Elon Musk and Chris Anderson, the head of TED, during an interview in Vancouver, Canada, on 14 April. (photo: Stacie Mcchesney/TED/AFP/Getty Images)
Arwa Mahdawi Guardian UK
25 April 22
US billionaires now own a combined $4.7tn, according to a new analysis – but to Elon Musk, since he doesn’t have a yacht or own a home, that’s totally OK
Us billionaires now own $4.7tn –but that’s OK, says Elon Musk.
“We’re all in this together.” Remember that corny catchphrase from the early days of the pandemic? Remember when there was a smidgen of hope that the collective trauma the world was facing would reshape people’s priorities and the pandemic could be a portal to a better, fairer society?
Well, two years on, precisely none of that has happened. People clapped for essential workers for a bit but didn’t stop exploiting them. Meanwhile it’s boom time for billionaires, who saw their already obscene wealth grow exponentially during the pandemic.
A new analysis released by Oxfam America on Monday, to mark tax day in the US, found US billionaires now own a combined $4.7tn in wealth. Much of this goes untaxed; last year ProPublica analyzed leaked tax returns and found the 25 richest people in the US paid a true tax rate of just 3.4% from 2014 to 2018. The average taxpayer, meanwhile, pays a true tax rate of 13%.
It wasn’t always like this. As Oxfam notes, it really wasn’t that long ago that the ultra-wealthy paid their fair share in tax; during the second world war, the federal income tax rate peaked at 94% and was still 70% three decades later. The rich haven’t just gotten richer, they’ve also gotten a lot more selfish.
While billionaires have seen their bank accounts balloon and corporations are raking in record profits, ordinary people are hurting from decades-high inflation. By some accounts, the inequality gap in the US is worse now than it was in France in the 1780s just before the French Revolution.
It’s easy to get angry about all this, but you might want to wait a moment before jumping to the seemingly obvious conclusion that gross inequality is bad and we really ought to do something about it. You see, in a recent (embarrassingly fawning) interview with Chris Anderson, the head of Ted, Elon Musk helpfully billionaire-splained why it’s actually OK for a handful of people to hoard obscene amounts of wealth.
“There are many people out there who can’t stand this world of billionaires,” Anderson said to Musk in the interview. “Like, they are hugely offended by the notion that an individual can have the same wealth as, say, a billion or more of the world’s poorest people.”
Only an idiot would be offended by something like that, Musk essentially replied. “I think there’s some axiomatic flaws that are leading them to that conclusion,” he told Anderson. “For sure, it would be very problematic if I was consuming, you know, billions of dollars a year in personal consumption. But that is not the case. In fact, I don’t even own a home right now. I’m literally staying at friends’ places … I don’t have a yacht, I really don’t take vacations. It’s not as though my personal consumption is high.”
Musk, who is worth almost $300bn, did concede that the one exception to his incredibly ascetic lifestyle is his $70m private jet, but said its use was justified because it gives him more hours to work. It’s essentially in the public good.
So there you go. Put down your pitchforks everyone! Stop sharpening your guillotines! Anyone getting angry about inequality simply needs to examine their “axiomatic flaws”. It’s perfectly OK that the world’s billionaires have more wealth than 60% of the world’s population combined, as long as they buy private jets instead of yachts and couchsurf at their mate’s mansion instead of paying property tax on their own house. Really glad Musk cleared that up for us all.
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