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TRILLIONAIRE COMETH, DEMOCRACY GOETH  
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Bob Lord
December 26, 2025
Inequality.org
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_ With the arrival of our first trillionaire fast approaching,
America’s democracy is hanging by a thread. _

Disgustingly rich … Musk. , Sean Simmers/AP

 

I wrote my first post for _Inequality.org_, Our First Trillionaire:
Only a Matter of Time
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twelve 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
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$750 billion. That total represents an annual average increase of 23
percent 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
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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.

“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
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The nation’s top .00001 percent — a mere 19 households — has
increased its share of America’s wealth from 0.1 percent in 1982 to
1.81 percent 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 percent per year on average.
To achieve that rate of wealth share growth, the wealth of our top
.00001 percent — one ten-millionth of America’s households — has
had to grow at an average rate nearly 7 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 percent comprise 5 percent of America’s top .0002 percent
(380 households, or roughly, the _Forbes_ 400). Their share of the
wealth of that larger group of billionaires now stands at about 50
percent 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
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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 percent.
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 U.S. 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 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
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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 percent 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 U.S. 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
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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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BOB LORD, AN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES ASSOCIATE FELLOW, CURRENTLY
SERVES AS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR TAX POLICY AT PATRIOTIC
MILLIONAIRES.

* Elon Musk; US Oligarchy; Trillionaires; Tax Policy;
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