The first trillionaire – no big deal?

Like slavery, massive corruption or reckless imperialism, draconian income inequality is a compound, internal cancer that corrodes democracy, vetoing both the idea and delivery of positive government actions

How curious, and telling, the shocking news a month ago that one earthing boasts control over a trillion dollars hardly drew weeks of headlines! Let alone shock, awe and outrage, even demands for reform. This breakthrough whopper carries both real-world and symbolic impacts. When, in short, is way, way too much too much – when do voters regain control over their world? If Musk the half-trillionaire in 2024 spends $300+ million rigging campaigns, why not a billion or more now, a rounding error. Even were Musk not a badly-educated, impulsive, alt-right, white supremacist – keen to spawn a legion of Muskettoes, any sovereign republic that tolerates one person controlling a trillion dollars jeopardizes its democratic integrity. A wayward trillionaire poses a pandemic threat with global obsessions.

Already, the immense political, cultural and administrative mayhem from barely dozens of fat cats in the 50 to 100 billion class is indisputable, worshipping growing profits, market dominance and corporate leverage over lawmakers. Ditto, the White House AI/tariff/trade nonsense clown making a daily fool of himself, spewing forth outrageous poppycock while rushing to destroy whatever he can’t plaster his name on. Which is more ominous – the world’s first trillionaire or the media negligence that obscures this dire scoop as just another capitalistic triumph? Why not a two trillionaire; why not a fistful of trillionaire players? When does over the top crony capitalism explode its own cork, forcing reforms before the game is over?

Really, who’s counting?

Facts: A trillion dollars is a billion times a thousand, just as a billion is a thousand times a million. What ten decades ago was a fabulous, even legendary threshold – a million bucks – is now chump change. Per google, in 1980, the US had all of 13 billionaires; by 1987, the global count was 140 individuals. Today, worldwide billionaires have surged past 3,400 and the 66 American tycoons in 1990 exploded to over 900 now. This drastic, even revolutionary lurch concentrates more wealth, more widely than ever in human history. Does big money not grow on big trees? The first billionaire, John Rockefeller in 1920, has been displaced by 900 others, the top ten oligarchs today with far, far more (networked) buying power. Overall, the combined global billionaire wealth tops $20 trillion, equal to 2/3s of the total 2025 US GDP of $30 trillion.

What will it take for centrist voters to ingest how unequal distribution of treasure means unequal distribution of power and influence? The Second Coming? How many really think their family interests parallel the obscene family wealth of unelected, unaccountable richies? Where’s the uproar when one wealth machine dwarfs the economic activity of a large majority of the world’s nations? Only 40 of the largest global economies boast an annual GDP that exceeds Musk’s net wealth, more than the household wealth of 175 countries globally. His net worth surpasses that of major countries, larger than GDP of nearly all African nations combined, roughly equal to the bottom half of the globe’s combined 3.8 billion population. Assuming Musk earns merely 10% annually (having gained far more this year after the SpaceX IPO), or 100 billion dollars per year, what stops this cash machine from doubling every decade, if not sooner. That would make him a double trillionaire before reaching the age of 64 (and the fattest cats, like Trump or Rupert Murdoch never retire until they go senile or drop dead).

Immensely rich and stingy

Contrary to the most ruthless 19th C robber barons, many renowned for high philanthropic sharing, Musk donated a mere $100 million in Tesla stock to undisclosed charities in 2025. His namesake philanthropic vehicle, the Musk Foundation, distributed a record $474 million in 2024, mostly funneled to organizations he personally controls. Despite $14 billion in assets, the Musk Foundation has repeatedly fallen short of the minimum 5% annual payout required for U.S. private foundations. During the 2024 election cycle, he made over $288 million in political donations, with an additional $45.3 million to super PACS in 2025. More criminally, Musk spearheaded a controversial daily million-dollar giveaway to buy votes in swing states that prompted legal blowback. Naturally, EM has not donated money to “end world hunger,” though the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) reports that $20 billion could significantly solve global famine. Instead, since then, Musk orchestrated a DOGE dismantling and defunding, of which the USAID cutbacks ALONE may result in 14 million preventable deaths by 2030, having ended global health, disease treatment, and emergency food programs. In short, amassing of world treasures doesn’t stop one from getting more shortsighted, insular, cruel and homicidal (by design or negligence).

