Royel Drane
Senior Thesis | 2025
Royel Drane
Dr. Alonge
Senior Thesis
11 April 2025
A Ban On Billionaires?!
The United States is on the verge of becoming a pseudooligarchy run by an extremely wealthy, but also extremely small number of families. The majority of their wealth is not earned, but once it is obtained, money is power, and people like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, are using that power to generate lifetime supplies of political and market influence for themselves while trying to appear as saints to the public. The intense concentration of power is counterproductive to the democratic nature of the U.S. as the vast majority of the country is left divided, misinformed, and vulnerable to the whims of a disproportionately powerful few. Consequently, the freedom granted to the American citizen is dulled and imbalanced, leaving them with fear and desperation that they have not the means to escape. Meanwhile, Musk, a man who was never elected into any political position, is currently the righthand man of the president, another billionaire, and has used the power bestowed upon him by the president to further weaken the few shackles remaining on the billionaire class. The freedom that comes with his scarcely restricted power is of a dangerous kind, allowing him to subjugate others and even appear to be beyond the law.
The two conflicting forms of freedom are described by Erich Fromm in his book, Escape From Freedom, where he calls them ‘Freedom From’ and ‘Freedom To’. A person’s level of Freedom From reflects the level of accountability one holds for their actions in relation to others. As a person grows up and is gradually left on their own by their wider society, their sense of
Freedom From grows, leaving them feeling “isolated, alone, and afraid” (Fromm 104). The answer to their fears is supposed to be found in their sense of Freedom To, a measure of how capable someone is in terms of their skills, connections, wisdom, talent, and confidence. The more Freedom To a person has gained throughout their life, the more they are able to feel “independent, self-reliant, and critical” (Fromm 104). A high and healthy sense of both Freedom From and Freedom To allows people to develop into independent and responsible human beings, but as the wealthy regime has developed, freedom has begun to take the forms of two polar extremes and divide people even further. Fromm’s explanation for why the people of Germany began to see the Nazis as a symbol of hope was because of the imbalance of freedom and abundance of desperation they were experiencing, and if the American people are to avoid coming close to the horrible results of WWII, the rising pressure of wealth inequality must be dealt with.
While the federal minimum wage sits in the single digits of income per hour, the price of allowing people to own an unlimited amount of money without any true restrictions rears its ugly head more and more. Over the past fifty years, the concentration of wealth and income has massively intensified, leaving a small and homogenous group of people in a domineering position over the rest of the country. Studies indicate a harsh truth about the legitimacy of billionaire wealth in general.. Despite these findings, however, the popular and individualistic notion that the U.S. is currently a meritocracy rationalizes the current state of wealth distribution in the eyes of many, leaving the less fortunate isolated and without freedom while the wealthy have far too much of it. The unpatriotic lack of freedom that the working class people are being subjected to can have catastrophic consequences on the country as a whole, and so it is necessary for information about the true state of the economy to be spread so that action can be taken against this injustice.
First, it is important to have a general overview of the current state of wealth distribution in order to understand the extent to which inequality has plagued the population. The current wealth gap between the working class and the wealthiest people in the country is beyond egregious. Since the 1970s, the income growth rates of the top 1% wealthiest U.S. households have increased far faster than those of the rest of the country, resulting in there being a 200% gap in income growth since 1979 between the wealthiest 1% of people and the bottom 20% of households in terms of wealth, who received the second highest increase in income growth out of the aforementioned wealth groups, the middle 60% above them, and the other wealthiest top 19% in the country.
Graph 1: Percent change in income after transfers and taxes since 1979 (Sherman Fig. 3).
The gap between the wealthiest fifth of the country and everyone else is so large, in fact, that they were the only group to have gained wealth since the Great Recession of 2007 (Sherman). On
top of the vast difference in income, about 70% of the country’s wealth belongs to the top 10%, with just under half of it belonging to the top 1% alone (Sherman). On their own, these two statistics paint a picture of how, when going from top to bottom, the level of individual wealth begins extremely low and grows very slowly, but starts to grow exponentially faster as it approaches the top 1%, whose growth overtime is represented by how the net worth of the richest person of any given year has grown in the 2000s, from Bill Gates gaining the title in 2009 with 40 billion dollars, to when Jeff Bezos first attained the title in 2017 with about 100 billion, to April of 2025, where Elon Musk holds the title with a net worth of 342 billion dollars (Wikipedia). Meanwhile, the current average hourly wage in the U.S. is about $30. If someone were to be paid $30 dollars per hour, work every day, and not ever use their money on anything, it would take them 3806 years to reach a single billion dollars in total income, and somehow, the situation can be even worse. In 2023, there were 36.8 million people living in poverty, meaning that they did not have the funds necessary to afford the most basic necessities. For the levels of individual net worth to vary so immensely in a country that prides itself on being a place where each person’s opinion matters and liberty and justice are shared by every citizen, it makes sense to assume that there must be some reasonable factors differentiating the common folk from the billionaires. But unfortunately, research suggests otherwise.
