What to Think about Billionaires

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What to Think about Billionaires
Consider the following for our conversation.
A few words about China:
In 2025 alone, mainland China minted 70 new billionaires, bringing the total to 470, according to a report by UBS, a bank. (America has 924.) These billionaires alone have amassed some $1.8trn. In the decade beginning in 2025, Chinese with a net worth of more than $5m will pass on $2.1trn, according to estimates from Altrata, a wealth-intelligence firm. Wealth is becoming more concentrated. In 2024 the top 1% in China held 30% of the wealth and the top 10% held 68%, according to estimates from the World Inequality Database overseen by Thomas Piketty, a French economist. That’s up from 16% and 41%, respectively, three decades before.
The US and the rest of the world:
From Britain and Denmark to blue state America, calls for new levies on the top 0.01 per cent of society are growing louder. In simple terms, it seems like a clear solution for cash-strapped governments and voters drowning under never-ending price hikes. But major backlash is brewing. The gilded class meanwhile keeps getting richer. The world’s wealthiest 500 people raked in another US$2.2 trillion just last year, ballooning their collective net worth to nearly US$12 trillion. They are also finding ever more ways to shape public policy and influence the media in their interests. But political organizers are now drawing global attention by trying to advance a ballot initiative in California to have voters decide in November (2026) whether to apply a one-time, five per cent tax on the state’s wealthiest residents. The goal is to raise US$100 billion to compensate for the Trump administration’s deep cuts to Medicaid (costs $894 billion). Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic congressman Ro Khanna — who represents Silicon Valley — are aiming even higher. They’ve proposed federal legislation to enact a five per cent annual wealth tax on all U.S. billionaires (Taxing ‘wealth’ is a complicated proposition).The two lawmakers claim it would raise US$4.4 trillion over a decade to be redistributed to working and middle-class families. The California initiative might just become reality. Although, the state’s ultra-rich and pro-corporate lobbyists are keen to shoot it down. Google co-founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page have reportedly moved their homes to Miami along with numerous business assets. David Sacks, a prominent venture capitalist who doubles as the Trump administration’s AI and crypto currency czar, has also relocated. Libertarian serial tech investor Peter Thiel has donated US$3 million to lobby groups fighting the proposal. Even Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to distance himself from it. The rising Democratic star fears immense capital flight will shrink the tax base and straitjacket government spending. “The fact is it actually will reduce investments in education,” Newsom has warned. “It will reduce investments in teachers and librarians, childcare. It will reduce investments in firefighting and police.” By some counts, the threat of the tax alone has already convinced individuals worth a combined US$1 trillion to flee to low-tax jurisdictions like Texas and Florida. Indeed, past experiments in wealth taxes have produced mixed results — at best. “Trying to fill budgetary gaps by soaking the rich will not work,” cautioned The Economist in February (2026). “It will raise less money than expected, damage economies and cause long-term political harm.” That may all be true. But liberal democracies everywhere are noticeably failing to find any solutions — even symbolic ones — to tame populist rage over widening chasms of inequality. This also has obvious destabilizing effects. It doesn’t help that billionaires are running roughshod over institutions or indulging in vanity projects like space tourism when most citizens are struggling and the planet burns. A 2024 study from Oxfam International found that billionaires’ lifestyles emit more carbon emissions in 90 minutes than the average person does in a lifetime. “The super-rich are treating our planet like their personal playground, setting it ablaze for pleasure and profit. Their dirty investments and luxury toys — private jets and yachts — aren’t just symbols of excess; they’re a direct threat to people and the planet,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar at the time. This was most stark during the heights of the pandemic in 2020. As the world shut down and governments mortgaged their citizens’ futures to keep economies afloat, 131 billionaires globally doubled their wealth. This as nearly 97 million people was newly thrown into extreme poverty. In May 2024, the Government of Canada’s future planning centre released a report assessing 35 society-altering disruptions that could occur within the next decade. Topping the list, in the next three to five years, is computer-generated deep fakes destroying people’s ability to tell fact from fiction. Following that — in terms of both severity of impact and highest likelihood — were people unable to afford to live on their own, an epidemic of mental health problems and billionaires running the world. It seems all of those corrosive dynamics are already here. “The scarce resources we have should be used to prioritize the basic needs of people in poverty and to create what is of societal value rather than serve the frivolous desires of the ultra-rich,” Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights told The Guardian in an interview earlier this month. It’s a wonderful vision. But California’s example signals the world’s most privileged people will instinctively do whatever they can to derail it. (Kyle Volpi Hiebert is a Montreal-based political risk analyst focused on globalization, conflict and emerging technologies).
