Billionaires are just awful. Just really totally awful.

The sequel to "First thing we do, let's kill all the Billionaires."

Brewster’s Millions is a comedy because the premise is hard.

The hero, a minor-league pitcher named Montgomery Brewster, must spend $30 million in thirty days to inherit $300 million.

He cannot give it to charity.
He cannot destroy it.
He cannot acquire durable assets.

He must have nothing to show for the money by the end of the month.

The film runs for an hour and forty-six minutes because, as it turns out, spending $30 million in thirty days requires actual labor. Brewster charters yachts. He deliberately produces a Broadway show to lose money. He runs a vanity political campaign. He hires a stadium for an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. At every turn, money keeps producing things — buildings, services, attention — that count as assets under the will. The audience laughs because they intuitively recognize that money at the $30 million scale is already behaving differently from money at the $30,000 scale.

This is the right place to begin a longer conversation, because it sets a benchmark. The $30 million figure represents the upper bound (back in the 1980s) of personal scale — wealth large enough to be conspicuous, not yet large enough to be sovereign. Above that line, the relationship between the individual and the money begins to invert. Below the line, the individual operates on the money. Above the line, the money begins to operate on the world through the individual, and eventually, independently of the individual.

I wrote a piece, which generated a stir, called “The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Billionaires.” It argued about the challenges that come from wealth and how that wealth can be leveraged against society.

I was rewatching Brewster’s Millions and said, “ok, I could do that. I could probably spend 30 million in a week.” Genuinely, I think I could. Then I said to myself, “Ok, what about 100 million?” Again, thought through it, and concluded, it’s harder, not yet materially harder. Then I thought about it at half a billion dollars, a billion dollars, ten billion dollars.

There is an inversion point, where it stops being “wealth” and you become something entirely different.

What follows is a thought experiment about where, exactly, that inversion occurs, and what happens to a social order when a sufficient number of individuals find themselves on the far side of it.

The argument is not that the wealthy are villains.

The argument is that wealth, at certain scales, mutates into sovereignty — and that a society that has not understood the mutation, or that refuses to understand it because it is in possession of a folk theology that obscures the mutation, is a society that has lost the capacity to defend itself from the consequences.

That’s the real problem here.

The Ladder

The escalation that follows is not linear. It is phase-transitional. Each rung represents not more of the same kind of wealth but a categorical change in what the wealth is.

$30 million

This is Brewster’s threshold. Spendable, just barely, by a determined individual in a finite time. Wealth at this scale is still recognizably money — it can be exchanged for things, lost in markets, consumed by lifestyle. It produces no particular institutional leverage. The owner is still subject to the same legal, regulatory, and political constraints as the rest of the population, even if they enjoy more comfortable accommodations within those constraints. The state, broadly, ignores them in the sense that mattered to the framers of the Constitution: the state neither needs their permission nor is unduly afraid of their displeasure.

Now, you can really live “the high life” on this wealth. But you’re still subject to all the rules as the rest of us. Yes, money smooths a ton of edges, but you’re still stuck in the machinery.

Could I spend it all in 30 days? Absolutely. The key would be to get rid of the money through operational expenditures only, primarily for services and consumables. If I’m being honest? I could get rid of it in a week. A fleet of aircraft on standby, combined with booked hotels across the US, combined with yatch reservations paid in advance, I’d probably be out 30 million by Friday if I started on Wednesday. It wouldn’t be that hard.

$100 million

This is the threshold of inconvenient money — wealth that becomes harder to deploy than to acquire. At nine figures, the question stops being “how do I make more money” and starts being “what do I do with the money I have?” Financial advisors become a permanent fixture of life. Family offices begin to make sense. Asset protection becomes a meaningful concern because the wealth is large enough that lawsuits, divorces, and tax disputes carry stakes worth defending.

Politically, $100 million begins to generate access. A nine-figure donor can buy meaningful proximity to officials. The donations are large enough to be material to a senator’s reelection campaign. The owner can hire former regulators as consultants. They can fund think tanks. They can endow chairs at universities. They are not yet, however, in a position to set the terms of regulatory engagement. They are still petitioning the state, not negotiating with it.

