How the explosion of the ultra-wealthy risks democracy

Gabriel Zucman says there cannot be a law more lenient for the rich and powerful than for the rest of us. (Supplied: WEF)

French economist Gabriel Zucman, one of the world's foremost experts on wealth taxation, raised that question last week.

He said anyone celebrating Elon Musk's US$1 trillion fortune needed to understand the fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy.

"The explosion of billionaire wealth has been one of the defining features of our time," he wrote.

Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire. It is hard to fathom a figure so staggering, but let's give it a shot.

"It is impossible to understand today's world if one ignores this upheaval.

"For with the explosion of the wealth of the super-rich has come an explosion of their power. The power to tilt markets, to shape public discourse, to influence policymaking, to stall social progress."

In a series of tweets, he explained how the world had seen nothing like what it was seeing today.

He said that at the peak of the Gilded Age in the United States, the four wealthiest families in the US could have bought 4 per cent of all of the goods and services produced in the US in a single year.

"This is a Senate of the monopolists, by the monopolists, and for the monopolists!" (Source: 'The Bosses of the Senate', by Joseph Keppler (1889), wikicommons)

But today, he said, that same tiny fraction of the US population, the top 0.00001 per cent (which now includes 19 households), could buy 14 per cent of everything produced in the US in a single year.

The concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent in the US has become extreme. (Source: Gabriel Zucman)

We have to understand what this level of extreme wealth can buy, he said.

"That's how Musk could buy Twitter on a whim for US$44 billion in 2022. That's how [Larry] Ellison can buy TikTok, CBS, and CNN today. That's how billionaires could account for 20 per cent of all political donations in the 2024 election cycle," he said.

"As the AI boom is minting billionaires by the day and the first trillionaires are now coming into view, one thing is becoming clearer and clearer.

"The battle between democracy and oligarchy will be the defining battle of the 21st century," he said.

The human brain can't comprehend how large $1 trillion is. The Verge tried to explain it this way:

"If you were to count out a million seconds, it would take you 11 and a half days," it wrote.

"But a trillion seconds would take 31,700 years — to reach that point today, you would have needed to start counting around the t