July 2026
Welcome to The Billionaire Bulletin, brought to you by Tax the Greedy Billionaires and the Excessive Wealth Institute. Each month, we explore how excessive wealth concentration is distorting our economy and eroding our democracy. Join our mailing list to get this newsletter in your inbox every month.
A NEW NAME FOR A DEEPENING CRISIS
Today marks the 237th anniversary of Bastille Day, when French peasants launched a revolution against a ruling elite they saw as oppressive and out of touch. More than two centuries later, Americans may have more in common with those 18th-century French peasants than we might think.
Just as French aristocrats lived in splendor while ordinary people starved, we are living through an unprecedented experiment in billionaire governance. Months after slashing life-saving programs as head of DOGE and leveraging government to bolster his business interests, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire—after building his fortune through taxpayer-funded government contracts. AI barons, who build their technologies on taxpayer-funded infrastructure and trained their models on public intellectual property, are now trying to marry the public’s fiscal interests to industry growth. And countless other ultra-wealthy individuals have simply paid the toll through inauguration checks, lawsuit settlements, and crypto purchases, converting tributes to the president into access, favorable treatment, and profit at public expense. Just look at the pay-to-play ingrained in Trump’s Freedom 250.
Excessive wealth is being transformed into even more power, further distorting our economy and corrupting our democracy—just as the Founders feared. Meanwhile, the institutions built to check excessive wealth—like the Supreme Court—are instead smoothing its path to strangling representative government.
But here is what the aristocrats of our era misunderstand: Americans are fighting back.
Fully 77% of Americans support taxing billionaires, including 75% of Independents and 65% of Republicans. Washington State, Maine, Hawaiʻi, and Rhode Island have all recently raised taxes on the wealthy. In California, voters will decide this November on a ballot measure to tax billionaires directly. And a growing number of federal lawmakers support legislation to tax the ultra-wealthy.
To build on this momentum, we are doubling down on our mission, starting with our name. Today, the Extreme Wealth Center becomes the Excessive Wealth Institute.
Why the change? Because “extreme” describes a point on a spectrum. “Excessive” names the problem: wealth beyond any conceivable use, wealth that exists primarily as power to bend markets, buy influence, and redirect our economy and our democracy away from the common good. The word captures a truth this moment demands: there is such a thing as too much money in the hands of a single person or institution.
The Excessive Wealth Institute will develop rigorous research on how excessive wealth harms our economy, our democracy, and our daily lives as we work toward something larger than any single policy: replacing a culture that celebrates greed with one that values shared prosperity.
In the coming months, we will release new public opinion research on the excessive wealth crisis, along with an analysis of how the ultra-wealthy use outsized political giving to manipulate our democratic process.
Urban Parisians who stormed the Bastille understood exactly who held power and who paid the price for it. Today, that same clarity is spreading in America, and the Excessive Wealth Institute exists to sharpen it.
BILLIONAIRE BLIGHT OF THE MONTH
As heat waves continue across the country and millions of Americans face record-breaking temperatures, the ultra-wealthy now have their own unique way to beat the heat—they’re building snow rooms. These rooms are exactly what they sound like: ice-cold luxury spaces with gently falling snow. If you have at least $130,000 to burn, you can have one installed in your home or even your yacht. The same billionaires who built their fortunes on the extractive industries that wreaked havoc with our climate now have a new way to stay cool while the rest of us face the consequences of their greed.
HARD TRUTH
Americans aren’t feeling very confident in the state of our economy and democracy, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey. Only 35% of respondents believe that the American Dream is still achievable, with 68% feeling that the country is in a state of decline. Crucially, around three-quarters of Americans believe billionaires and corporations have too much power in Washington while working Americans have too little.
SPOTLIGHT: The left sees a billionaire backlash — and an opening for a wealth tax
Our movement toward a national wealth tax is growing stronger, with prominent members of Congress like Reps. Greg Casar (D-TX) and Chris Deluzio (D-PA) speaking in favor of taxing the ultra-wealthy to reduce the wealth and power of billionaires. The Washington Post’s Dan Merica laid out the growing billionaire backlash in today’s Early Brief.
As Tax the Greedy Billionaires’ Igor Volsky told The Post, “What we’ve seen over the last couple of years is the kind of blatant exercise of billionaire power that so many folks have been warning us about over the past couple of decades. That’s why the issue is in the zeitgeist.”
We’re working to show policymakers just how outdated the “fair share” talking point is—and that the majority of Americans agree.
“The public is really far ahead on this issue,” Volsky said. “This old playbook of asking the ultra-rich or billionaires to just pay your fair share so that we could raise enough revenue to pay for a particular program simply isn’t meeting the scope of the crisis that we’re in or the challenge that we face.”
NEWSWORTHY NUGGETS
- ”The Founders’ Warnings About Excess Wealth Have Come Appallingly True” – The New Republic
- “How to Tax a Billionaire” – Mother Jones
- “We Need to Talk About Gavin Newsom” – Gabriel Zucman
- “Meet the megadonors pouring more than $1.3 billion into the 2026 election” – The Washington Post
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