Forbes has been producing its annual list of the world’s billionaires since 1987. Despite landing at the height of 1980’s excess, that original list seems dowdy by today’s standards. In 1987, there were 140 billionaires on the planet. The world’s wealthiest person was the Japanese real estate tycoon, Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who was worth $20 billion. Tsutsumi would only rank #33 on this year’s list, even after adjusting for inflation.
The 2026 list is staggering by any measure. Before 2000, it averaged 27 new members per year. This year there are 400. There are now 3,428 billionaires in the world, who are together worth over $20 trillion dollars. This year’s wealthiest person is Elon Musk, whose estimated wealth is $839 billion. Adjusting for inflation, Musk is not only 14 times wealthier than Tsutsumi was, but is actually worth about the same amount as all the world’s 140 billionaires in 1987.
The astonishing growth of wealth at the top has not gone unnoticed, and it has generated public unease. In Washington, Governor Bob Ferguson recently signed into law the state’s very first income tax of any kind—a 9.9% “millionaires’ tax” on income over $1 million. In California, healthcare workers’ unions submitted 1.5 million signatures (nearly double the requirement) to put a one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax on the November 2026 ballot. These anxieties aren’t limited to blue states; they show up in polling that crosses party lines. A January 2026 Economist/YouGov poll found that 80% of Americans—including 66% of all Republicans and even 57% of self-described “very conservative” persons—believe that the gap between rich and poor is a “very” of “somewhat” “big problem.” The conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen has put the point bluntly: “an oligarchy isn’t a left or a right phenomenon.”
The obvious question is ‘why’? Why are there so many more billionaires today, and why are their fortunes so much larger than they used to be? This question is important because it reveals the inadequacies of conceptions of wealth that focus exclusively on individual ingenuity and effort. Elon Musk works famously hard. But he doesn’t work fourteen times harder than Yoshiaki Tsutsumi did in 1987.
Musk is smart, inventive, and relentlessly driven, and the companies he has built are genuinely extraordinary. SpaceX has cut the cost of reaching orbit by an order of magnitude and revived a moribund American space program. Tesla midwifed the electric car into the mainstream and created a world where 1 out of 4 new cars are EV’s. Neither company existed twenty-five years ago, and both were widely expected to fail.
But both Tesla and SpaceX would not have survived were it not for sizeable public investments at moments of great vulnerability. SpaceX won a $1.6 billion contract from NASA when it was days away from bankruptcy after several high-profile launch failures. Tesla survived the 2008 financial crisis because of a $465 million low-interest loan from the Department of Energy.
Both companies, moreover, sit on top of decades of publicly funded research. The rocketry that SpaceX uses emerged from sixty years of NASA and Air Force aerospace work. The lithium-ion chemistry in every Tesla battery came out of university and national-laboratory research underwritten by federal grants. Libertarians like to cast Musk as a parable of private enterprise outperforming a sclerotic state. The truer story is that he is a parable of what becomes possible when private ambition rides on top of decades of public investment.
Musk offers a vivid example of a more general truth. Modern wealth production cannot be understood apart from the extraordinary complexity of the global economy in which it occurs. The switch from an analog economy built around stuff to a digital economy built around bytes has opened wholly new ways to make staggering amounts of money.
A piece of software can reach billions of users at almost no marginal cost. Globalization has expanded the customer base for any successful product to most of humanity. The transcontinental railroads of the nineteenth century made enormous fortunes, but they took decades to build and could only operate where the rails were laid. It’s telling that almost all of the top ten billionaires in 1987 made their fortunes in property or real estate. No one in this year’s top 100 made their fortunes in the real estate industry, and 7 of the top 10 all started technology companies.
Individuals work hard, but they do so within complex institutions made possible by social cooperation. The internet exists because the United States Department of Defense funded a communications network that could survive nuclear attack. GPS exists because military satellites were eventually opened to civilian use. The semiconductors that power modern computing trace back, ultimately, to publicly funded research at universities and national laboratories. The financial system that channels capital to entrepreneurs is held together by securities law, deposit insurance, and a central bank willing to act as lender of last resort. Global trade rests on treaties hammered out by political representatives and enforced by international institutions. The roads on which Amazon’s packages travel were built by the public; the engineers Tesla hires were educated by it. Even the dollars on which the entire edifice rests have value only because we collectively agree they do. One could go on indefinitely.
The reason why there are so many billionaires now is because the modern world is built on an extraordinarily complex system of social cooperation that no one of us produced and no one of us could escape if we tried.
The significance of such social cooperation is at the heart of the late political philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice. Rawls is often regarded with some suspicion by Christians for his skepticism about the role of faith in public life (a view that I think is misunderstood, but that is an essay for another day). He is, however, the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century for having articulated a powerful argument about how the benefits and burdens of social cooperation should be distributed in a complex modern society. Rawls’s deepest idea is that modern societies are constituted by a “basic structure”: the primary social, political and economic institutions that shape human life and make social cooperation possible.
Pre-modern societies had nothing quite like a basic structure in this sense. It has a special significance because “its effects are profound and present from the start.” These institutions reach into every life, decisively shaping life prospects, and there is essentially nothing an individual can do to opt out of them. Because its effects are so far-reaching and inescapable, principles of justice arise to govern the terms of social cooperation. A voluntary cooperative arrangement—a club, a partnership, a neighborhood association—can run on whatever terms its members agree to, because those who dislike them can leave. The basic structure of a modern society is not similarly voluntary. Principles of justice are the rules that ensure that the benefits and burdens of social cooperation are distributed fairly.