Could I spend it all in a month? Yes. It’s harder than 30 million, but it’s a scale problem, not really a problem with vectors. Again, more yachts, planes, services, accountants, lawyers, hotels, etc. I’d need the full month to get rid of it all, but I feel very confident I could. For example, Macallan has roughly 30 bottles of Scotch that are about $ 2 million each. I’m pretty sure I could drink 30 million in Scotch in a month. That’s a third of the assets gone right there.

$500 million

This is the threshold at which wealth begins to generate institutional leverage in its own right. A half-billion-dollar fortune is not large enough to overwhelm a major economic sector on its own. But it is large enough to have a substantial influence on one. By this point, the owner has begun to control institutional infrastructure — operating companies, real estate portfolios, investment vehicles — that employ enough people and touch enough other businesses that decisions made by the owner ripple outward through other lives.

The character of the wealth changes here. At $500 million, the owner is no longer simply a wealthy individual. They are an institution. They have a staff. They have a public-facing organization. They have political relationships that are corporate rather than personal. The wealth has begun to externalize into the world.

Critically, the wealth at this scale begins to compound at rates that exceed any plausible personal consumption. A $500 million portfolio, even held in indexed equities, generates returns of $30-50 million per year in a typical market. The wealth is now growing faster than the human capacity to spend it, by an order of magnitude. The owner cannot deplete the principal through any reasonable lifestyle. Brewster’s Millions, at this level, becomes an analytical absurdity.

Could I get rid of it in a month? I doubt it. Honestly. First, the places I could park the wealth would, in and of themselves, generate wealth faster than I could probably spend it, even with lavish living. There are only so many ways to disburse it quickly, and 500 million dollars will generate 1.5 million dollars just sitting there at nominal interest rates. But a deposit that big, you would get probably close to treasury rates, so 2 million dollars. For doing nothing. Every month. I don’t think I could do it in 30 days. I might be able to get rid of it all in a year.

$1 billion

This is where the rules begin to change around the person. A billionaire does not request access; they receive it. They do not petition regulators; they meet with regulators. They do not hire former officials; former officials interview for positions in their organizations. The relationship between the individual and the state has inverted from the relationship that prevailed at $30 million. At $30 million, the state ignored the individual. At $1 billion, the individual ignores parts of the state, and those parts that retain the institutional self-respect to demand the individual’s attention have to organize themselves in formidable ways to be heard.

A billion-dollar fortune produces, as a matter of structural inevitability: a federal lobbying operation, formally registered or otherwise; substantial annual political contributions, often routed through institutional vehicles that conceal the source; a media presence, either through direct ownership of outlets or through influential relationships with editorial boards; a philanthropic apparatus that functions partly as charity, partly as tax management, and partly as social-license production; an asset protection infrastructure — trusts, offshore vehicles, family-office staff — that places the underlying capital outside the reach of ordinary creditors, lawsuits, and certain forms of taxation; and access to investment opportunities (pre-IPO equity, private placements, hedge fund tranches) that are not available to the general public and that systematically compound the wealth gap.

The owner, at this point, has acquired something the framers of the Constitution did not anticipate and would have found alarming: the operational capacity of a small state, owned and directed by a single individual, with no electoral or constitutional check on its activities.

Could I spend it? Absolutely not. I’ve thought about it and gamed it out multiple ways, and I feel very confident that somewhere between 200 million and a billion dollars, the leverage swings towards making more money than your ability to disburse it and not have assets. Wealth at a billion dollars takes on a life of its own. That life begins at centamillionaire status and accelerates to a billion-dollar level. At a billion dollars? Things take on a life of their own.

