May 2026
Welcome to The Billionaire Bulletin, brought to you by Tax the Greedy Billionaires and the Extreme Wealth Center. Each month, we explore how extreme concentrations of wealth are distorting our economy and eroding our democracy. Join our mailing list to get this newsletter in your inbox every month.
Trickle-Down Gets a Silicon Valley Rebrand
Elon Musk is rapidly approaching a $1 trillion net worth, but even that won’t be enough for him. Musk recently said he’s aiming to someday hoard a $10 trillion fortune, “or bust.” At the same time, he’s promising a future of “amazing abundance,” where AI will raise the standard of living for us all and “everyone can have a penthouse if they want.”
His argument is straightforward: If we let the ultra-wealthy accumulate more and more, the gains will eventually trickle down to everyone else. We’ve heard this before. This is the same exact logic behind decades of tax cuts for the rich, but instead of delivering shared prosperity, the evidence shows that extreme wealth concentration leaves working people worse off.
Research has repeatedly found that large tax cuts for the wealthy increased income inequality and failed to boost economic growth or reduce unemployment. In fact, when more income and wealth flow to people who already have the most, consumer demand can soften, wage growth can stall, and economic and political power becomes more concentrated in the hands of the very few.
Tech broligarchs like Musk are desperate to convince working Americans that the new wave of AI tools are going to change the future of labor and usher us into some new golden age, but the public remains rightfully skeptical. The AI boom has certainly been great for the people at the top, with more than 50 new billionaires minted in 2025 alone. Meanwhile, the same tech companies championing AI have laid off at least 92,000 workers in 2026, either to pave the way for further AI integration or to offset the cost of their AI investments.
Working Americans aren’t blind to this. They’re watching these layoffs. They’re seeing data centers reshape their communities and paying the price as their own electricity bills surge. Kevin O’Leary (yes, the Shark Tank guy) is mounting a project in Utah to build a data center that will be more than twice the size of Manhattan and powered by gas generators, which could increase the state’s emissions by up to fifty percent. When the community came together to protest the proposal, local authorities approved it anyway. AI systems and the infrastructure that support them are being built without any consideration to the needs of working families, so why would we ever believe that we’ll be invited to share in the profits?
We cannot accept Musk’s argument that we should simply rely on billionaires to voluntarily “spread the wealth” after they have captured it. Instead, policymakers must aggressively tax wealth in order to reduce its corrosive power and ensure AI’s benefits flow to working people, not just to shareholders and billionaires. The wealth generated through this technology must power broadly shared prosperity across society, not work to make Elon Musk a multi-trillionaire.
Our Ultra-Rich Rulers
The Senate just voted to confirm Kevin Warsh as Fed governor, putting him on track to be the wealthiest Federal Reserve Chair in history, pending board approval. Warsh has been cagey about his net worth, but Forbes puts it somewhere between $135 million and $226 million. Warsh’s wife, Jane Lauder, has a net worth around $2 billion due to her stake in Estee Lauder, founded by her grandmother. Warsh’s appointment is in keeping with President Trump’s propensity to install ultra-wealthy friends and allies at all levels of government. Trump’s White House is the wealthiest in modern history, with 13 billionaires (counting Trump himself) holding roles in the administration in 2025.
Hard Truth
The number of billionaires in the world could reach 4,000 in just the next five years, a roughly 25% increase from today’s estimated 3,110 billionaires globally. This unchecked growth further underscores the imperative to use the tax code as a tool to reduce the power of the ultra-wealthy and boost the power of working people. A robust wealth tax would actively chip away at the wealth hoarded by the ultra-rich and slow the creation of new billionaires, while also raising trillions of dollars in revenue to invest in our communities.
Billionaire Blight of the Month
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made quite a stir with his Tax Day announcement that the city would impose a tax on unoccupied luxury properties. Real estate billionaire Steve Roth took some time on an earnings call to complain about Mamdani’s phraseology, saying, “I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich,’ when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.” He also said that the rich “are at the top of the great American economic pyramid for a reason” and “they should be praised and thanked.”
It’s worth digging into the absurdity of Roth’s claim that “tax the rich” is as vile as a racial slur. Here is the truth: Billionaire wealth more than quadrupled since 2020, even as the wealth gap between Black and white households increased significantly. According to the Federal Reserve, white households hold 84.2% of all U.S. wealth while making up only 66% of households. Black families, who make up 11.4% of households, hold just 3.4% of wealth. Put another way, for every dollar of wealth a white family holds, Black families have about 13 cents and Latino families have 19 cents. The rich didn’t get to the top alone; they got there on the backs of workers, many of them Black and brown, who are systematically excluded from the wealth they helped build. And many of these billionaires have spent the last twenty years proving one thing: They will do whatever it takes to make themselves richer. No matter who it costs. No matter what it breaks. No matter how many of our democratic institutions they have to buy, bend, or break on the way. So no, we don’t need to thank them. We need to tax them.
NEWSWORTHY NUGGETS
- Philanthropy’s Chosen Blind Spot: The Harms of Extreme Wealth – Inside Philanthropy
- The American Experiment Has Been Infected by Oligarchs – Mother Jones
- The Washington Post Is Wrong: Many Rich Americans Are Not Paying Their Fair Share – Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
- Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass – The New York Times
- Peter Thiel has a new tool for intimidating reporters – The Boston Globe
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