reach Mexican-like levels of wealth concentration. The only questions: Who will be our Carlos Slim and how kindly will our trillionaires treat us.”
Indeed, the gap between America’s level of wealth concentration and Mexico’s has closed considerably over the past 12 years. Slim, still the wealthiest Mexican, has seen his share of Mexico’s total wealth fall since 2013. But the share of American wealth held by the wealthiest American—Gates in 2013 and Musk in 2025—has tripled.
And we saw the accompanying concentration of power become vividly visible at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. On the inaugural stand, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg all sat center stage.
We see that same concentration in the funding of our politics. In the 2024 election, reports Americans for Tax Fairness, our billionaires collectively accounted for $2.6 billion of the $15.9 billion in total political spending, a total lopsidedly on the Republican side.
Musk alone spent about $277 million in 2024, a tiny one-thousandth of his net worth at the time, but nearly 2% of total political spending in a nation of 340 million people. At his current level of wealth, Musk could drop $1 billion by himself into the 2026 election without breaking much of a financial sweat.
But those numbers only hint at the political power our richest now wield. Billionaire control over our nation’s major media outlets far exceeds the influence of direct billionaire political spending.
The six billionaires with wealth over $200 billion all control either a major media outlet or a major social media platform. Musk, of course, owns Twitter. Zuckerberg, through Meta, controls Facebook and Instagram. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Larry Ellison’s son, David, holds a controlling interest in Paramount, the media giant that owns CBS and is seeking to acquire control of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Ellisons also have their eyes on the US operations of TikTok. Larry Page and Sergey Brin remain the largest shareholders of Alphabet, the corporate colossus that controls Google and YouTube.
What does that billionaire lock grip over our largest media translate into? Everything from a Washington Post editorial page that rails against wealth taxation to the placing of America’s most respected weekly network TV news show, "60 Minutes," in the censorious hands of the right-wing ideologue Bari Weiss.
America now finds itself in a democracy-destroying downward cycle. Extreme wealth begets a political power that begets policy choices that lead to even more extreme wealth concentration. The challenge of breaking that cycle could hardly be more daunting.
The arrival of our first trillionaire could well mark the date America’s oligarchy becomes unbreakable. Let’s not let that happen.
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How Taxing Billionaires Can Help Prevent Government Shutdowns
Until Congress addresses the fundamental power imbalance allowing billionaires to benefit from—and drive—government dysfunction, Americans will remain trapped in a game of shutdown chicken.
Oct 16, 2025
Most people are surprised to learn government shutdowns, and the ensuing fingerpointing, haven’t always been a mainstay of American politics. To understand how we got to this point, we must first examine who benefits from shutdowns.
For decades, conservatives in Congress have used one manufactured budget crisis after another to drive a narrative that the government doesn’t work—while quietly enriching their billionaire backers.
The most recent example came just before August recess, when House Republicans advanced a little-noticed government funding bill to gut the Internal Revenue Service base budget by $2.8 billion. Translation? Roll out the red carpet for tax cheats with nine-figure bank accounts.
The numbers don’t lie. In 1990, before shutdown politics became normalized, America had 66 billionaires controlling $240 billion. Today, roughly 700 billionaires hoard over $7 trillion—a 28-fold explosion in wealth. As billionaire wealth exploded, the total share of wealth controlled by the bottom half of the country shrank.
We must tax billionaires to break up the dangerous concentration of wealth that allows them to hold our democracy and economy hostage.
This wasn’t accidental. It happened in part because government dysfunction means big paydays for America’s ultra wealthy, who take advantage of shutdowns and spending cuts to evade taxes, skirt consumer protections to maximize profits, and promote privatization. The current shutdown paused antitrust cases that could break up Amazon and Apple, for instance.
Unsurprisingly, the ultra-wealthy beneficiaries of shutdown chaos are often major donors to far right GOP politicians and outside organizations lobbying for that chaos.
For example, billionaires Jeffrey Yass and Robert Mercer are two of the biggest funders of Club for Growth, a key hard-right group behind the GOP-led 2013 shutdown over the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The ACA wasn’t just healthcare reform—it also raised billions of dollars in new taxes from ultra-wealthy households. Shutting down the government over its possible repeal would have been a no-brainer for Yass and Mercer, both of whom were also engaged in legally questionable tax-avoidance schemes at the time.