$10 billion and above

This is the threshold at which an individual becomes, functionally, a transnational organism. The fortune is no longer a stock of capital. It is an institution — a quasi-sovereign entity with operations on multiple continents, employment relationships with tens of thousands of workers, contractual relationships with multiple national governments, technological infrastructure of strategic importance, media holdings, intelligence-gathering capabilities, and the capacity to influence the political and regulatory environments of multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

At this scale, the individual has become what astronomers would call a gravity well — an object massive enough that the surrounding space-time bends around it. Capital flows toward it because capital flows toward capital. Talent flows toward it because talent goes where the capital is. Political access flows toward it because political access is fungible with capital. Media coverage flows toward it because the entity is now newsworthy on a permanent basis. The financial gravity well, once formed, continues to deepen as every component of the surrounding economy reorganizes to accommodate its gravitational pull.

The owner at this rung has access to: negotiated relationships with multiple national governments, often at the head-of-state level; the capacity to make geopolitical interventions — bandwidth, satellites, communications infrastructure — that have direct consequences for ongoing armed conflicts; strategic technological assets — chip fabrication, cloud computing, large language models, payment systems — that constitute critical infrastructure for the economies of multiple countries; private intelligence capabilities, either through directly held firms or through relationships with intelligence-adjacent contractors; the capacity to dominate labor markets in entire sectors, setting wage norms and working conditions that other employers must follow; media holdings that shape public discourse in multiple countries; and sufficient capital to outbid sovereign wealth funds for strategic acquisitions.

At $10 billion and above, the analytical question is not whether the individual is wealthy. The analytical question is what kind of sovereign entity the individual has become, and what relationship the formal sovereign — the state, the legislature, the regulatory apparatus — bears to the de facto sovereign whose private operations span multiple countries.

By the time the ladder reaches its top rung, the entity there is not a person who happens to be wealthy. It is a private state with a person at the center.

At a hundred billion dollars, you have more wealth than at least five states: Vermont, Wyoming, Alaska, South Dakota, and North Dakota (in terms of GDP). If you have half a trillion dollars or more, you are wealthier than every state except California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan.

Elon Musk is estimated to have roughly 800 billion in wealth. If true? Then he’s literally the sixth-wealthiest “state” in the US - behind California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois. Once he crosses the one trillion mark? He will probably displace Illinois and then Florida. You need over 3 trillion in wealth to displace New York and Texas; you need over four trillion to displace California.

This is the dynamic and the problem. Billionaires aren’t just wealthy; they’re sovereign.

The Mythology

There is a body of folklore that has grown up around concentrated private wealth in the United States — a liturgy that performs the same function for the contemporary plutocrat that divine-right theory performed for the seventeenth-century monarch. The folklore requires close examination, because it has been remarkably successful at suppressing the kind of analysis I have just walked through.

The first piece of the mythology is the doctrine that the holders of these fortunes earned them. This claim, examined empirically, is incoherent.

No human being earns $200 billion in any meaningful sense of “earn.” A human being who works diligently for fifty years, at the upper end of professional compensation, might earn $50 million. The remaining 99.97% of a multi-billion-dollar fortune is not earnings. It is capital gains, asset appreciation, equity revaluations, leveraged returns on prior holdings, and tax-advantaged compounding.

None of these activities resembles what the average voter understands by the verb “earn.”

The language of earning is borrowed from the world of work and applied to the world of capital ownership as if the two were continuous.

They are not.

This is not a complaint about the morality of the wealthy. It is an observation about the misleading vocabulary that surrounds them. A billionaire is not someone who earned a billion dollars. A billionaire is someone who owns something that has appreciated to that valuation, often through a combination of skill, timing, network effects, information asymmetry, regulatory accident, and luck so substantial that the role of skill becomes statistically difficult to isolate.

The second piece of the mythology is the doctrine that society needs billionaires.

It most certainly does not.

The argument runs that without the prospect of vast fortunes, the entrepreneurial activity that drives innovation would collapse. The argument is inverted by the historical record.

The most productive period of American innovation in the twentieth century — roughly 1945 to 1975 — occurred during the era of the highest marginal tax rates in American history, the most aggressive antitrust enforcement, the strongest labor unions, and the most constrained corporate power since the Gilded Age.

