Primer: Billionaires
In the American context, a billionaire is an individual whose net worth equals or exceeds $1 billion (USD) in assets. Net worth is generally calculated by subtracting liabilities from the total value of an individual’s holdings, including stocks, private businesses, real estate, investment funds, and luxury assets such as art. Publications such as the Forbes World’s Billionaires List estimate these fortunes through public market data, ownership records, exchange rates, and available financial disclosures, though the opacity of private wealth means such calculations are necessarily approximate. Because billionaire wealth is often tied to fluctuating asset values, fortunes may rise or fall dramatically within short periods of time. Nevertheless, the billionaire has emerged as a defining figure in the popular imagination of the twenty-first century, a time of unprecedented inequality and concentration of private wealth.
The oil magnate John D. Rockefeller emerged as the world’s first billionaire in the early 20th century, and today, according to the estimates of the Forbes list, there are over 3,400 billionaires worldwide, nearly 1,000 of whom are Americans. But since the time of Rockefeller, the existence of these ultrarich few, whose wealth is scarcely conceivable in numerical terms, at the same time as the struggling masses of working Americans has incited the ire of populist-minded Americans. In 1934, during the height of the Great Depression, Huey Long, the populist firebrand and Louisiana governor, delivered a famous national radio address, calling for dramatic wealth redistribution from the nation’s wealthiest to its poorest in the form of a tax on wealth. This proposed “Long plan” included graduated taxes on the wealth of Americans with fortunes above $1 million, culminating in a 100% tax on wealth above $100 million. But though many of Long’s other proposals were enacted under Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda, the wealth tax was never implemented.
Nonetheless, the idea of a wealth tax as a potential antidote to the historic wealth inequality that the United States faces today has not faded from the populist imagination. Just last October, the SEIU-UHW union in California filed a ballot initiative known as the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of California residents with wealth exceeding $1 billion. On a national level, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2026, a bill reintroduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Pramila Jayapal in March, proposes annual tax rates on wealth for American households with net worths above $50 million and $1 billion. Other countries with wealth taxes currently in place include Colombia, France, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland.
Proponents of this resolution, those against the existence of billionaires and who generally might be assumed to support some sort of taxation on the wealth of the ultrarich, believe that the outlandish wealth of billionaires has no place in a world — or, more narrowly, in a nation — with such a large disparity in wealth and living. The surplus wealth of these billionaires, which could never be spent and for which they have no justifiable use, proponents contend, ought to be more effectively allocated to Americans in need. In the face of the abject living conditions of so many Americans, the fact of the continued existence and boundless accumulation of these billionaires is thus morally unjust and offensive.
On the other hand, opponents of this resolution might attack the resolution from several different angles. First, as a matter of accounting practicability, many opponents question the precise extent to which these grossly inflated net worth estimates correspond to actually liquid wealth. Billionaire wealth typically comes in the form of ownership stakes in corporations, fluctuating stock valuations, or other illiquid assets rather than cash reserves readily available for redistribution, and aggressively taxing unrealized wealth would require the forced liquidation of assets. Others might defend the existence of billionaires on broader philosophical grounds, contending that extraordinary wealth accumulation is the legitimate result of entrepreneurship, innovation, and voluntary market exchange, and the abolition of billionaires would constitute an unjust infringement upon property rights and economic liberty. The mere existence of billionaires, they might contend, does not itself impoverish others. Rather, the relevant moral question concerns not inequality itself but absolute standards of living.
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“Money” by Pictures of Money, CC BY 2.0