Should Billionaires Exist?

“Many billionaires created products that raised living standards for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The founders of Amazon, Google, and Apple built infrastructure that billions depend on daily. Extreme wealth accumulation is, in these cases, a byproduct of extreme value creation for society — not evidence against it.”

“Eliminating the prospect of extreme upside destroys the incentive for the risk-taking that produced breakthrough innovations. The founders of Tesla, SpaceX, and Moderna took billion-dollar risks that failed more often than they succeeded. Capping the reward caps the risk-taking, with compounding losses in innovation that are enormous but invisible.”

“Billionaires acquire wealth not just through value creation but through regulatory capture, labor suppression, network effects they did not build, and market positions protected by governments they helped elect. The clean story of pure value creation describes a small fraction of extreme wealth; the rest is power compounding power.”

“Extreme wealth distorts democracy at scale. It purchases think tanks, politicians, media outlets, and narratives that no voter can counter. A single individual with $100 billion commands more political power than millions of citizens combined. Democracy and billionaires are structurally incompatible at the level of influence money can buy.”