Billionaires control a massive and growing share of global wealth. The most affluent 1% of adults control roughly half the world’s assets, while the richest 0.001% have three times more than the world’s poorest 50%. The rich accumulate assets at almost double the rate of everyone else, so extreme concentrations of wealth worsen from month to month.

Equality brings benefits like stronger economies, healthier societies, and improved individual well-being. It ensures fair resource and opportunity distribution, reduces social problems, and fosters a more productive, stable, and humane environment for everyone.

An essay published in The New York Times includes:

Billionaires had a great thing going. The ruling in the 2010 Citizens United case, among others, invited the super rich to exert all the influence on policy and politics that their money could buy — and then enjoy all the wealth that influence secured for them in return. Thanks to ever-more-obliging tax policies, the billionaire class grew absurdly rich over the years that followed. In the last five years alone, the wealthiest 20 Americans increased their net worth from $1.3 trillion to $3 trillion, Forbes reported.

And they did it in many cases without the rest of us even having a clue. It took the investigative reporter Jane Mayer five years of relentless digging to figure out how the Koch brothers gained a chokehold on the Republican Party. The title of her 2016 book, “Dark Money,” became synonymous with a particularly effective form of influence that was all but untraceable. The billionaires could have kept on like that forever. All they had to do was keep their mouths closed.

Today, billionaires are still flooding politics with their money and still reaping the benefits…

The sheer scale of this wealth, which beggars even the riches of the Gilded Age, has induced a kind of class sociopathy.

Peter Thiel, the crucial funder of JD Vance’s ascent, talks extensively about his desire to escape democracy (and politics generally) in favor of some kind of bizarre techno-libertarian future.

Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and former crypto exec, calls for tech elites to take control of cities and states — or build their own — and run them as quasi-private entities.

Alex Karp, who along with Thiel founded the high-flying military intelligence company Palantir, shares his predictions about an apocalyptic clash of civilizations, pausing to brag, “I think I’m the highest-ranked tai chi practitioner in the business world.”

In another era, this would all be laughable. But as the MAGA moment emboldens them to drop any pretense of civic virtue and just go full will-to-power, their nutty ideas are now borderline plausible. And terrifying.

An October 2025 article in The Guardian discusses economic woes experienced by many while the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased 54% in a single year.

In his new book Burned by Billionaires, inequality researcher Chuck Collins argues that the system that perpetuates wealth inequality is purposely opaque to most Americans.

“[The wealthy] have bought their jets, they’ve bought their multiple houses and mansions, but now they’re buying senators and media outlets,” Collins told the Guardian in an interview. “We’re now entering this other chapter of hyper-extraction where the wealthy are preying on the system of inequality.”

Collins, a director at the Institute for Policy Studies, is no stranger to wealth. A great-grandson to Oscar F Mayer, the founder of the meat processing brand, he is a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, a non-partisan group of wealthy Americans who advocate for higher taxes for the rich and higher wages.

…To understand how wealth at the billionaire level works, Collins breaks it down into four parts: getting the wealth, defending the wealth, political capture and hyper-extraction.

When many Americans think about wealth, they usually think solely about the first step, Collins said. People can create a modest amount of wealth through starting or running a successful business, which could get them residency in Affluent Town.

But getting to Billionaireville requires serious investment and strategy in those next three steps. Collins describes what he calls the “wealth defense industry”: the tax lawyers, accountants and wealth managers who use their expertise to ensure that the super rich are being strategic about their taxes.

“Wealth defense professionals use a wide variety of tools such as trusts, offshore bank accounts, anonymous shell companies, charitable foundations and other vehicles to hold assets,” he writes.

To further a wealth defense strategy, a family needs political support. Wealth of over $40m translates to political power, Collins says, and can be used to defend wealth and protect its accumulation…

The effects of this inequality go beyond the wealth getting wealthier. It’s about people paying more for their healthcare, rent and vet bills without seeing any meaningful wage increases. And Collins said the pain and frustration of this kind of society can lead to deep discontent…

A simple person can ask, “Once a few billionaires control most of the world’s wealth, who will sustain their businesses?” Indeed, business enterprises would collapse due to a lack of consumers with the purchasing power to sustain demand.

Ordinary people can control the influence of billionaires through collective action. We can:

• Advocate for systemic policy changes, including stricter tax laws and stronger labor movements;
• Engage in politics, or, at least, communicate regularly with politicians;
• Contribute to grassroots organizations;
• Circulate information reported in this blog post.

If it is to be preserved and protected, we must participate in democracy. This must happen regularly, not just every few years.