More recently, on June 8, 2021, ProPublica published an investigation<\/a> into the taxes of U.S. billionaires. After accessing their tax records, they found in several annual returns of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, George Soros, and Warren Buffett that they had managed to pay absolutely no income tax without committing a single irregularity. They were the most notorious cases, but the average income tax rate paid by the 25 richest people in the country between 2014 and 2018 was also disconcerting: 15.8%. \u201cThat\u2019s lower than the rate a single worker making $45,000 a year might pay,\u201d ProPublica wrote. Although the difference is not as pronounced in Europe, the same rule applies in Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, and the Netherlands: the effective taxes paid by the wealthiest 1% are always lower than those of the average taxpayer.<\/p>\n Seen from today\u2019s perspective, the privileges enjoyed by the pre-revolutionary Church and nobility seem almost trivial. Wasn\u2019t it supposed that privileges reserved for certain social classes had ended centuries ago, precisely because of the progress achieved after the French Revolution? As Max Lawson, who leads Oxfam\u2019s research on inequality, says, billionaires have minimized taxes and other regulations that limit their profits by using a series of tools that transform economic power into political power<\/a>. Among the classic levers for achieving this are campaign and party funding, the threat of taking the money elsewhere, traditional lobbying, and the appropriation of public discourse through investments in media, social networks, and the hegemony of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n While middle-class parents in parts of the Western world find it increasingly difficult for their children to match their standard of living, the world\u2019s billionaires have acquired new superpowers to manipulate politics. Some examples? The power to decide a country\u2019s military fate by granting or denying access to its satellites (Musk\u2019s Starlink <\/a>is one such example); the power to contribute to or not the spread of disinformation<\/a> that threatens democratic coexistence (the cases of Facebook and X, for instance); or the power to revolutionize the world of work and communication with AI, while many countries struggle to pass even minimal regulation.<\/p>\n That their voices are heard more than everyone else\u2019s wouldn\u2019t be so problematic if their interests were aligned. But the short-term incentives of billionaires, whose wealth derives from capital gains, don\u2019t usually coincide with those of the majority of the population, whose income depends on wages. Greater regulation of financial markets, for example, protects society from cyclical crises, but reduces billionaires\u2019 opportunities to inflate their fortunes. There are also conflicting interests on sensitive issues such as the future of public healthcare and education.<\/p>\n According to economist Branko Milanovic, breaking the link between economic and political power is difficult because those who wield it know how essential that influence is to maintaining their position. \u201cBut a savvy plutocrat would do the same thing capitalists did after World War II: faced with the possibility of communism, they accepted many of the demands for equality in order to preserve their power,\u201d he explains. \u201cIf the major plutocrats don\u2019t curb their appetites, and their ambition becomes too obvious, the backlash against them could end up undermining the very pillars on which they stand,\u201d he warns.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is likely no historical precedent for the wealth inequality that exists today, and indeed, there is no precedent for the level of global wealth,\u201d Milanovic continues. In his opinion, two of the reasons why billionaires seem to continue accumulating wealth without qualms have to do with the \u201clack of recent precedents in which their power was challenged,\u201d and with the visibility afforded by social media. \u201cBefore, the names of billionaires weren\u2019t widely known; now they\u2019re in the news every day, everyone recognizes them. I don\u2019t know if that also makes it harder for them to curb their appetites.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout 2025, the fortunes of the world\u2019s billionaires grew at three times the annual rate they had recorded on average over the previous five years. \u201cActions of the Trump presidency, including the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation, have benefitted the richest,\u201d according to an Oxfam report published in January.<\/a><\/p>\n Billionaires\u2019 investments are further evidence of the transmission belt that transforms economic power into political power. In the 2024 U.S. elections, just 100 families contributed one $1 of every $6 spent by candidates, parties, and committees. They invested $2.6 billion that year, more than double the $1 billion they had invested during the 2020 elections, and 160 times what they invested before the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated limits on campaign financing in 2010. Something similar is happening with public discourse: more than half of the world\u2019s leading media outlets are owned by billionaires, according to Oxfam\u2019s calculations; eight of the 10 largest AI companies are run by billionaires, as are nine of the 10 largest social media platforms.