“The 793 billionaires that existed in 2009 then had combined wealth of $2.4 trillion, while the 3,000-plus billionaires of 2025 now enjoy combined wealth of $16.1 trillion—an increase of over 570%.”
— “Sun Valley, billionaire ‘summer camp,’ out of step with public mood,” Fast Company
For context, if you had a trillion dollars and spent $1,000 every single day, it would take you nearly 2.7 million years to run out of money.
Or how about this: If you counted one number per second, nonstop, it would take you about 31,700 years to reach a trillion. That’s longer than all of recorded human history.
These fuckers don’t have one trillion. They have 16.1 of them.
If they spent $1,000 a day, it would take them 44 million years to spend $16.1 trillion. The Alps barely existed 44 million years ago.
If you counted one number per second, nonstop, it would take you roughly 510,000 years. Homo sapiens didn’t exist 510,000 years ago.
A Trillion is Just the Beginning
I’ve said it before, as have people much more influential than me: “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”
And between 2009 and 2025, there were an awful lot of failures.
Remember 2009? Bank executives and their lackeys had just torched the global economy, and instead of jail time, they received $440 billion in TARP, plus trillions more in Fed liquidity. Politicians literally wrote checks, drawn on our taxes, to bankroll the same executives who caused the crash. AIG alone received $170 billion. The bankers then turned around and used our money to hand themselves billions in bonuses. Citigroup transferred $5.3 billion from taxpayers to executives; Bank of America’s executives stole $3.3 billion; and Merrill Lynch executives gave themselves $3.6 billion, despite losing over $30 billion.
Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) tried to cap the bonuses, but he conveniently inserted a loophole that exempted existing contracts. And guess what? He’d received more money from AIG than anyone else in Congress.
The uproar was immense (remember the Tea Party?), so some members of Congress tried to act by passing the Dodd-Frank Act to “rein in” Wall Street. But the millionaires and billionaires weren’t about to go quietly. They flooded Washington with cash, spending over $1 billion to neuter the new rules. Four years later, Citigroup literally wrote the legislation that repealed parts of the law. Lawmakers who voted “Yes” on Citigroups’ amendment received, on average, three to four times more money from Wall Street than those who voted “No.” What a coincidence.
Of course, in January 2010, five members of the Supreme Court, including two of whom (Alito and Thomas) can fairly be categorized as “billionaire sponsored,” voted to overwhelm American politics with corporate money through the Citizens United ruling. The ruling amplified the influence of Wall Street, and, as Senator Bernie Sanders has said, essentially legalized bribery in America, making it easier for Citigroup and the others to continue their economic coup.
The Trump Era
By the beginning of the Trump Era in 2017, Wall Street was back to record profits and had friends in the highest places. A former Goldman Sachs executive was in charge of the Treasury Department, giving bank lobbyists the ability to write wish lists for deregulation. Congress rolled back oversight of regional banks in 2018 and freed banks with over $250 billion in assets from the rigorous stress tests designed to prevent another 2008-level failure (too big to fail become too big to test). The politicians who crossed the aisle to support the legislation were absolutely flush with bank donations that year. We talked about “Main Street vs Wall Street,” but it was more like “Ant vs Foot.”
We can’t forget the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, legislation that might as well have had Wall Street’s logo on the title page. The corporate tax rate plunged from 35% to 21%, delivering an estimated $2 trillion windfall over a decade. The six biggest U.S. banks alone booked $32 billion in tax savings by 2019, money they promptly funneled into executive bonuses and share buybacks (President Trump asked the leader of JP Morgan to say “Thank you”). Meanwhile, ordinary Americans saw a shrink-and-run pay bump that evaporated once the dust settled. Once again, policy was engineered top-down to pour public revenue into private wallets.
Then came the pandemic crash in 2020. While rushing to save the country’s economy, the government released trillions in liquidity and corporate aid, which, while it stabilized people’s ability to pay their rent and feed their families, also funneled untold wealth to billionaires and big corporations. Many of them ended 2020 richer than ever.
The Fed’s interventions succeed in re-inflating asset prices, which benefitted investors more than anyone else in the economy. By mid-2020, Wall Street had rebounded sharply, but the average person was still hurting.