In the Club for Growth’s view, repealing the ACA and its taxes on the ultra rich was a win. A shutdown that froze IRS audits and enforcement was a win. Allowing the government to reopen only after Democrats conceded to deep spending cuts was a win. Dysfunction that “proved” the inability of government to function efficiently was a win. The only losers would be the American people.
While the demands in shutdowns vary, the crisis often only resolves with Democrats accepting GOP spending cuts that weaken regulatory capacity and benefit wealthy industries at the expense of everyday Americans.
Conservatives have learned they might lose their nominal objective—like cuts to Medicare or repealing the ACA. But by drawing attention away from their attacks on good government, they win by losing.
While the March 2025 partisan funding bill avoided a shutdown, it slashed $13 billion from domestic priorities, gutted IRS enforcement funding to target wealthy tax cheats, and hobbled regulatory agencies that safeguard working families—while simultaneously empowering the Trump administration (and billionaire allies like Elon Musk’s DOGE) with broad discretion to reallocate remaining funds at will.
Working people are frustrated by this toxic game. We must tax billionaires to break up the dangerous concentration of wealth that allows them to hold our democracy and economy hostage.
Taxing billionaires is a consensus issue, with support rising sharply as the consequences of unchecked, extreme wealth play out.
Recent Impact Research polling found broad and intense support for raising taxes on billionaires among likely voters in 2026 battleground congressional districts and states. And a recent Morning Consult poll found that even 70% of Republicans believe “the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes”—up from 62% just six years ago.
Until Congress addresses the fundamental power imbalance allowing billionaires to benefit from—and drive—government dysfunction, Americans will remain trapped in a game of shutdown chicken. It’s time to tax billionaires and return the power to the people.
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The Super-Rich Are Gobbling Up Earth’s Future and Our Leaders Are Letting Them
Billions upon billions give our world’s wealthiest an overabundance of mind-boggling political power, and right now they’re wielding that power to protect their fortunes at the expense of our planet’s future.
Dec 05, 2024
Looking to find something special this holiday season for that mega-millionaire in your life? The Italian retailer Valextra has just what you may need: a cocktail set that offers a “vision of design fluidity and discreet luxury.” Just $13,400 for a leathered and lacquered box that includes “a shaker, cocktail tools made from silvered brass, and two martini glasses.”
Or maybe you’re looking for a nice, new waterfront condo in South Florida. The private-equity movers and shakers at Apollo Global have just advanced the $307 million needed to plop 92 sumptuous residences on Florida’s “Millionaire’s Mile” near Pompano Beach. Each of these seaside palaces will enjoy “direct access to a private beach with food and beverage service.”
Or do you have your heart set on a thrilling new artistic experience? The billionaire crypto king Justin Sun certainly delivered one last Friday. Two days earlier, at a Sotheby’s auction, Sun had outlasted six other bidders and won—for $6.2 million—an artwork from an Italian absurdist artist. Sun proceeded to work up an appetite and then, before a packed news conference at a pricey Hong Kong hotel, ate his historic acquisition: a banana duct-taped to a wall. Only a video of the banana remains.
What wealthy nations do take seriously: the interests of their wealthy. And that seriousness is setting the world up for abject climate failure.
For Justin Sun and his fellow billionaires, no artwork or beachfront palace or luxury gift can make more—at worst—than a modest dent of their grand personal fortunes. Today’s global billionaires, a new report from the world’s top commercial tracker of grand fortunes calculates, more than doubled their combined wealth last year, to a record $12.1 trillion.
These 3,323 billionaires make up, the new data from researchers at Altrata show, less than 1% of our world’s “ultra-high net worth” population, those wealthy worth at least $30 million. But these few thousands of billionaires are sitting upon 25% of global ultra-high net worth.
Billionaires worth over $10 billion, add Altrata’s analysts in their latest annual Billionaire Census, make up only 6% of the billionaires who call our Earth home. These fortunate few hold 41% of billionaire wealth.
Billionaires who call the United States home, meanwhile, once again dominate Altrata’s latest global wealth stats. Americans hold a full third of the world’s billion-dollar fortunes, over three times the share of China, the world’s second-largest billionaire hotspot.
Another sign of America’s billionaire dominance: The world’s four richest individuals—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison—all just happen to be Americans. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index is now listing their combined net worth at nearly $1 trillion.