<\/p>\n In December 2024, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences published research by Eli G. Rau and Susan Stokes on the pernicious effects of inequality: the likelihood of democratic backsliding<\/a> was seven times greater in the most unequal countries, they concluded. According to Rebecca Gowland, who works in the U.K. as a spokesperson for Patriotic Millionaires (an organization of millionaires aware of the problem of inequality that campaigns for governments to raise their taxes), this backsliding ultimately delegitimizes the entire system. <\/p>\n \u201cThe problem is not only that billionaires are designing policies that affect us all to their own benefit, but that they are doing so in plain sight, and that also makes us lose faith in democracy,\u201d she says. Billionaires themselves admit this in anonymous surveys. \u201cIn the last survey we conducted in January in the G-20 countries, we asked them if they believed that extreme wealth was used to buy political influence, and almost 80% responded that it was and that it shouldn\u2019t be,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n According to the latest Oxfam data, the world\u2019s 12 richest people collectively possess more wealth than over four billion people. The growth of billionaires\u2019 fortunes is not solely due to the fact that taxes have little impact on their wealth. According to Francisco Ferreira, head of inequality studies at the London School of Economics, they have also benefited greatly from the weakening of regulations protecting free competition. He argues that the steel industry, or even the oil industry, faced far more competition than today\u2019s tech giants, \u201cwhich can operate with much larger margins and generate extraordinary profits.\u201d<\/p>\n Antitrust laws<\/p>\n \u201cWe can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can\u2019t have both,\u201d said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1916\u20131939), a key figure in the fight against monopolies. His jurisprudence and the laws enacted at the beginning of the last century helped contain monopolistic tendencies until the 1980s, when a reinterpretation of antitrust law narrowed its scope to cases involving price increases or reduced output. This laid the groundwork for the creation of giants like Amazon, Meta, and Google, which charged their users little or nothing in exchange for market power that has allowed them to dictate the rules and neutralize their rivals.<\/p>\n Former U.S. president Joe Biden tried to revive the spirit of Brandeis by appointing Lina Khan to fight monopolies at the Federal Trade Commission, but Trump dismissed her as soon as he took office. \u201cIt\u2019s not possible to reverse a trend toward concentration in just four years,\u201d says Ferreira. \u201cIf Khan\u2019s regulatory strategies had been maintained for 20 years, it would have made a difference; but mergers and acquisitions don\u2019t happen every year.\u201d<\/p>\n Although regulations aren\u2019t perfect, the defense of free competition and campaign financing are better regulated in the European Union, says Belgian philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns, author of a book on the idea of \u200b\u200blimiting wealth \u2014 placing a cap on the maximum amount of wealth a person can accumulate. \u201cIn the media sector, for example, in Europe we have a whole series of agencies that must authorize companies\u2019 growth operations, while in the United States we see how the Ellison family [owners of Oracle and now also Paramount] is acquiring all the major players; their latest purchase was CNN,\u201d says Robeyns.<\/p>\n Harmful effects<\/p>\n Besides jeopardizing the functioning and legitimacy of the democratic system, the accumulation of wealth by billionaires has detrimental effects on the economy. If that wealth were more equitably distributed, it could boost economic activity and employment through increased consumption. Nor does the global excess of savings generated by this concentration of wealth help \u2014what former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called the \u201cglobal saving glut.\u201d In search of returns, all that accumulated liquidity scans for new investment havens in sectors such as education, healthcare, and housing \u2014 basic rights that have gradually drifted further out of reach as they have been absorbed into market logic<\/a>.<\/p>\n So much for the bad news. The good news is that this isn\u2019t the first time humanity has experienced this drift toward the concentration of power, and we can learn from past solutions. As Guido Alfani, professor of economic history at Bocconi University, says, the ancient Greeks already warned us of the incompatibility between democracy and the concentration of wealth. \u201cAristotle wrote that in a context of great inequality, the super-rich would be like gods among men,\u201d Alfani says. \u201cThe Republic of Venice is a clear example,\u201d he explains. \u201cIn the 15th century, humanists said it was the perfect model for a stable republic because its structure prevented the wealthiest from gaining political control, and yet, by the beginning of the 17th century, the rich could buy a seat on the Great Council of Venice, and all their descendants could be part of the ruling family.\u201d According to Alfani, the plutocratic drift usually coincides with the moment when elites perceive a worsening of the conditions that enabled their enrichment.