Is the Tide Turning Against Billionaires and Their Unreasonable Power?
BY JAN MASAOKA
For a while, billionaires felt like our real-life superheroes — Batman and Iron Man with tech companies and PR agents.
In the comics, it tracks: Bruce Wayne (Batman's secret identity) and Tony Stark (Iron Man's) are both billionaires, complete with vast inheritances and high-tech toys, and they keep saving the world.
Back in the real world, figures like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Donald Trump were often treated the same way: admired, celebrated, and held up as ideals for ambition and success. (Trump’s fortune was inherited; Gates, Musk, and Zuckerberg built theirs—though not without aggressive, and sometimes illegal or questionable corporate strategies.)
In 2001, Occupy Wall Street caught public attention with the phrase, “the 99% versus the 1%.” And over the following decade, "millionaire" stopped sounding outrageously rich. Even the reality show Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? didn't seem to be offering enough money.
In fact, we have been seeing a gradual shift in the popular idea of extreme wealth—To be really rich, now you had to be a billionaire. And for the first time, there were enough billionaires to talk about them as a group.
Now we appear to be in the middle of a wider cultural—and possibly political—shift in how billionaires are viewed. Cultural shifts don't easily lend themselves to precise measurement, but several indicators are visible:
- The growing use of the term “billionaire class.” This isn’t about colorful individuals anymore; it frames billionaires as a group with shared economic interests.
- “Tax the Rich” has increasingly become “Tax the Billionaires.” The target has narrowed—and sharpened.
- Federal policy vocabulary: Just last year, the Biden administration proposed a Billionaire Minimum Tax—a 25% tax aimed at the wealthiest one-thousandth of one percent (0.001%).
- State policy vocabulary: In California, unions and advocates are gathering signatures for a proposed Billionaire’s Tax—a one-time 5% tax on the wealth (not the income) of roughly 200 California residents who have net worths of $1 billion or more.
- Pop culture: It’s risky to read too much into movies and TV, but it’s notable that the past two years have delivered a wave of billionaire villains—from Succession to Glass Onion: Knives Out, Jurassic World: Rebirth, and Alien: Earth. The billionaire-as-hero motif is increasingly supplanted by the billionaire supervillain.
A small number of billionaires themselves have acknowledged the distortions created by extreme wealth. Warren Buffett put it bluntly: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
And let's not forget how hard it is to even picture a billion. Stack $1 bills and one million dollars reaches about 358 feet (31 stories). One billion dollars? About 68 miles high. That's sixty miles higher than where commercial airplanes fly!
So there is some good news. More people are recognizing that billionaires don’t just act solely as individuals—they often act in the interests of a billionaire class, with consequences for everyone else: for inequality, for democratic institutions, and for the planet itself.
Cultural and political moods can swing quickly, and not always in the same direction. For now, though, this shift is worth noticing and offering a ray of optimism. There's a problem with so few people having so much money and thereby control and influence. We should remember that billionaires exercise their power through multiple vehicles, including philanthropic entities. And they typically exercise this power to strengthen the financial and political interests of the billionaire class. Let's appreciate this small cultural shift and seek ways to build on it.