Fortunes as massive as these don’t just give our richest plenty of pocket change for the world’s most extravagant luxuries. These billions upon billions give our nation’s—and our world’s—wealthiest an overabundance of mind-boggling political power, and right now they’re wielding that power to protect their fortunes at the expense of our planet’s future.
Some of our world’s most perceptive climate journalists have been tracking that wielding this past month at two pivotal global conferences.
The first of these, in Rio de Janeiro, involved what have become known as the “G20” nations, a grouping that includes some 19 top national economic powers and two regional bodies, the European Union and the African Union. Different countries chair the G20 each year, but none have done their chairing more aggressively than Brazil, this past year’s chair.
Under Brazil’s progressive president, the former union leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, this home to the endangered Amazon rainforest has spent 2024 pushing the G20 to get serious about taxing the world’s super rich—and using the proceeds from those taxes to address the world’s deepening climate calamity.
Earlier this year, Brazil brought before a meeting of the G20’s national finance ministers the famed E.U. Tax Observatory economist Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s top experts on tax-the-rich options. Zucman proceeded to make a powerful case for an annual global 2% tax on the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest.
On paper, Brazil’s tax advocacy has made a real impact. The final declaration that nations attending last month’s 2024 G20 summit in Rio adopted is overflowing with admirable egalitarian sentiments.
“We live in times of major geopolitical, socioeconomic, and climate and environmental challenges and crises, which require urgent action,” the G20 nations solemnly declared. Added their official statement: “We recognize that inequality within and among countries is at the root of most global challenges that we face and is aggravated by them.”
This noble G20 summit declaration, notes 350.org climate activist Kate Blagojevic, shows that Brazil and other G20 environmentally conscious nations have essentially “gained consensus for one of the most logical solutions to one of the world’s most pressing issues—taxing billionaires to pay for climate action.”
But now, stresses Blagojevic, G20 governments “must build on the growing popular support for taxing extreme wealth by putting words into action.”
Those rich holding that extreme wealth, agrees Emma Seery, Oxfam’s lead on development finance, have plenty of billions they could be sharing.
“Today,” Seery notes, “the world’s 16 richest individuals would still be billionaires even if 99% of their wealth vanished overnight.”
Those super rich a bit below that top-16 status have ample quantities of wealth to share as well. Since 1980, Seery points out, the G20’s richest 1% “have seen their tax rates fall by roughly a third” over the same years their share of global income was jumping by 45%.
Despite stats like these, several key G20 powerhouses—most notably the United States and Germany—have been showing little interest in moving expeditiously in any significant tax-the-rich direction. “Some” G20 leaders, as the Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva has cautiously acknowledged, have objections “to issues linked to the climate agenda, to the financing agenda, above all to the issue of taxing the super rich.”
These objections turned out to be far more upfront at last month’s second pivotal global gathering on climate chaos, the United Nations annual climate “Conference of the Parties,” COP for short, a huge assembly held this year in Baku, the capital of oil-rich Azerbaijan. This year’s COP29 ended a few days after the G20 session and focused on the pivotal questions of how much fighting climate change is going to cost and who ought to be footing the bill.
What makes these two questions so absolutely pivotal?
“Without help,” as Heated World’s Arielle Samuelson puts it, “poorer countries will be unable to transition away from fossil fuels, driving up emissions for the whole planet.”
The poorer of the nearly 200 nations attending COP29 did considerable pushing for at least $1.3 trillion a year in climate aid, an outlay that, Fiji deputy prime minister Biman Prasad observed, “pales in the face of the $7 trillion” wasted annually on subsidies for fossil fuels and the corporations they enrich.
In the end, “after marathon talks and bitter recriminations,” COP29 did produce a consensus of sorts. The gathered nations agreed on the need for $1.3 trillion in help for developing nations, but only $300 billion of that total will come in grants and low-interest loans. All the rest, reports The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey, “will have to come from private investors” and unspecified new sources of revenue.
This COP29 outcome, sums up a disgusted Mohamed Adow of the think-tank Power Shift Africa, amounts to a “disaster for the developing world,” a “betrayal of both people and planet by wealthy countries who claim to take climate change seriously.”
What wealthy nations do take seriously: the interests of their wealthy. And that seriousness is setting the world up for abject climate failure.
The governments of wealthy nations, as the British economist Michael Roberts reflects, ought to be bankrolling shifts to renewable energy, a power source that’s continuing to get ever less expensive. But the world’s most powerful governments are insisting instead “that private investment should lead the drive to renewable power,” and that insistence is crippling the move to renewables.
