On the menu today: A new report wants you to be really mad at America’s top ten billionaires because they’ve made a lot of money in the past year. But if you’ve paid attention to the stock market, a whole lot of people have made a whole lot of money in the past year. Elsewhere, you won’t find the phenomenon of the “drive-by media” here; as we approach the off-year Election Day this newsletter, some follow-ups on previous stories you’ve seen in this space.
America’s Billionaires Had a Good Year Because Lots of Investors Had a Good Year
The likely imminent election of Zohran Mamdani and his “the end goal of seizing the means of production” agenda in New York City is likely to stir a lot of talk about income inequality. Over in the U.K., The Guardian breathlessly reports, “the collective wealth of the top 10 U.S. billionaires has soared by $698 billion in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide.”
The top ten U.S. billionaires got richer over the past year? How could this possibly happen?
Well, Oxfam, Guardian, pull up a chair and I’ll help you understand.
Some of this jump in wealth comes from the value of these billionaires’ ownership of private companies. Elon Musk owns an estimated 42 percent share in SpaceX; when the value of SpaceX increases, the value of his share increases. While estimating the value of a privately held company has its challenges, every company has money coming in from contracts and money going out in the form of expenditures. Every time SpaceX has a successful rocket launch, people conclude that the value of the company is increasing, because they’re having success at doing something that is very difficult. You can find a list of SpaceX contracts here — NASA, the military, the European Space Agency, Turkish communication satellites. The same is true for Musk’s ownership shares in his other private companies, like X, xAI, Neuralink, and the Boring Company.
Tesla is a publicly traded company; if you want to own a small share of the electric carmaker and can afford it, you’re free to do so. Musk owns approximately 12.8 percent to 13 percent of Tesla’s shares, making him the largest shareholder.
On October 31, 2024, the price of a single share of Tesla stock closed at $249.85. This Friday, the stock price closed at $456.56. When a guy who owns the most shares in a particular company has the stock price nearly double over the course of a year, his net worth is going to take a significant jump.
Now, I know this is going to shock you, but when the stock market goes up, a whole lot of investments go up (but not all of them!). America’s top billionaires, who own many, many shares in their own companies and sometimes lots of other countries’ companies’ shares, have a lot more invested in the market than you and I do. So, it’s not exactly surprising that their net worth would increase a lot.
The Oxfam America report doesn’t bother to tell us who those ten billionaires are, or what their wealth level was on the day they started measuring, or what it was when they stopped measuring. Fellas, if that’s the big headline out of the report, I think that sort of information is worth mentioning.
If you investigate the footnotes of the report you find, “Billionaire wealth data are from the Forbes Real Time Billionaires List. Wealth gains were ascertained by comparing net worth on September 30, 2024, with net worth on September 30, 2025.”
So, looking at the list today, with their wealth listed as of this writing:
Elon Musk: $497.4 billion
Larry Ellison: $320 billion
Jeff Bezos: $254.3 billion
Larry Page: $232 billion
Mark Zuckerberg: $222.4 billion
Sergey Brin: $215.2 billion
Jensen Huang: $175.7 billion
Steve Ballmer: $155.9 billion
Michael Dell: $154.5 billion
Warren Buffett: $142.5 billion
(Note that Bernard Arnault and family are on the list at number seven, but he’s French, and this report is about U.S. billionaires.)
That adds up to $2.369 trillion.
Now, this is an imperfect comparison, because maybe these billionaires had a great October. But gaining $698 billion over the course of a year out of $2.3 trillion comes out to a 30 percent increase in their collective wealth.
That’s a really good year for any investor, but in the past year, a whole lot of investors have had good years, and some have had great years.
From October 31, 2024, to Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased from 41,763.46 to 47,562.87 — a gain of 13.89 percent.
The S&P 500 was valued at approximately 5,705.37 on October 31, 2024, and on Friday it closed at 6,840.20 — which comes out to an increase of about 20 percent over the past year.
And then there’s the NASDAQ composite. You often hear it referred to as “the tech-heavy NASQAQ,” and one of the reasons that the NASDAQ includes Intel, Microsoft, EBay, Alphabet (which owns Google), and a bunch of other tech stocks that are riding the AI boom this year. But the NASDAQ also includes Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft-Heinz, and other big-name non-tech companies.
And the NASDAQ Composite has had a phenomenal year. It’s closing value on October 31, 2024, was approximately 18,095.15. On October 31, 2025, the NASDAQ Composite closed at about 23,204.87. That comes out to a gain of 28.3 percent.
The NASDAQ’s 28.3 percent gain of the past year isn’t all that far away from the 30 percent gain in the net worth of the top ten U.S. billionaires over the past year. If you had invested what you could afford to lose into the companies that make up the NASDAQ last Halloween, you wouldn’t have had the wealth of the ten richest billionaires in America by now, but you might have had a rate-of-return comparable to theirs.
I’m always amused by people who fume about the wealth of billionaires and insist that somehow the reason that they’re poor (or, more often, just not as wealthy as they wish they were) is because of those billionaires. What, did Elon Musk mug you on the street one day? Did Warren Buffett snatch your purse and run off with it? Did Larry Ellison and Larry Page break into your house and steal your flat-screen TV?