That era produced the interstate highway system, NASA, the moon landings, the integrated circuit, the laser, the internet (DARPA-funded), the polio vaccine, the modern computer (Bell Labs), commercial aviation, the modern pharmaceutical industry, and the architectural and engineering substrate of the modern economy.

It also produced a thriving middle class, broad-based wage growth, and the highest level of social mobility in American history.

What it did not produce was billionaires.

The number of American billionaires, in inflation-adjusted dollars, was vanishingly small throughout this period. The architecture of the American economy was structured to prevent the accumulation of fortunes on the scale that has become the norm in the last forty years. The architecture produced more innovation, not less, and distributed the benefits of that innovation more broadly than at any time before or since.

The third piece of the mythology is the doctrine that innovation collapses without oligarchs. This claim has been substantially repeated by the oligarchs in question, who have a financial interest in being believed. The historical record indicates the opposite. The most concentrated periods of private wealth in American history — the late Gilded Age and the present era — have not been the most innovative periods. They have been the periods of greatest rent extraction, greatest financial speculation, and greatest political capture. The innovation associated with contemporary plutocrats has been overwhelmingly funded, at the foundational level, by public research that they inherited and privatized.

The internet was DARPA. The Global Positioning System was developed by the Department of Defense. The fundamental algorithms underlying modern artificial intelligence were developed in academic labs funded by federal grants. The semiconductor industry’s foundational research was funded by the Pentagon. The mRNA platform that produced the COVID-19 vaccines was developed over thirty years of NIH-funded research. The contemporary plutocrat’s contribution has typically been the productization, marketing, and capital-market extraction of value from technological substrates assembled at public expense before the plutocrat arrived.

The fourth piece of the mythology is the doctrine that taxing billionaires destroys capitalism. This is the most analytically impoverished of the four claims. Capitalism, as an economic system, does not require billionaires. It requires private property, the rule of contract, functioning markets, and reliable monetary infrastructure. None of these things is threatened by progressive taxation. The historical record demonstrates that capitalism functioned more dynamically, more inclusively, and more innovatively during the era when its top-end accumulation was structurally constrained. The argument that taxation destroys capitalism is, on inspection, an argument that any constraint on the accumulation of private fortune is incompatible with the economic system. This is a remarkable claim. It is also a useful claim if one is in the business of accumulating an unconstrained private fortune.

The four pieces of the mythology, taken together, function as a secular liturgy. They are recited at conferences, repeated in editorial pages, and embedded in business school curricula. They are not, in the empirical sense, true. They are a folk theology of plutocratic order, and their function is to render the order acceptable.

Civilization-Made Wealth

Even setting aside the mythology, there is a more fundamental analytical point that the discussion of private fortune systematically avoids. No fortune of the scale we are discussing is self-made.

The infrastructure that makes a hundred-billion-dollar fortune possible is not built by the holder of the fortune. It is built by the civilization in which the holder operates. Roads, ports, electrical grids, water systems, public health infrastructure, telecommunications networks, the internet, the reserve-currency system, the central banking system, the legal system, the contract enforcement system, the patent system, the regulatory framework, the education system that produced the labor force, the basic scientific research that produced the technological substrate, the military protection that secured the property — none of these is the product of any individual fortune-holder. All of them are the product of cumulative public investment, organized over generations, and paid for by the labor and taxation of populations that derived no individual benefit from the resulting fortunes.

A fortune at the scale we are discussing is, in operational terms, a privatized extraction from civilizational infrastructure. The infrastructure made the fortune possible. The fortune is the product of civilization more than the product of the fortune-holder. The fortune-holder’s contribution is not zero — there is real entrepreneurial skill in most large fortunes, real risk-taking, real organizational competence — but the contribution is small relative to the substrate. A genius businessman in a country without functioning courts, a reserve currency, public education, and military protection does not produce a hundred-billion-dollar fortune. He produces, at best, a regional conglomerate at the mercy of local warlords.

The civilizational substrate is the necessary condition. The entrepreneurial activity is a sufficient condition. The mythology of self-making conflates the two.