<\/p>\n But perhaps the most useful historical parallel is also the closest: the so-called Gilded Age in the United States<\/a>, spanning the last three decades of the 19th century. These were the years of the railroad and rapid industrialization, with the rise of gigantic fortunes like those of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, and the Morgans. \u201cThe Civil War had ended, and citizens were unprepared for what was coming,\u201d explains Richard White, professor of economic history at Stanford. \u201cThey came from slavery, where plantation owners were also the wealthiest, and they expected to enter a world of small producers competing with one another: they failed to see the industrialization and the world of impoverished wage earners that was coming because none of that had existed before in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n Just as Trump announced $500 billion in joint investments for AI a year ago, Gilded Age governments aided those early entrepreneurs with subsidies and tariffs, arguing that industrialization would be good for the entire country. \u201cBut who benefited from that industrialization?\u201d White asks. \u201cWhen you look at things like wages, life expectancy, and health, in that era, what you find is a decline for the vast majority of Americans,\u201d he says. \u201cConditions deteriorated so much that there began to be all sorts of signs of an impending class war in the country, with protests in the streets and an overwhelming majority against monopolies, regardless of their political affiliation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c[US President William] McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by a socialist, and even conservative publications were saying that something had to be done to address the problem of monopoly power and the concentration of wealth,\u201d explains Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston University School of Law. Madoff recalls how the tax system then shifted from tariffs to the introduction of a tax system that would lay the foundation for the current one.<\/p>\n The progressive income tax was introduced in 1913, followed by the wealth tax in 1917. These levies achieved an unprecedented redistribution of wealth and reduction of inequality for most of the 20th century. This period, in White\u2019s words, coincides with \u201cthe most prosperous era in U.S. history.\u201d<\/p>\n Although the structure of the two taxes remains the same today, Madoff says, they have been \u201csecretly eroded\u201d for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals over the past 40 years. He describes various techniques, such as personal trusts and foundations, used to circumvent wealth and inheritance taxes, among other tools. \u201cWhat they do rests on the following principle: banks need to lend money, because that\u2019s their business, and billionaires have a gigantic amount of wealth to secure those loans, so they live in debt, refinancing that debt over and over again,\u201d Madoff explains.<\/p>\n The solution is technically simple, says Madoff. Ensure that wealth is taxed as soon as there is a transfer of ownership, regardless of who receives it, whether through sale, donation, or inheritance, with no exemptions other than those decided by a democratic majority. \u201cOf course, there\u2019s a desire to help children, especially now that inheritance has become the only way to help them maintain a middle-class lifestyle, but that can be solved by leaving the first million or two million dollars untaxed; whatever society decides democratically,\u201d explains the professor. \u201cBut that has nothing to do with justifying the descendants of Zuckerberg or Musk not paying inheritance tax.\u201d<\/p>\n According to analyses by French economist Gabriel Zucman, preventing billionaires from keeping the privilege of paying less tax than workers would simply require ensuring that fortunes above \u20ac100\u202fmillion ($117 million) pay a minimum annual tax of 2%<\/a>, regardless of the mechanisms used to reclassify or recategorize wealth<\/p>\n In Spain, researchers Olga Cant\u00f3 and Francisco Garc\u00eda-Rodr\u00edguez from the University of Alcal\u00e1 de Henares concluded in a recent study that reforming the wealth tax to align it with proposals by economist Thomas Piketty<\/a> \u2014 or with the existing wealth tax in Norway \u2014 would have exceptional revenue-raising power. It would be enough to fund a universal child benefit of more than \u20ac2,000 ($2,340) per child, achieving a 5% improvement in the Gini inequality index.<\/p>\n Another solution is to impose especially heavy taxes on activities that convert economic power into political power. This is what Branko Milanovic suggests for any billionaire who wants to finance political campaigns or get involved in media, social networks, and other attempts to shape public opinion. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it will sound a bit far-fetched, but it seems to me that the taxes on these activities should be confiscatory, so that if they want to own media outlets or contribute to political parties, they should pay 2% of their wealth in taxes, for example,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ML3OI5YGWREEPDCWXXLAVPVEME.jpg\")
Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration was attended by leading technology magnates.Shawn Thew (Pool \/ CNP \/ Polaris \/ Europa Press \/ Contacto)<\/p>\n