Trillionaire Cometh, Democracy Goeth

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 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, 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 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.