Some of these guys are billionaires because they built companies that make things that other people find useful and are willing to pay money to get. People like to buy their cool-looking electric cars, the Pentagon finds that SpaceX is a good way to launch satellites, people like being able to order any book in the world on Amazon, and even if we don’t hear from the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” guy any more, people still like buying that company’s computers.
Or, like Warren Buffett, these guys are billionaires because they’re sharp investors. Buffett’s had his share of misses over the years, but he’s built his fortune on searching for and finding good companies with good dividends that are worth holding for the long haul. In 2016, Apple was a well-known and successful company, but Buffett saw growth potential. If you had bought when Buffett did, by this spring, your investment would be worth about seven times what you bought.
Why would you hate this guy for having good judgment about which companies are going to succeed in the long run?
That Oxfam report only mentions just one of those ten billionaires: “Former member of the Trump administration and current world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, spearheaded layoffs and resignations of an estimated more than 200,000 federal workers dismantling a workforce that has traditionally had higher rates of unionization and provided decent jobs for women and historically marginalized groups.”
I notice that some people who really hate Musk don’t have comparable contempt for other billionaires. I can’t help but suspect if that Oxfam report had been entitled, “Isn’t it terrible that Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, Steve Ballmer, and Michael Dell have made a lot of money in the past year?” I think a lot of people would have shrugged.
Newsletter Update, Number One: Paris Thieves Win Some and Louvre Some
We thought those Louvre thieves were so sophisticated. Come on, guys, we watch enough crime dramas to know that the CSI techs can find your DNA if you don’t destroy or otherwise scrub the vehicle you used. From the Wall Street Journal:
The thieves had prepared a jerry can of gasoline to quickly set fire to the truck-mounted lift and other equipment they had just used to penetrate the Louvre Museum and steal France’s crown jewels.
A blaze might have destroyed evidence linking them to the crime. But the clock was ticking. Security forces were closing in. So the thieves made a critical decision: They left the truck intact and jumped on their scooters to make a getaway along the Seine River.
That was one of several mistakes that have provided French authorities with a trove of forensic traces, allowing them to track down and detain three of the suspected thieves in a matter of days, in addition to other people with suspected links to the heist. Paris prosecutors said that over 150 DNA, fingerprint and other samples were gathered at the scene.
Fingerprints? Fingerprints? These guys didn’t remember to wear gloves?
Right now, we’re all picturing them back at the hideout with the jewels, with Jean Reno berating Gérard Depardieu for his sloppiness, while Vincent Cassel and Christopher Lambert glower in frustration:
. . . .Despite the missteps, investigators still haven’t tracked down the $102 million worth of royal and Napoleonic-era jewels that disappeared from one of the world’s most closely watched museums.
“Brick by brick, the investigation is taking shape and closing in on those who may be involved,” Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said.
I suspect that right now, the screenwriters pitching Netflix are desperately rewriting their scripts, from a thriller about a cool erudite team pulling off the heist of the century to a comedy about a gang of bumbling misfits, in way over their heads.
Newsletter Update, Number Two: One Less Mississippi Monkey
Credit the Associated Press for not forgetting about those escaped monkeys down in Mississippi:
One of the monkeys that escaped last week after a truck overturned on a Mississippi highway was shot and killed early Sunday by a woman who says she feared for the safety of her children.
Jessica Bond Ferguson said she was alerted early Sunday by her 16-year-old son who said he thought he had seen a monkey running in the yard outside their home near Heidelberg, Mississippi. She got out of bed, grabbed her firearm and her cellphone and stepped outside where she saw the monkey about 60 feet (18 meters) away.
Bond Ferguson said she and other residents had been warned that the escaped monkeys carried diseases so she fired her gun.
“I did what any other mother would do to protect her children,” Bond Ferguson, who has five children ranging in age from 4 to 16, told The Associated Press. “I shot at it and it just stood there, and I shot again, and he backed up and that’s when he fell.”
Please tell me that after firing the fatal shot, she coolly said, “The name’s Bond. . . . Bond Ferguson”:
A truck carrying the monkeys overturned Tuesday on Interstate 59 north of Heidelberg. Of 21 the monkeys in the truck, 13 were found at the scene of the accident and arrived at their original destination last week, according to Tulane. Another five were killed in the hunt for them and three remained on the loose before Sunday.
I’m enough of a softie to prefer to see these monkeys captured rather than shot dead by civilians. But herpes B is no joke, and it’s hard to begrudge any mom for acting quickly when she perceived a threat to her kids.
Newsletter Update, Number Three: Come On, Argentinian Peso
The good news is that after Argentinian President Javier Milei’s party had that big win, the Argentinian peso rebounded; as you’ll recall, the U.S. Treasury Department spent $20 billion in U.S. dollars to swap with the peso, effectively betting it would rebound after the Argentinian midterm elections.
The bad news is . . . the peso drifted back down again.
Bloomberg explains, “After an initial jump early Monday, the peso has steadily given back those gains and slid 2.4 percent on Tuesday, leaving it only slightly above where it was before the vote. The movement reflects, in part, gnawing doubts that the country will maintain the currency-trading band that it defended so aggressively over the past two months.”
ADDENDUM: Over in that other place I write, readers contend age is just a number, that “nonagenarians have changes that nature thoughtfully confers on us,” and that Donald Trump, at age 79, is a young man.