There are nuanced conversations to be had in defining how much is too much when it comes to personal wealth. Today, we’re ready to take on that challenge and start by saying this: $1 billion is more than enough.
It’s hard to believe, but the New York City mayoral election, which has captured the attention and imagination of people all around the world, is less than two weeks away. Early voting begins this Saturday, October 25th, and polls will close on Tuesday, November 4th, at 9 PM ET.
You may recall that, a few weeks back, we shared our thoughts about how Zohran Mamdani’s focus on bread-and-butter economic policies, like raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour and increasing taxes on the wealthiest 1% of residents, provides a good template for Democrats looking to win back the trust of voters. But, there’s another part of Zohran’s campaign that has stuck with us, too. Back in June, in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the current front-runner in the race said, “I don’t think we should have billionaires.”
Zohran’s comment largely aligns with how we feel about billionaires. But to be extra clear and precise on where exactly we stand, the popular phrase “Every billionaire is a policy failure” best captures our sentiments on the question of whether billionaires should exist. Our Founder and President, Erica Payne, said as much last week at the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group. Check out her remarks below, beginning at the 2:35 mark.
For this week’s Closer Look, we want to explain what we and others mean by this phrase and why we believe the existence of billionaires is a problem in America. We’ll start by laying the foundation for our argument by putting into perspective just how much money $1 billion is. We’ll then explain why $1 billion is more than enough money to incentivize people to innovate, and then close by identifying who the real culprits are behind America’s billionaire problem: compliant politicians on both sides of the aisle.
How much is $1 billion really?
It is hard for the human mind to fully grasp just how much money $1,000,000,000 really is. $1,000,000 is somewhat easy—it’s a thousand sets of a thousand dollars. But a thousand sets of a million dollars is another story.
In the past, we’ve found that analogies are helpful in demonstrating just how large $1 billion actually is, so we’ll offer you a few today:
- The median full-time American worker earns $62,192 a year. To make $1 billion, they would need to work 16,079 years. Going back in time, that would mean they’d have to start working in the Upper Paleolithic era.
- In 2024, CEOs at the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay were paid on average $17.2 million. Even they would need to work 58 years to make $1 billion.
- The average price for a new car in America is $50,080. You could buy 19,968 of them with $1 billion.
- Pretend you earn $1 every second. It would take you a little over 11 days to make $1,000,000. It would take you close to 32 years to make $1,000,000,000.
Last month, we were bombarded with headlines about the explosion of billionaire wealth in America. This included the news that Elon Musk could become a trillionaire. If it takes all this time and all these resources to earn $1 billion, imagine what it would take for the average person to become a trillionaire.
This TikTok perfectly summarizes just how rapidly the billionaire class has grown over the past few decades
You don’t need $1 billion as an incentive
People need financial incentives to work hard, innovate, and create new products which ultimately benefit the rest of society. That’s always been the case. People start new businesses for all sorts of reasons—for personal fulfillment, to better their communities, for fame, etc.—but there’s no getting around the fact that one of the biggest reasons is the potential to get rich.
We don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with this. We have no problem with people being rich or with some degree of economic inequality in our society. In November 2023, our Chair, Morris Pearl, said as much when he testified before the Senate Finance Committee: “To be clear, I am not against being rich. I lead an organization of millionaires. We know that being rich is great, and we recommend that everyone try it.”
We do, however, have a problem with the extreme level that inequality has reached in America today, and with the fact that some financial rewards—particularly for the billionaire class—have just simply become too handsome.
Past a certain point, massive payouts arguably no longer incentivize innovation, and that definitely includes billion-dollar payouts. Do you think Lebron James would stop playing basketball if he knew he could only earn $700 million instead of his cool $1.3 billion? Do you think Taylor Swift would not have released her latest album if she could only make $800 million instead of $1.6 billion? Do you think Bill Gates would not have started Microsoft back in the day if he knew he’d only amass $999 million as opposed to $106 billion?
Our member Abigail Disney said it best when she was profiled by The Guardian this past April:
“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath. Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of. And so by just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire. It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”
When epically handsome rewards no longer incentivize innovation, they instead begin to incentivize something a little more sinister: wielding the power that comes with great wealth to harm the economy, our democracy, and the environment.
The real villains in the story of billionaires are politicians
It makes us uncomfortable to think that 902 people in America have (at least) 16,079 years’ worth of money at the same time that 37 million people live in poverty, 67% of the country lives paycheck to paycheck, and 37% of Americans can’t cover a $400 financial emergency. But what makes us even more uncomfortable is the fact that this state of affairs was by no means inevitable.
This is what we mean when we say that every billionaire is a policy failure. The existence of billionaires in the face of so much abject suffering didn’t have to happen, and policies could have been enacted over the years that would have both lifted the bottom of society and put a check on the top.
Which brings us to who we blame for the billionaire problem in America: politicians.
Over the years, politicians of both parties have failed to do anything meaningful to stem the growth of inequality and the billionaire class, and instead have passed policies that have actually accelerated it. They have let the minimum wage sit at a deplorably low $7.25 an hour for over 16 years. They ripped apart our tax code to such a degree that billionaires now pay lower tax rates than all other income groups. They failed to protect and strengthen unions. They enabled increasingly obscene executive pay. They greenlit corporate monopolization and took away just about every guardrail that we had in place in our financial system to prevent another Great Depression. The list goes on.
When we say “Every billionaire is a policy failure,” we often get accused of hating billionaires. This is NOT what we are doing, nor is this our intention. We are not pointing the finger at billionaires personally for creating our inequality crisis, nor are we trying to paint them all as bad people who did nefarious things to amass so much wealth. Rather, if we are “hating” on anything, it is the system that has enabled the existence of billionaires in the first place.
Some billionaires have definitely done ethically questionable things to attain their wealth status. Elon Musk is notoriously anti-union and his companies have been accused of union busting. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon workers have been known to pee in bottles and sleep in their cars. But as far as we know, many billionaires are good and honest people who haven’t done anything wicked; they’ve just been extremely lucky winners of an extremely rigged system.
Many billionaires recognize the policy failure inherent in their class. When Yvon Chouinard, the founder of outdoor apparel company Patagonia, was placed on the Forbes 2017 billionaire list, he described it as “one of the worst days of his life.” In a deliberate effort to get off the list, in 2022, he and his family transferred their ownership of Patagonia to a trust and non-profit which use the company’s profits to combat climate change.
That said, we would love to have Yvon Chouinard and other socially-conscious billionaires join our ranks! If you recognize the problem of inequality and want to be part of the solution, you’ll fit right in here at Patriotic Millionaires.
Conclusion
We believe there is such a thing as too much wealth. As we mentioned earlier, beyond a certain point, wealth becomes corrosive and gives people the power to “buy” just about every aspect of our society. They can buy up major media and social media platforms and control what we see, read, and think. They can buy our democracy by giving massive campaign contributions to friendly electoral candidates. And they can even “buy” our planet by sopping up an exorbitant amount of natural resources to maintain their luxurious lifestyles.
Through our “Extreme Wealth Line” initiative, we are hard at work trying to figure out where that point lies. One of our members, Scott Ellis, recently wrote an opinion piece for TIME Magazine in which he argued that $30 million was the tipping point and sufficient. In his words, “With $30 million, a household can secure every conceivable comfort: homes, education, travel, even luxuries most people never dream of. Beyond that point, wealth shifts from living well to wielding power.”
Time will tell whether the findings from our initiative align with Scott’s belief. In the meantime, we hope that we can all at least agree that $1 billion is, if not too much, more than enough, and that every billionaire really is a policy failure.