Why? Private investors, Roberts explains, only invest when investing figures to pay—in healthy profits. With prices for renewables falling, these healthy profits aren’t materializing. Investors, consequently, are making no rush to invest in renewables. They might as well, many of these wealthy have come to believe, double down on fossil fuels.
Given all these dynamics, will all the rest of us be able to save our planet? Maybe—if we double down on saving our planet from our plutocrats.
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Testimony to UN Panel: 'Tax the Rich. Save the World'
"When too much money turns into too much power, it threatens us all," said Patriotic Millionaires president Erica Payne.
Mar 20, 2024
The founder of a group of millionaires that campaigns for a more progressive and just tax system said during a United Nations hearing on Tuesday that governments must increase taxes on the rich before it is too late to rescue democracy from the corrosive impacts of wealth concentration.
Failure to do so, warned Patriotic Millionaires president Erica Payne, "will not end well for anyone, including millionaires."
"This is not an act of kindness or of philanthropy," Payne said during a special meeting of the U.N. Economic and Social Council. "It is in our own self-interest. The far-right is on the rise around the world. If we do not address the twin crises of wealth concentration and inequality, we will face in the next decade the wholesale dismantling and eventual death of liberal democracy, of justice, and of basic human freedom."
Watch Payne's remarks in full:
Patriotic Millionaires, which has chapters in both the United States and United Kingdom, released survey results earlier this year showing that nearly three-quarters of millionaires in G20 countries support higher taxes on extreme wealth to improve key public services and address cost-of-living crises.
Additionally, the poll found that a majority of respondents see the vast accumulation of wealth at the very top as a threat to democracy.
Payne said Tuesday that "nearly 1,000 millionaires from across the globe have joined us in calling on governments to tax extreme wealth." In recent decades, top marginal tax rates around the world have plummeted, allowing the ultra-rich to amass eye-popping fortunes that they have used to impose their will on political processes and policy debates.
"Since 2020, five billionaires have doubled their wealth, while five billion of the poorest people in this world got even poorer. Children starve while billionaires fly their rockets into space," Payne said. "You may not care how much money a person has, but you likely do care how much power someone has. When too much money turns into too much power, it threatens us all."
"The single only way to preserve the chance of freedom and democracy, the only way to save this planet and humanity, is to tax extreme wealth."
Payne argued that "there are no benevolent billionaires" or "public-minded plutocrats" and implored policymakers to weigh the potentially disastrous consequences of not taxing extreme wealth, in addition to considering how and how much the rich should be taxed.
"The single only way to preserve the chance of freedom and democracy, the only way to save this planet and humanity, is to tax extreme wealth," said Payne. "Yes, the math might be a little complicated. I trust you all can figure that out. The principle itself is not complicated. Tax the rich. Save the world. It is that simple."
Payne's remarks came a day after an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data found that the collective fortunes of U.S. billionaires have grown by nearly 88% to $5.5 trillion over the past four years.
On Tuesday, a group of congressional Democrats introduced legislation that would tax U.S. fortunes over $50 million.
Patriotic Millionaires was among the organizations that endorsed the bill, titled the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. Morris Pearl, the chair of the group, said in a statement that "contrary to popular belief, billionaires and millionaires like me do not amass such extraordinarily large fortunes because we work harder or because we are more talented than Americans who work for a living."
"Instead, it's because we rigged the tax code so that wealthy people like us who make most of our money off our assets pay next to nothing—or sometimes literally nothing—in taxes," said Pearl. "The Ultra-Millionaire Tax will be an important first step in requiring the rich to finally start paying their rightful share in taxes, thus reining in the destabilizing level of economic inequality that plagues our country and threatens our democracy."
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The US Leads the World in Millionaires, but the Wealth Is Not Trickling Down
The spectacular wealth of America’s wealthy is paying no great dividends for average Americans; those dividends are funneling instead to the top of the U.S. economic ladder.
Aug 21, 2023
Five-star hotels. So yesterday. Today’s super rich, The Wall Street Journal reports, are picking palatial luxury villas over swanky suites when they need a quick pick-me-up.
Italy, France, and Greece currently offer the widest array of villa options, but Portugal seems to be catching up fast. So many options!