The potential conflicts of interest barely got a shrug in Washington’s urgency to “do something.” President Trump even did what he always does: he fired the independent inspector general assigned to monitor the COVID funds. The person was on the job for roughly a week. As a result, Trump removed all accountability from the millionaires and billionaires who took the country’s money.
Wealth inequality soared during COVID. While millions were locked in their homes or dying at overstuffed and under-resourced hospitals, U.S.-based billionaires saw their accumulated wealth jump by about 70% from mid-March 2020 to October 2021. This equated to a $2 trillion gain for 700+ individuals (all of whom already had more than a billion dollars).
Crisis came, and the pattern re-asserted itself: American politicians protect capital over labor, shareholders over citizens. The moral hazards revealed in 2008 were supposed to have taught us a lesson, but a dozen years later, and once again, private gains came from socialized losses.
The Biden Era
Then it was 2023-2024, and while the nation continued to deal with its Trumpian/COVID hangover, we were faced with the crises of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Both freed from strict oversight by that 2018 law, they took on too much risk and collapsed, threatening wider damage in the economy. Taxpayers had to backstop all their depositors to prevent panic. And who were their depositors? Tech entrepreneurs and executives, venture capital firms, wineries, media companies, and other very wealthy individuals and corporations. In other words, it was another publicly-funded bailout.
To be fair, Biden’s Build Back Better bill included a stock buyback surcharge, created a 15% minimum tax on corporations with over $1 billion in profits, and established a 5% surtax on adjusted gross incomes over $10 million (and 8% above $25 million), but the Democrats couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get it passed through Congress. Instead, we got the Inflation Reduction Act, which included the 15% minimum tax on high-profit corporations and invested $80 billion in the IRS to chase down taxes from high-income individuals. It did not claw back funds from individual billionaires, however.
One Big Beautiful Bill
With President Trump in complete charge of the Republican Party, and the Republicans in complete control of Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, our national politicians gave the wealthy one big beautiful bill in 2025. They preserved and extended the tax cuts from Trump’s first term, increased the country’s debt limit by $5 trillion (which will force future “austerity” cuts on ordinary Americans), rolled back drug-price reforms to save the millionaires and billionaires in Big Pharma over $5 billion at the expense of older Americans, and dedicated roughly $320 million to the Pentagon and immigration enforcement, channelling direct public funds to corporate contractors, private prison operators, and weapons manufacturers.
At over 950 pages, there are dozens of more ways that the uber-wealthy will benefit from the “one big beautiful bill.” The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported that Americans with the least amount of resources will lose money every year due to the bill, while Americans with the most resources will receive the biggest boost. Families earning less than $25,000 a year will lose $1,600 each year due to the One Big Beautiful Bill; families with incomes over $700,000 a year will receive $12,000 each year thanks to the bill.
That doesn’t include the cruel cuts to services that will make life harder for every working American, just so millionaires and billionaires can have more money in their pockets.
The Grotesque Trends
The trends from 2008-2025 are clear. First, there’s the shameless self-enrichment. Executives and shareholders cash in with public funds meant to stabilize the system. It’s not just AIG and others using funds for executive bonuses. It’s companies using tax cut savings for stock buybacks that enrich their investors.
Second, there’s the blatant pay-to-play politics. Time and time again, policies that help the financial elite are smeared with the greasy fingerprints of heavy lobbying and campaign cash. This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s Citizens United and the cynicism of national politicians.
Finally, there’s the accountability vacuum. Forget Epstein; not a single banker or executive went to jail for destroying the pensions and savings of tens of millions of Americans, nor for the obvious excess and fraud (President Trump, with his 37 felony convictions for fraud, included). Regulators had their teeth and claws removed, and any new watchdogs were either muzzled or, like the independent inspector general, taken behind the woodshed and shot.
Billionaires learned their lesson, all right. They learned they could write the rules to their liking. If trouble came, Federal politicians would do anything to prevent them from falling. Billionaires did not just survive these past 12 years. They engineered the system to make themselves richer. They funded the campaigns, wrote the laws, dodged the taxes, crashed the system, and got paid for all of it. Over and over and over again.
3,000 billionaires with $16.1 trillion isn’t an accident. It’s an oligarchy.
It didn’t have to be this way, and it sure as hell doesn’t have to stay this way.