Who Are America’s Billionaires, Anyway

28 October
“The United States has always had a very high tolerance for inequality. As long as people believe the rules are fair and anyone can get there,” said Chuck Collins, director of the program on inequality at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, a nonprofit, and author of “The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions.” “What’s changed is the rules don’t look fair, and not everybody can get there.”

Part of that change is how many more people are reaching stratospheric levels of wealth. By one attempt to measure — an analysis of Forbes data by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies — there are now 745 billionaires in the United States, compared with 614 in March 2020, when the pandemic tightened its grip on the country (and just 66 in 1990). As a group, they have added $2.1 trillion to their combined net worth over the same period, which now totals $5 trillion.

“Now that we hear the words ‘millionaire’ and ‘billionaire’ a lot, we have sort of lost any sense of how much that actually is,” said Rachel Sherman, professor of sociology at the New School and author of “Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence.” “Today’s billionaires are yesterday’s millionaires, but a billion is still exponentially more than a million.”

America’s billionaires represent both first-generation technology and finance wealth and multigenerational billionaire families like the Waltons and Marses. Billionaires minted during the pandemic include Robert Langer, the co-founder of Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna, and Timothy Springer, an early investor; reality star turned shapewear and cosmetics entrepreneur Kim Kardashian West; entertainment mogul Tyler Perry; and Whitney Wolfe Herd, whose dating app Bumble went public this year.

Sam Bankman-Fried, 29, is a prime example of a new kind of billionaire. In 2011, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, he was a student at M.I.T., considering becoming a physics professor and interested in effective altruism, a philosophy that supports applying data and evidence to doing the most good for the many.
Courtesy: The New York Times