Idolising billionaires and the world’s ultra-rich is a prominent part of the mainstream media and popular culture.
Think of the countless articles, movies, interviews and books dedicated to telling the story of the archetypal misfit university drop out-turned-tech billionaire — the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbergs of our world.
Emphasis is placed on the “special” character traits these billionaires seemingly possess, like “entrepreneurship”, “determination” and “leadership”. This is to convince us that if we hone our abilities then we can (maybe) become rich too. If we don’t make it, it’s because we lack the necessary dedication or personality traits.
However, the idea that extreme wealth is a reward for talent and hard work is a myth.
Oxfam International’s report released in January, Takers not Makers: The unjust poverty and unearned wealth from colonialism, shows that most billionaire wealth (60%) is from inheritance, cronyism (rich people capturing or influencing the state for private gain) and corruption or monopoly power.
Inheritance makes up 38% of billionaire wealth. Over the next three decades, billionaires will hand down more than US$5.2 trillion to their heirs, largely untaxed, because most countries don’t tax inheritance.
Take Nazi-saluting billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who started his business ventures using funds from the empire his family built during Apartheid South Africa.
He was then gifted billions of dollars in government grants, subsidies and tax breaks for SpaceX and Tesla to establish near-monopolies in the space rocket and electric car industries, respectively.
Musk and his billionaire buddies have a staggering amount of money — the richest 1% control 45% of all global wealth. Even if any of the richest 10 billionaires somehow lost 99% of their wealth, they would still be a billionaire.
And their fortunes keep growing: billionaire wealth grew three times faster last year than in 2023.
Meanwhile, the number of people living under the poverty line of US$6.85 a day is the same as it was in 1990 — 3.6 billion people, or 44% of humanity.
This extreme inequality is due to billionaires exploiting the labour of millions of workers.
It’s also deeply rooted in colonial expansion, predicated on slavery and resource extraction, which transferred massive wealth from the Global South to a small, rich, white male minority in Europe.
But colonialism didn’t just embed a system of economic exploitation, it reconfigured social structures to impose a global hierarchy rooted in white supremacy and patriarchal ideology.
It’s no coincidence that a minority of mostly white men still control most of the world’s wealth — 85% of Forbes’s list of the 400-richest Americans last year were white men.
Mirroring the dynamics of colonial-era plunder, international trade involves a systematic transfer of wealth and labour from the Global South to the Global North.
Rich countries control the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, which dictate much of global trade and economic policy.
These neocolonial conditions maintain unequal exchange, a rigged financial system and low wages, allowing rich countries to extract huge wealth from the land, resources and labour of people living in the Global South.
Between 1990–2015, the Global North drained US$242 trillion of wealth from the Global South.
The global financial system alone transfers US$30 million an hour from the Global South to the wealthiest 1% in rich countries.
Wages in the Global South are 87–95% lower than wages in the Global North for work of equal skill, with the former contributing 90% of labour to the world economy while receiving 21% of the income.
It’s a small number of corporations — and their billionaire owners — that wield immense influence over governments and economies, with largely unchecked power to: price gouge; abuse workers and suppress wages; and limit access to critical goods and services.
If you think this inherently unjust, consider becoming a Green Left supporter and help fight for an ecosocialist alternative to the system that allows a handful of people to feverishly hoard wealth, while billions suffer.
For more than 30 years, we have reported on the grassroots movements working to build a better world, instead of joining much of the mainstream media in worshipping billionaires.
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