Pearl River The rigged deck of the Trump’s big bad budget bill was the terrible tradeoff that will force the poor to subsidize the rich by extending and enlarging their tax breaks and favored treatments. Nowhere is this more evident than in the galloping growth in the list of billionaires.
Sure, we are afflicted with Trump, Musk, and some of the current US cabinet officers, but a special report and graphic from the Wall Street Journal recently brings the horror home in making the point that they are now everywhere among us. There are so many now that anywhere you throw a rock, you risk hitting one of them, unless you live in North Dakota, where none of them seem to own any property, or what a comedian calls “sub-homes.”
In 2024, there were 1135 of them in the US, up from 927 four years earlier in 2020. It’s not all Wall Street either. 255 live up and down California, beating New York badly. It’s all scary. The only GenZers on the list are two twenty-somethings who are heirs of Koch Industries, the fabulous funders of the right for decades now. 150 of the big buck billionaires are women although 86% are men. Even in this gang, the superrich Daddy Warbucks of the group can look down at the mere billionaires like Lilliputians. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg account for $1trillion of the total themselves, and the richest of the rich top 100 or terrific ten percent are holding on to more than half of the total at close to $4trillion.
Some of this was predictable. In the under-30 crowd, Taylor Swift is right there in the middle of the pack. Who wants to bet that Travis Kelsie will not have to sign a pre-nuptial agreement? Who knew Selena Gomez was a billionaire though? Turns out even though she does some acting and singing, her stash comes from some kind beauty brand. Got me there.
Less of a surprise in this list of no-names and unknowns is LeBron James. Basketball has been bank to him, but even if he hasn’t brought another bag full of trophies to the Lakers, being around Hollywood has also fattened his stash by getting him deals for podcasts and shows. He may sit in a barbershop chair, but he’s not cutting hair. Somehow Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer manages to have collected more money than Bill Gates, the company’s founder, who at one time was the richest of these rich.
In Arkansas, the heirs of the Waltons still stand out, and it’s well reported that those who drove delivery trucks for Walmart around the northwest Arkansas company’s hub also made billions. Alice Walton seems to be the richest woman in the group with Rob and Jim Walton also in the catbird seats. When it comes to families Walton rules with eight billionaires and almost half-a-trillion in wealth. The other big hitters were the Kochs with 11 at $180 billion, Mars, the candy clan, with seven at $133 billion, Cargill-MacMillan with 14 at $49 billion originally from agricultural products, and the Pritzkers with 11 at $45 billion, initially with Hyatt hotels.
Supposedly, billionaires have donated $185 billion over the last decade with the lion’s share in education, heavily weighed towards creating vouchers and charter schools, healthcare with their names on the building, social services, I wonder what and where, and similar things. Their impact on politics and our democracy is harder to measure whether it’s Soros, Bloomberg, the Kochs, Musk, or the big bopper, Trump himself, but it’s hard to leach out any self-interest.
It’s hard not to believe with this much money sloshing around that it’s mainly about letting them sail on top, while the rest of us on the bottom need to swim hard to keep from drowning.