About Billionaires

We are all familiar with the most famous billionaires – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, for example – but most billionaires keep a very low profile and don’t dominate headlines.

These roughly 750 individuals use their influence to pull strings behind the scenes so that they accumulate more wealth than everyone else and keep more of it. According to Forbes, U.S. billionaires are richer than ever before – together, their assets are worth $4.6 trillion.

It’s no accident that billionaire wealth has increased exponentially over the past few years, and it’s not because they’re working harder. Billionaires are holding on to more of their wealth using laws that have been written into our tax code for just this purpose. They pay lower tax rates than most Americans and hide a lot of their money in offshore accounts and in private charities that don’t do much charitable giving.

Billionaires can do all of this because they wield a lot of political power. That, too, is no accident.

In the United States today, and especially since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, billionaires dominate campaign financing. In the 2020 election cycle, a handful of billionaires contributed just under 10% of all federal campaign contributions.

Billionaires like Charles Koch, Robert Mercer, and Richard Uihlein have an outsized say when it comes to who runs for office, who wins elections, and then ultimately what sorts of things politicians do once in office.