The little-loved Elon Musk is odds-on favourite to become the world’s first trillionaire. He is, after all, the richest man in the world. There are others on his tail. According to Oxfam’s latest inequality report, Takers Not Makers, four other people are expected to join Musk in the trillionaires club by amassing at least $1 trillion within the next decade: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and family.

Note that four of the five are American, either born or naturalized. This isn’t surprising. The U.S. has always been a great place for entrepreneurs. Under Trump it is becoming much greater. He has provided the wealthy with a “deregulatory bonanza.” His administration is not just weakening financial regulations and oversight but attacking agencies meant to keep corporations from misbehaving. He has even paused enforcement of foreign anti-bribery rules.

Bankers, for one, are reaping the rewards. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, serves as a good example. In 2025, Dimon’s combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in bank shares yielded him roughly $770 million. Almost a billion dollars a year—not a bad pay cheque.

The U.S. Supreme Court has done its part in caring for the rich as well. According to a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ruling for the Rich, in the 1950s justices appointed by the Democrats and the Republicans were similar in casting pro-rich votes. Since then there has been a steady increase in polarization, mainly due to Republican appointees’ decisions rising from about 50 percent pro-rich to 70 percent. On the current Court, Republican appointees make up six of the nine judges, mainly due to Trump’s appointments.

As for the idea that the billionaires earned their wealth, the Oxfam report points out that in fact it is mostly taken, not earned. Sixty percent of their income comes from either inheritance, cronyism or monopoly power. In 2023 for example, more billionaires amassed their wealth through inheritance than through entrepreneurship. In other words, a free lunch. Or, more appropriately, a free banquet.

We can expect an expanding trillionaire club as the billionaire class is doing very well. In 2024, their ranks grew by over 200 to nearly 2,770 with their wealth skyrocketing by $2.1 trillion US, three times faster than the previous year.

At the other end of the scale, things aren’t looking quite as rosy. The number of people living under the World Bank poverty line today is the same as it was in 1990—almost 3.6 billion people (44 percent of humanity). Progress to reduce that number has stalled.

This gross and growing inequality creates a series of problems. There is the simple immorality of great poverty amidst great wealth. This in turn leads to social instability. The U.S. serves as the example. The nation with the greatest inequality among the advanced nations has the unhealthiest society, a society that now seems to be crumbling under billionaire rule. (The Trump administration includes almost a dozen members worth at least $1 billion on their own or with their spouses.) And then there is the insidious influence of wealth over politics and government and its erosive effect on democracy, with once again the U.S. serving as the exemplar.

Little could do more to address this threat than taxing wealth fairly. Aside from low tax rates, billionaires escape taxes by secreting their wealth in tax havens and corporations by shifting their profits to low-tax countries.

In 2021, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development negotiated an agreement to deal with the tax shifting. Large multinational enterprises would be required to pay a minimum level of tax (15 percent) on their income in each jurisdiction where they operated, thereby reducing the incentive for profit shifting while placing a floor under tax competition. The aim was to end the race to the bottom on corporate tax rates. It would include corporations that do business in places where they have no physical presence, such as through internet retailing or advertising.

The deal was recently finalized with 150 countries signing on, unfortunately to a watered down version. One country, you will easily guess which, essentially opted out. The U.S. negotiated a side agreement that only its global taxes could be applied to U.S multinationals, undermining the agreement.

This was unfortunate as the agreement was strongly supported by former president Joe Biden and spearheaded by his treasury secretary Janet Yellen. Those were the good old days, rapidly fading into history, when the United States was a responsible global citizen, a champion for a rules-based world order. As our prime minister reminds us, those days aren’t coming back soon, if ever. Bringing the billionaires to heel has proved difficult, dealing with the trillionaires will no doubt be even more of a challenge.