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extreme wealth
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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