In 2027 or soon after, we’ll have a new type of fat cat on the planet: the trillionaire (in dollar terms at least). We’ve had billionaires for over a century. US oil tycoon John D Rockefeller was the first to reach that milestone in 1916.
According to wealth tracking group, Informa Connect Academy (ICA), several current industry titans will achieve trillionaire status before the end of this decade. Elon Musk leads the race but it depends on whose share price performs best over the intervening period.
As the head of the electric carmaker Tesla, private rocket company SpaceX and social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk is currently the world’s richest man with a current net worth on paper of roughly $450 billion (€431.5 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index.
His wealth is estimated to have jumped by more than $170 billion since the US election and his alliance with president-elect Donald Trump, largely on the back of Tesla’s share price. Since the November 5th election, Tesla’s stock has surged 70 per cent.
On the basis of his current trajectory, the ICA predicts he will hit the trillion mark in 2027. But Telsa’s share price has been volatile and Musk appears to be driving X into the ground so things may change.
India’s business mogul Gautam Adani is predicted to hit the trillion mark in 2028 followed by Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the AI giant Nvidia, and Prajogo Pangestu, the Indonesian energy and mining mogul, provided their current financial trajectories hold.
$1 trillion is a hard quantum to hold in your head. Put it this way, it would comfortably buy every home Ireland.
It was only six years ago that companies reached the trillion dollar milestone in terms of valuations (Apple became the first to cross the $1 trillion mark in August 2018) and we marvelled, or thought absurd, that a single company could be financially bigger than a developed economy.
There are currently nine companies with trillion dollar valuations: Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Saudi Aramco, Meta, Berkshire Hathway and Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC.
Now we’re about to confront the notion that an individual could be as valuable as a developed nation and the millions of workers and their labour that comprise it.
The Netherlands, one of Europe’s richest countries, has an annual GDP (gross domestic product) of roughly $1 trillion (€960 billion). So if the ICA is right, Musk will be richer than the Netherlands is now by 2027.
What this acceleration in individual wealth says about the state of the world or modern capitalism is disturbing. On one level, it suggests that the current period of rapid technological transformation has outgunned the antitrust legislation designed to police it, creating behemoth monopolies and uber elites wielding too much economic power.
According to UK economist Duncan Weldon, the wealth of these aspiring trillionaires is also tied into three more conventional but no less consequential economic trends: decades of low interest rates (which have boosted asset values); accelerated corporate profits; and a shift towards less progressive tax systems.
Combined, these trends have accelerated global inequality. And this appears to be feeding into a breakdown in consensus politics, a throwback to the Rockefeller days when democracy in many countries fractured.
According to Oxfam, this inequality trend has been supercharged by the pandemic. In a report earlier this year, the charity noted that almost five billion people had been made poorer by the pandemic while the wealth of the five richest people had more than doubled, from $405 billion in 2020 to $869 billion in late 2023. That’s an increase of $14 million an hour.
The world’s richest 1 per cent now own 43 per cent of all global financial assets and emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity, Oxfam says.
Let’s not be naive, market capitalism depends on inequality and is, in part, driven by it (some people will work harder or take financial risks to get ahead), but when the gap between top and bottom gets too large, when a critical mass of citizens feel the system is rigged against them, we tend to get radical politics. That was surely the lesson of the 20th century.
In the 1960s, the gap was modest by today’s standards. Expressed as the ratio of the boss’s salary to those on the factory floor, it was just 15-to-1 in the US. According to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, it is now 221-to-1. Other estimates suggest it is higher.
Of course, salary is just one metric. In Ireland and other countries, an intergenerational divide on housing has become a major and ongoing source of grievance.
Musk said once that he believed the effects of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) on employment would soon make it necessary for countries to provide citizens with a basic income as a guardrail against inequality. This was before he bought his way into the second Trump presidency (spending a reported $250 million on the campaign) and supercharging his wealth in the process.
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