Thus, doubling Musk’s wealth, with its anti-empathy mania, could well double the menace, the inhumanity and the damage to an already besieged democratic system. Did not Musk boldly declare on The Joe Rogan Experience (February 2025) that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”? Strange from an ex-atheist who considers himself a “cultural Christian” and claims to think Jesus’ teaching are “good and wise,” well, except for that annoying empathy part about caring for the sick and needy. How is this not opposite the Gospel, pushing survival of the richest and fattest? Public health researchers estimate that parallel GOP budget and health care proposals could produce 51,000 annual, preventable US deaths – thanks to shredding Affordable Care Act premiums, food/nutrition programs, DOGE devastation, and less support for research, hospitals and clinics.

The big picture, just as ugly

As economic professor Gabriel Zucman reminds us with his essay, “The era of trillionaires will be dire for democracy:”

There is a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy. Extreme wealth is always an extreme power. It’s the power to stifle competition, the power to shape public discourse, the power to influence policy making, the power to buy elections, the power to stall social progress.

This problem is not new: all the thinkers of democracy, from Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago to Lea Ypi at the London School of Economics today, have highlighted the corrosive nature of extreme wealth for society. James Madison, the father of the US constitution and a hero to today’s conservatives, memorably wrote that wealth inequality is as poisonous for democracy as war. . . .The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes.

Zucman then fleshes in why today eclipses the past:

The [inequality] explosion has been even bigger in the United States, where the wealth of the super-rich now far exceeds its peak of the beginning of the 20th century. At the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, the four largest American fortunes owned wealth equivalent to 4% of US GDP. Today, that same tiny fraction of the population, the top 0.00001% – which now includes 19 households – could buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the US.

. . .When the power of wealth is wielded by sociopaths, the consequences are a matter of life and death. But the individual merits or kindness of billionaires are in fact irrelevant. No one should want to live in a society where one single individual can be worth $1tn, no matter their personal virtues: such levels invariably skew power, distort markets and sap our democratic ideals.

His conclusions are indisputable (except by billionaires): “It is time to break decisively with the perverse logic in which retirees, the poor or immigrants are expected to balance the budget, while the rich are to be allowed to live [relatively] tax-free in their own parallel society.”

Since America resists internalizing downsides to our predatory capitalism, even with blatant government thumbs on the scale, let’s consider what makes a greedy business type into a billionaire. Nearly all come from wealth, funded by loans from family and friends, with enough education to know what’s up, how to secure staff support then above all avoid whopping blunders. Some crypto billionaires come from modest homes, as do top athletes. Billionaires born poor include: Oprah Winfrey, Howard Schultz, Sheldon Adelson and Ralph Lauren. The range of “modestly-born billionaires” is diverse, from actors (Tyler Perry, Jay-Z, Jamie Gertz, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Seinfeld, and Dwayne Johnson), to performers (Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé), music/fashion integrators (Kanye West, Rihanna) athletes (LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Roger Federer), movie makers (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas), author J.K. Rowling and “famous person” Kim Kardashian.

At least two ex-billionaires squandered affluence, ending up in jail (Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes). Another noteworthy criminal billionaire, yet to lose his money and still at large, specializes in real estate connivance, junk impresario and political mockery, with a sleepy day job as president of the USA. The arc of justice exists but it’s glacial and timing not easy to predict. Just like Trump taints all politicians with the worst brush, so Musk makes all billionaires look even more regressive than they need to be to stay rich.