Campaign Finance issue:
Several democracies have introduced strict caps or complete bans on large private donations to political parties and candidates. France limits contributions to $10,000, Canada $1750, similarly with Belgium, Portugal, and South Korea. Corporate donations are banned.
The US: Five presidential elections ago, before a Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling that lifted many remaining campaign finance restrictions; the share of billionaire spending was almost zero — 0.3 percent, to be precise. In 2024, 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions — in federal elections either directly or through political action committees. The US is a place where wealthy people are able to spend millions of dollars to essentially direct how the government runs — without breaking any laws. The result is ultra wealthy people, especially in the tech and finance industry, who aligned with Mr. Trump’s tax and deregulation policies being awarded roles in his administration.
Philanthropy issue:
Upside story;
George Soros worth $7.5 bil gave away 76% of their net worth, Lynn and Stacy Schusterman 4.4 bil gave 47%, McKenzie Scott 30.9 bil gave 46%, John and Laura Arnold 2.9 bil gave 44%. Seventeen of the top 25 givers have given away at least 10% of their net worth.
Downside Story;
The ‘Giving Pledge” has become out of fashion. Brian Armstrong, the co-founder of coinbase has unsigned, Larry Ellison is amending his Pledge, Scott Besant is promoying ‘Trump Accounts” that feed nest eggs for lower income children, Dario Amodei of Anthropic adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless. Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist regularly complains about the rise of ‘woke’ ideology that turns people against the tech sector and the wealthy.
Taxes: Professor Madoff, Boston College (THE SECOND ESTATE; How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy) Via NYTs article March 15,2026.
Billionaires (and multi-millionaires) pay themselves little or nothing in salary, instead amassing wealth mainly in stock shares and options. For day-to-day expenses, to say nothing of yachts and planes and private islands, billionaires have excellent options, from a tax standpoint, to raise cash. The most straightforward is to sell assets. Even if they sell hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock or other assets, like art collections**, they will be taxed at a low federal rate for long-term capital gains** — an advantage often advocated by economists as an incentive for investment. But this preferential treatment makes an already tilted playing field even steeper. “Capital gains are taxed at much lower rates than earnings from work,” Professor Madoff writes. “Because of this difference in tax treatment, someone who earns $50,000 from working a job pays higher taxes than someone who makes $50,000 from selling an investment.” Furthermore, the truly rich may never need to sell their assets. Instead, banks and private credit firms will happily lend money at favorable rates, using wealth as collateral. And as long as their wealth grows at a higher rate than the interest rate charged on their loan, they become richer, tax-free. Under current rules, managers of private equity, venture capital and hedge funds receive a fat share of their funds’ profits for their work, which they get to call “carried interest.” As a consequence, they pay lower tax rates.
Generations of untamed wealth
There’s a strategy for billionaire families seeking true, intergenerational wealth to avoid taxes forever. It’s called “buy, borrow and die.” Say you’re already rich, have accumulated assets and have borrowed against them. That covers “buy” and “borrow.” Now for the nasty part: Even billionaires die. Billionaires can pass these holdings on to their heirs without ever having paid tax on their gains. And for the heirs, the appreciated value of the holdings becomes the base against which future gains and losses are measured.