This is not a moral argument. It is a structural one, and it has structural consequences. If civilization is the necessary condition of fortune, civilization has a legitimate claim on the disposition of the fortune. The mechanism through which civilization asserts that claim is taxation — graduated taxation, in proportion to the dependence of the fortune on the civilizational substrate. The fortune does not exist independently of the substrate. Therefore, the fortune cannot, coherently, claim independence from the substrate’s right to constrain it.

The contemporary American political and constitutional order has, over forty years, progressively undermined this claim. The mechanisms by which civilization used to constrain extreme fortune — progressive taxation, antitrust enforcement, regulatory authority over corporate power, statutory limits on political spending — have been weakened, in some cases removed entirely. The fortunes have grown. The civilization that produced the fortunes has not, in any commensurate way, captured the benefits of the growth.

This is what is meant by the parasitic transition.

The Parasitic Transition

At a certain scale, accumulated capital ceases to function as productive capital. The function of productive capital is allocative — directing resources toward opportunities that yield future returns. This is the activity that justifies the existence of capital markets in the first place. Capital, at scale, is supposed to allocate.

But at the upper extremes of accumulation, allocation becomes secondary to preservation. Capital begins to behave self-protectively. It directs its resources not toward future opportunities but toward preservation of the conditions that made the existing accumulation possible. It funds political campaigns to maintain favorable tax treatment. It funds think tanks to produce intellectual justifications for its own privilege. It funds media properties to shape the discourse that constrains it. It litigates to maintain regulatory exemptions. It lobbies to suppress labor organizations. It captures the agencies that were supposed to regulate it. It bends antitrust enforcement so that consolidation continues unimpeded.

At this point, the capital has shifted from productive to parasitic. It is no longer producing future value. It is consuming the social and institutional resources that would otherwise be available for other uses to preserve itself in its current form.

This is not an accusation. It is a description of behavior. Capital, at the upper extremes of accumulation, behaves like any other organism whose survival is threatened by external constraint: it organizes itself to neutralize the threat. The threat, in the case of accumulated capital, is the corrective mechanism of the democratic state — the taxes, regulations, antitrust enforcement, labor laws, and disclosure requirements that, in healthier configurations, constrain the unlimited growth of private fortune. The capital responds to this threat the way any threatened organism does: by attempting to neutralize the threat.

The behavior is rational at the level of the individual fortune. It is catastrophic at the system level. A society whose corrective mechanisms have been progressively neutralized by the entities those mechanisms were supposed to correct is a society that has lost the capacity for self-correction. It is, in the technical sense, a captured system.

The American political and regulatory architecture has undergone substantial capture over the last forty years. The Federal Election Commission cannot enforce its own rules because the entities it is supposed to regulate fund the campaigns of the legislators who appoint its commissioners. The Internal Revenue Service cannot meaningfully audit billionaires because its budget has been progressively cut by legislators funded by those billionaires. The Securities and Exchange Commission cannot effectively regulate market manipulation by sitting presidents because, as the country recently observed, the consequences for executive market manipulation have been operationally reduced to nothing. The antitrust apparatus, which was supposed to constrain corporate consolidation, has not blocked a major technology merger in twenty years.

This is what the parasitic transition produces. It is not a coup. It is not a conspiracy. It is the predictable behavior of accumulated capital at scale, operating through the perfectly legal mechanisms that capital can purchase at scale. The mechanisms by which the system was supposed to constrain the accumulation have progressively been undermined by the accumulation itself. The corrective loop has been broken.

The Evidence the Mythology Ignores

The strongest empirical argument against the necessity of plutocratic wealth concentration is the one that the mythology systematically excludes from polite discussion: the postwar American economy actually existed. It was not a theoretical construct. It was the operational economic order of the world’s largest industrial nation from approximately 1945 to 1975, and its outcomes are matters of historical record.

During this period, the federal marginal tax rate in the top bracket ranged from 70% to 91%, depending on the year. Antitrust enforcement was vigorous; the Department of Justice broke up monopolies and blocked anticompetitive mergers as a matter of routine. Labor unions covered approximately one in three American workers. Corporate governance was constrained by stakeholder norms that have since been replaced by exclusive shareholder primacy. Executive compensation was approximately 20-25 times the average worker’s wage; the ratio is now approximately 300:1.