How can our deepest pockets find the right one? A “high-end travel consultant,” the Robb Report on luxury living points out, can identify just the perfect villa vacation. The cost for joining the circle that can access one top consultant’s advice: $25,000 in annual fees on top of a $150,000 joining fee.
The world’s distribution of wealth remains remarkably top-heavy. Individuals with less than $10,000 to their name—52.5% of the world’s adult population—hold just 1.2% of the world’s assets.
The cost of actually renting a high-end villa? The realtor agency Oliver’s Travels was offering at one point this summer three dozen villas renting for over $130,000 a week.
How many people on our Earth today can afford to put down—without batting an eye—that sort of cash? Some of our best annual stats on our global super rich have been coming out, over recent years, from the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse. But this fabled 167-year-old institution stumbled royally during the pandemic and, earlier this year, ended up the property of its Swiss rival UBS.
UBS, fortunately, has opted to continue Credit Suisse’s annual Global Wealth Report tradition, and the 2023 edition—covering data through 2022—has just appeared. As usual, this annual report’s release has enjoyed substantial media coverage worldwide, especially in the business press.
Most all the latest coverage has generally emphasized the news in the 2023 report’s opening lines. As one typical headline, from Bloomberg, reads: “Global Wealth Fell Last Year for First Time Since 2008.”
Wealth per global adult, the new Global Wealth Report does indeed show, fell by 3.6% in 2022. But most of that decline, the report goes on to add, “came from the appreciation of the U.S. dollar against many other currencies.” Hold those exchange rates constant and the story changes. Wealth per adult increases by 2.2%.
This year’s Global Wealth Report actually has a much more important story to tell than the global wealth per adult, and the global media coverage has by and large missed it. That story: The world’s distribution of wealth remains remarkably top-heavy. Individuals with less than $10,000 to their name—52.5% of the world’s adult population—hold just 1.2% of the world’s assets.
Those numbers almost exactly reverse at the other end of the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s “global wealth pyramid.” The 1.1% of the global adult population worth over $1 million individually holds 45.8% of the world’s wealth.
One nation—the United States—is driving this incredibly top-heavy statistical picture. Some 38% of the world’s millionaires call the USA home. China, the next largest contributor to the global millionaire population, claims just 11%. Japan and France, the next two highest millionaire manufacturers, each claim only 5% of our globe’s at least seven-digit set.
Worldwide, about a quarter-million individuals—243,060, to be exact—qualify for Credit Suisse’s more exclusive “ultra-high-net-worth” status. These ultras each hold at least $50 million in personal wealth, and over half of them, 51%, hail from the United States. That U.S. ultra-rich share nearly quadruples China’s ultra-rich population, the world’s second largest.
America’s richest of the rich, in short, dominate the ranks of our global deep-pockets. But the rest of us Americans, cheerleaders for our rich love to assure us, have no cause for unease about that domination. The more wealth that America’s wealthy accumulate, their reasoning goes, the more our rich can invest in creating better futures for ordinary working Americans.
The latest Credit Suisse numbers totally undercut that claim. In other developed nations—societies with the rich holding significantly smaller shares of their national wealth than in the United States—typical people have seen substantially greater growth rates in their personal wealth.
Back in the year 2000, the typical American had a net worth of $46,479. The typical net worth of French adults that year: $51,360. By the end of 2022, the typical French adult held $145,591 in personal wealth. The typical—median—U.S. adult wealth last year: just $107.739. Over that same two-decade-plus span, the typical Dutch median net worth jumped from $44,513 to $120,270, the typical Canadian from $37,295 to $143,862.
The spectacular wealth of America’s wealthy, in other words, is paying no great dividends for average Americans. Those dividends are funneling instead to the top of the U.S. economic ladder.
Just one final illustrative example of that dynamic from the new 2023 Global Wealth Report: Japan’s top 1 percenters hold 18.8% of their nation’s wealth. The U.S. top 1% wealth share? Almost twice as much: 34.2%.
Japan’s most typical adults, meanwhile, hold personal net worths of $124,258, some 15% higher than the $107,739 U.S. wealth median.
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The US Could Soon Have Its First Trillionaire. That's No Cause for Celebration
We should be fearing, not cheering, the prospect of an American trillionaire.
May 28, 2023
It’s been a full decade now since I first predicted — warned, to be a bit more precise — that America would have its first trillionaire before 2040.
