Economist Gabriel Zucman warned Tuesday that the rise of trillionaires — led by Elon Musk after SpaceX’s stock market debut — poses a fundamental threat to democratic governance, arguing that extreme wealth concentrated in a few hands inevitably translates into political power that undermines equality.
In a Guardian opinion piece, Zucman, a professor at the Paris School of Economics and UC Berkeley and founding director of the International Tax Observatory, wrote that “the mere existence of trillionaires is a major political and economic problem, probably the defining issue of our time.” He argued there is “a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy” because “extreme wealth is always an extreme power” — the power to stifle competition, shape public discourse, influence policymaking, and stall social progress.
Zucman traced the corrosive nature of extreme wealth back through political thought, citing Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago and modern thinkers such as Lea Ypi at the London School of Economics. He also quoted James Madison, who wrote that wealth inequality “is as poisonous for democracy as war.” According to Zucman, after World War II, top marginal tax rates approaching 100% in both the UK and US nearly eliminated extreme wealth, but it has returned “in full force.”
He cited data showing that in 1989, the wealthiest 0.001% of families in the UK — about 200 households — held wealth equivalent to 5% of UK GDP. Today, he said, that same group owns wealth equivalent to 20% of UK GDP, meaning those families could theoretically buy a fifth of everything produced in the country in a given year.
In the United States, Zucman wrote, the concentration is even more striking. At the height of the Gilded Age around 1910, the four largest American fortunes amounted to 4% of US GDP. Today, the top 0.00001% — 19 households — could buy 14% of everything produced annually in the US.
Zucman offered concrete examples of how that wealth translates into political power. He noted that Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 “on a whim,” that Larry Ellison is pursuing purchases of TikTok, CBS and CNN, and that billionaires accounted for 20% of all political donations in the 2024 federal election cycle. He also cited Musk’s role directing the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), which shut down the US Agency for International Development. Zucman pointed to a study in the Lancet estimating the resulting funding cuts could lead to more than 14 million deaths, including 4.5 million children under age five, by 2030. Great wealth is an “enormous power,” he argued — the power to stifle competition, shape public discourse, influence policymaking, and stall social progress.
Zucman rejected the notion that a billionaire’s personal character matters, arguing that “no one should want to live in a society where one single individual can be worth $1tn, no matter their personal virtues.”
As a solution, Zucman called for “fixing one of the most grotesque anomalies of our time: that the super-rich often live nearly tax free today.” Citing research from his book “We Need to Tax Billionaires,” he noted that Jeff Bezos one year claimed the child tax credit after reporting so little income.
Zucman proposed a minimum tax rate of 2% on wealth for individuals with net worth above $100 million — a policy he previously developed in a report commissioned by the G20 in 2024. He estimated that the tax would raise approximately £15 billion annually in the UK from just over 1,000 families, or about 0.5% of GDP. For comparison, he noted that the UK government’s decision to scrap the winter fuel allowance for retirees saved about £1.5 billion annually.
“It is time to break decisively with the perverse logic in which retirees, the poor or immigrants are expected to balance the budget, while the rich are to be allowed to live tax-free in their own parallel society,” Zucman wrote. “There cannot be a law more lenient for the rich and powerful than for the rest of us. If ever there was a time to act, it is now.”