But what is a fair distribution? Musk will say that his $839 billion is fair because he worked hard and has done so much to improve society. A blue collar factory worker who lost his job to globalization and no longer has the health insurance that he needs to provide for his sick child might have disagree. Rawls’s most famous contribution to political philosophy is a thought experiment designed to help us think through this impasse. Imagine, he asks, that we are choosing the basic rules for our society—the rules that will govern how all the benefits and burdens of social cooperation will be distributed—but we choose without knowing who we will turn out to be when the rules take effect. We do not know whether we will be born to wealth or poverty, to health or illness, to talents the market rewards or talents it doesn’t. What rules would we choose?
Rawls suggests that we would choose a society where social goods like wealth are distributed in such a way as to make sure that the worst-off persons do as well as they possibly can. People who didn’t know where they were going to end up would make sure that the worst-case scenario was as good as it could possibly be. The operative idea here is maximin—Rawls tries to maximize the minimum.
Importantly, there is inequality in Rawls’s society, perhaps even a lot of it. It permits doctors to be paid more than orderlies, engineers more than factory workers, founders more than employees, provided that those inequalities are part of a larger system that improves the position of everyone, especially those at the bottom. But there is no “natural” amount that entrepreneurs deserve because of their hard work and ingenuity. Again, we are all a part of a cooperative scheme; we all do better when we cooperate.
But the whole thing only works if we all participate in it so it is fair to ask that the benefits and burdens of social cooperation are distributed fairly. Inequality is important because it allows everyone to do better. But a fair distribution is one that treats everyone’s interest equally; no one is morally superior to others. This is the core idea that Rawls’s thought experiment models.
And what would such a society look like? It’s hard to say exactly, but imagine that you are about to enter American society without knowing who you will be or where you will end up. Would you choose to live in a society in which health insurance is largely tied to employment, so that losing a job means losing your family’s coverage at exactly the moment you can least afford to pay for it? Would you accept a minimum wage that leaves you living below the poverty line? Would you choose a system of public education whose quality depends largely on the zip code of the house you can afford? Would you choose to live in a country where there is so little margin for error for the most disadvantaged? No, you wouldn’t.
The reply, of course, is that we can’t afford to arrange things otherwise—that taxing fortunes more heavily would dampen the entrepreneurial energy on which our prosperity depends, and that the current system, for all its harshness, is the one that delivers the goods. This argument is usually delivered in the sober, slightly weary tones of someone explaining hard economic realities to a naive idealist. But the tone outruns the evidence. Would Elon Musk really have walked away from founding Tesla and SpaceX if he had stood to become merely a multi-billionaire rather than, possibly, the world’s first trillionaire? Would Jeff Bezos have decided just to run a small independent bookstore rather than go through the trouble of starting Amazon if he were only going to be worth a few hundred million dollars?
Cross-national economic evidence runs in the same direction. Sweden has a lot more billionaires per capita than the United States. Iceland and Norway work about 20% less, but both have higher GDP per capita than the United States. The Scandinavian countries as a group have higher productivity per hour worked (GDP per total hours worked) than the United States, despite paying about 65% more in taxes. (There also famously happier.) The economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva have shown that across the developed world over the past half-century, cuts to top tax rates have made the rich richer without making economies grow faster. These are complicated issues, of course, but we have proof of concept for a state that is wealthy, entrepreneurial, humane and just. The question is whether we want to build it here.
Rawls is sometimes read as the apotheosis of late modern liberal egalitarianism. But his arguments about inequality are in fact participating in a very old tradition. The conviction that a society ought to be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable is not a twentieth-century innovation; it is a constant drumbeat in the Christian tradition. The philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff, notes how the Bible shows repeated and insistent concern for what he calls the “Quartet of the Vulnerable”—the poor, the widow, the foreigner, and the orphan—those who were most vulnerable in ancient Israelite society.
The Torah builds protection for them into its laws of gleaning, Sabbath, and Jubilee. The Prophets return to them again and again, often using the sharpest language of judgment that we find in the Bible when they are wronged. Mary sings of a God who has “filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty.” Jesus opens His public ministry by announcing that He has come “to proclaim good news to the poor... release to the captives... freedom for the oppressed.” He pronounces blessing on the poor and the hungry, and woe on the rich and the comfortable. He shares His table with tax collectors, prostitutes, and the ritually unclean. And in Matthew 25, Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned, warning that those who ignore them will be “cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
The biblical witness on this point is not a handful of proof-texts; it is a sustained insistence that a community is answerable for how it treats the most disadvantaged. Rawls articulates philosophically what the prophets had insisted on theologically: a society’s institutions are to be measured by what becomes of the poor, the widow, the foreigner, and the orphan. By that measure, the present arrangement does not pass.
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Jeff Bezos is rumored to be quietly putting his yacht up for sale. The vessel—christened Koru, a Māori word implying “new beginnings” or “new life”—is the largest sailing yacht in the world. It cost $500 million to build and an additional $50 million a year to staff. It is so large that it requires a separate $75 million support yacht to carry the helicopter that Bezos’s wife uses to commute to it. To leave the Dutch shipyard where it was built, the shipbuilder asked that a beloved 95-year-old bridge be partially dismantled. The residents of Rotterdam threatened to pelt it with rotten eggs, and the request was quietly withdrawn.
Now Bezos is selling it because it has become “too huge to manage.” And so the fourth-richest man in the world will downsize to something more discreet, while fourteen million American children remain unsure whether dinner will be on the table, 36 million people live under the federal poverty line, and 771,000 people experience homelessness. Whatever else can be said about such a situation, it is not one that anyone would choose if they didn’t know their place in society; nor is it one that the Bible would consider just.