Trillionaires Should Exist

Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren shared on Wednesday a week-old CNBC piece titled, “The world will have its first trillionaire within a decade, but poverty won’t be eradicated for another 229 years, report finds” that is just utter rubbish. Naturally, the report comes from Oxfam, the part-time prostitution ring and part-time poverty NGO that has a vested interest in the elevation of poverty awareness and wealth envy.

The CNBC piece reads:

In just three years, the world has witnessed a “supercharged surge in extreme wealth,” new data shows.

In the U.S. alone, billionaires are 46% richer than they were in 2020, while the three wealthiest men — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison — have increased their net worth by 84%, a recent Oxfam report on global inequality found.

Yet, despite the fact that America ranks first as the richest nation in the world in terms of gross domestic product, 37.9 million Americans live in poverty, accounting for 11.5% of the total population, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“We’re witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation and war, while billionaires’ fortunes boom,” said Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar.

One, as a practical matter, give this inflation enough time, and we’ll all be trillionaires. Two, the phrase “X group shouldn’t exist” is not a place political language should go. When discussing wealth, this dogma was applied to billionaires and has become increasingly popular among the activist Left on Reddit, Tumblr, Teen Vogue, and the like, but it shows up in slightly more serious settings such as the British parliament. The complaint is always the same: Rich men are getting richer. Yes, those who own successful businesses and have funds available to invest typically do well for themselves. The Rule of 72, an estimate of how long it should take to double one’s money in an index fund, is not a secret reserved for the ultra-rich.

But we all know that these complaints about the wealthiest are insincere — the grousing is envy and intra–social circle virtue signaling for those a tier below the self-made billionaires. No one hates the ultra-wealthy as much as the almost-as-wealthy trust-fund class:

In an open letter to political leaders gathered at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, more than 250 billionaires and millionaires said that they wished to deliver a clear message, “Tax our extreme wealth.”

The signatories of the letter, entitled “Proud To Pay More,” span 17 countries and include Disney heir Abigail Disney, screenwriter Simon Pegg and Valerie Rockefeller, an heir to the famed U.S. family.

Please, do donate your estates. Or don’t. Just stop pretending you’re good people for saying those slightly better off than yourselves are villains for owning stakes in companies that improve the quality of life for billions. (For those who like a deeper dive on the subject, Dominic Pino says as much more eloquently in a longer format here.)

Trillionaires are just fine because the existence of such means that the total pie has grown; we all become richer. Anyone who has a piece of Amazon, Walmart, Nvidia, or Boston Beer in his retirement funds is enriched by the same forces that turn a billionaire into a trillionaire. Rich men don’t keep their money in a dragon’s horde; instead, their valuation is attached to companies they need to see continuously grow.

One could point Warren and Clinton to the Tenth Commandment, but they’ve proven such profound innumeracy that double-digits might be beyond them.