I stand by that warning today. Unfortunately, everything I said ten years ago has aged well. Too well. I explained back then how tax policy was supercharging the accumulation of obscene fortunes in America. Policymakers, I noted, had lifted the lid on wealth accumulation by decreasing taxes on inheritances and income from capital. That policy failure would go on to become substantially worse in 2017 with the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Others would see this same ominous trend. In an interview with CNBC, several experts recognized the distinct possibility the world would have its first trillionaire by 2039, the year CNBC would turn 50. They offered various explanations for how that would happen, with most of them agreeing it would “take several Bill Gates-like successes from one individual to reach the trillion-dollar mark.”
I saw things differently, telling CNBC: “It might take the founder of five of today’s Microsofts to reach a trillion, but we’re going to see larger and larger Microsofts.”
More recently, the idea that a larger Microsoft would deliver our first billionaire has gained traction. Three years ago, USA Today reported on predictions that Amazon would raise Jeff Bezos’ wealth to trillionaire level as early as 2026.
Those predictions have turned out to be a bit aggressive — Bezos’ wealth climb has leveled off — but they may have been beneficial in an odd way. Historically, far too many Americans have looked at billionaire wealth the way they look at sports, as I noted in 2014:
The super-rich are setting new records, $10 billion, $50 billion, and soon enough $100 billion. Rather than objecting, our nation celebrates the increasingly obscene fortunes of the super-rich as we do athletes breaking sports records.
Reaching $1 trillion will be what hitting 73 home runs was before we knew Barry Bonds cheated to get there.
Will our first trillion-dollar fortune also be tainted by misdeeds of the achiever? Could that be what finally wakes us from our slumber?
In 2020, with Americans dying in large numbers from the pandemic, Bezos had become to billionaire wealth hoarding what Barry Bonds had become to home run records. As noted by USA Today, the reporting on Bezos becoming the first trillionaire occurred when Amazon workers were publicly protesting over safety issues.
Which caused the appropriate response to his predicted trillionaire status — anger — at least on Twitter. One tweet disdainfully noted: “Jeff Bezos will sometime in the near future have more money than the Netherlands. Totally normal. Nothing out of order here.” Another considered a headline announcing Bezos’ impending trillionaire status the most “disgusting and disturbing” he’d seen.
The reaction to trillionaire talk three years ago, unfortunately, may have been an anomaly, not the turning point I hoped it would be.
A case in point: The Motley Fool, a financial and investing advice company, has recently been promoting investment in a corporation it suggests could be as large as 17 Amazons, with a market capitalization of $17 trillion, an accumulation that would create the world’s first trillionaire. The promotional material doesn’t give the name of the corporation. To find it, you’d at least need to provide an email address, which would mean lots of unwanted promotional emails. Apparently, this corporation has technology that could supercharge artificial intelligence, or AI.
But the identity of that corporation — or the founder who stands to become the first trillionaire — isn’t the point here. After all, absent significant reform of America’s tax policy, we will see our first trillionaire, probably not much more than a decade from now.
Worse, too many folks may think that would be a good thing. In its promotional ad, Motley Fool gushes over how excited the prospect of a $17 trillion corporation headed by a trillionaire has investors, as if the super-rich becoming richer rates as a good thing in and of itself.
Most troubling: Motley Fool is using the prospect of someone achieving a net worth over $1 trillion as a selling point. This sort of advertising works because we have millions of investors out there who emulate the billionaire class.
Which brings us back to tax policy. Halting, then reversing, the obscene concentration of wealth in America will require Americans in overwhelming numbers demanding real tax reform. Without that tax reform, the concentration of wealth will worsen and, before we know it, we’ll see the arrival of our first trillionaire. And as our concentration of wealth worsens, the political power of billionaires will only continue to increase.
We’ll never have the collective mentality, as a nation, to take on the ultra-rich if millions of Americans identify with them and see the chase to become the first trillionaire the same way they see a football team’s pursuit of an undefeated season. We see this same identification in the response of everyday Americans to estate tax reform. In large numbers, many Americans oppose the estate tax because they think it will apply to them one day.
To be sure, many Americans do understand the perils of concentrated wealth. But to make real progress on tax reform, we need more than a bare majority of Americans opposing extreme wealth concentration and supporting higher taxation of the rich. We need to reach the point where for every average American citizen who sees billionaires as role models, another ten see them as the wealth hoarders they are.
Which means we should be fearing, not cheering, the prospect of an American trillionaire.
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