The economic outcomes of this constrained system were, by every relevant measure, superior to the outcomes of the deregulated system that replaced it. GDP growth averaged 4% per year. Productivity growth averaged 2.8%. Median household income approximately doubled. Home ownership rose from 44% to 65%. College attendance expanded by an order of magnitude. The middle class expanded from approximately one-third to approximately two-thirds of the population. The innovations of the era — the interstate highway system, NASA, the moon landings, the integrated circuit, the laser, the internet, the polio vaccine, the modern computer, commercial aviation, the modern pharmaceutical industry — are the operating substrate of the contemporary economy.

What the period did not produce, in any substantial quantity, was billionaires. The accumulation of wealth at the scale that has become normal in the last forty years was, in the postwar period, structurally prevented by the tax, regulatory, and corporate-governance architecture. The architecture worked. The economy thrived. The population prospered. And the wealth that was generated remained substantially within reach of the population that generated it.

This is the period that contemporary mythology must dismiss in order to remain coherent. The dismissal typically takes the form of an assertion — that the postwar period was exceptional, that its conditions cannot be replicated, that the global economy has changed too much. The assertion is offered without evidence because the evidence does not support it. The postwar architecture was not magic. It was a set of policy choices. The choices produced the outcomes. The outcomes were good. Different choices have since been made; they have produced different outcomes; the outcomes have been worse for nearly everyone except the holders of accumulated capital.

The argument that we cannot return to the postwar architecture is, in operational terms, an argument that the holders of accumulated capital have acquired sufficient power to prevent it. This is, in fact, true. It is not an economic argument. It is an inventory of the political constraints that the parasitic transition has produced.

The Bottom of the Ladder

A society can survive the existence of wealthy people. Every society has had them. The question that distinguishes societies that endure from those that fail is whether the wealthy operate within constraints imposed by the broader society, or whether they operate without constraints because they have acquired the capacity to bend the constraint-imposing mechanisms to their own purposes.

Over the last forty years, the United States has progressively shifted from the first configuration to the second. The mechanisms meant to constrain extreme wealth concentration have been progressively neutralized by the very wealth they were meant to constrain. The corrective loop has been broken. The political class that was supposed to represent the broader public has been, with limited and inconsistent exceptions, absorbed into the orbit of the entities that fund its campaigns. The regulatory apparatus that was supposed to maintain the boundary between private fortune and public power has been hollowed out by the fortunes whose boundary-respecting behavior it was supposed to compel.

What remains is a political-economic system in which the formal architecture of democracy — elections, legislatures, courts, agencies — continues to operate at the surface, while the substantive decisions about resource allocation, regulatory priority, political agenda-setting, and even foreign policy are increasingly made by, or at the behest of, a small number of private actors who have accumulated wealth at scales that the framers of the constitutional system did not anticipate and would have found alarming.

The reader of this essay who recognizes themselves in the description is not crazy. The pattern is observable in the public record. The mythology surrounding the pattern is contradicted by historical evidence. The decline in the corrective capacity of the democratic state is a measurable phenomenon. The transition from productive to parasitic capital is a documented behavior.

What is to be done about this is a separate question, and not one this essay attempts to settle. The polities that have, to varying degrees, retained the constraint mechanisms that the United States has shed — northern Europe, parts of Asia, and several smaller jurisdictions — exist. They are not paradises. They have their own pathologies. But they have, in operational terms, preserved more of the postwar architecture than the United States has, and the consequences are visible in their populations’ relative material outcomes, social cohesion, and political stability. Anyone evaluating where to direct their working life, residency, assets, and children’s futures should at least be aware of the comparison.

The deeper question is not what to do as an individual. It is what happens to a society in which the corrective mechanisms have been broken, and the broken mechanisms have not been repaired.

The answer, observable in every previous historical configuration in which this dynamic has played out, is some version of the following.

A society incapable of limiting concentrated private power eventually discovers that it will limit society instead.

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