Most billionaire wealth is taken and hoarded, not earned. Α 2025 publication reveals that “about 60 percent of billionaire wealth comes from three sources: inheritance, cronyism and corruption, or monopoly power” (Oxfam). Once again, the idea of meritocracy is tarnished by the truth as billionaire wealth is passed around through individual networks, giving those who end up with the wealth the ability to grant the right of way into the cycle of riches to their friends and family, leaving the rest of the country in the dust. On the surface, it is a dream for many to be able to bring all of the people in their life into the world of success. There are
very few people who would not want to take the burden of money off the shoulders of their family and friends. Nonetheless, at the point where even just tens of millions of the country’s dollars are involved, keeping that money within the space of just a few households contributes to the already atrocious problem of wealth inequality and historically keeps the wealth of the country in an undiversified set of hands. In 2022, the median wealth of White households in the wealthiest one-fifth U.S. households stood at 2.5 million while the median wealth of both Black and Latino households in the same category stood at 500 thousand, a difference of five times (Sherman). In conjunction with the fact that 37 out of 50 of the richest people in America are white men, with only one man out of the entire group being nonwhite, this data reveals that America is still firmly held in White male hands. And so, wealth inequality is not only a problem of class, but also one of race and gender, and if it continues to escalate in the direction, it has been going in for decades, America will be directed by a single-minded and unrivaled hand that leaves the country’s population in the dust.
Graph 2: Household net worth by race and ethnicity, 2022 (Sherman Fig. 1).
In this case, the freedom of both the oppressed majority and the domineering minority are taken to extremes. On one hand, the oppressed are bombarded with an inescapable sense of Freedom From, but without the resources necessary to foster a healthy sense of Freedom To as a counterbalance. Such a scene can be seen today, where the individualistic culture of the U.S. stands in opposition to the high prices of healthy food, the restrictions around education, the harsh importance placed on the socioeconomic background someone is born with, and how the infamously infectious ideal of meritocracy makes people indifferent to the current state of affairs (The Opportunity Atlas). In a culture where people pride themselves on being self-made, the amount of money someone’s family possesses has a major impact on their physical and mental development, leaving them unprepared for when the world puts all the weight of their actions on their shoulders. On the other hand, the dominant minority are corrupted by the overflow of freedom that comes with their extreme wealth in both ways. No one encapsulates how far deplorable people can go with extreme wealth in the 2020s better than Shawn “P Diddy” Combs, who has only been facing a surge of lawsuits since late 2023, but has been exploiting an obscene amount of people physically, mentally, and sexually for decades prior. His money and status give him a bottomless well of Freedom To in the form of opportunities and abilities, but with that comes a twisted Freedom From that allows him to evade the law, threaten those whom he has wronged into submission, and hire people to cover up the truth of his crimes against women, men, and even children. Casandra Ventura, with whom Diddy had a relationship with for about 13 years, filed a law suit against him in November of 2023 for sexual assault, battery, sex trafficking, and requiring her to engage in sexual acts (Rosenbaum). Accompanying the lawsuit was footage from 2016 of her being thrown onto the floor, stomped on, and dragged back into a hotel room by Combs that
was made public in May of last year. Then in September 2024, Thalia Graves filed a lawsuit accusing Diddy of drugging her, tying her up, and “viciously raping her” in 2001 with a body guard of his (Rosenbaum). 61 other cases are described in one article alone, all with similar accusations from a wide variety of people, and these are just the people who had the courage to speak out at all (Rosenbaum). For decades, this man has been allowed to terrorize and traumatize the people around him without legal repercussions, as it was only in 2023 when the allegations began to pile up against P Diddy. The power and influence that came with his extreme wealth plays a major role in his ability to evade the law for so long, presenting a fatal flaw in allowing individuals to garner such an insurmountable amount of money in any country that even remotely values justice. However, the consequences of such a choice go beyond the scope of crime and protection from justice.
By making the choice to allow individuals to amass immense amounts of money, the United States is granting a lucky few individuals the ability to majorly support their political party while other citizens are too poor or laden with work to be able to make an informed decision on who to vote for. Elon Musk is currently the most prominent figure of all billionaires in this case due to his status as the richest man in the world along with his close relationship to President Donald Trump. His massive financial contributions to Republican causes in the 2024 elections along with the outreach he went back on his word to abuse as the owner of Twitter greatly benefitted Trump’s campaign in ways only possible for a billionaire. He is nowhere near the first to use his extreme wealth to benefit his side of politics, however, as David Koch, a member of one of the richest families in America, also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to attack president Obama’s campaign during the 2012 elections. Even someone like Yvon Chouinard, who has created a positive public image for himself after not only founding the eco-friendly Patagonia
company, but also transferring all his wealth to a ‘non-profit organization’, is turning his wealth into a lifetime supply of political power for his family under people’s noses. Extreme wealth is granting these individuals a disproportionate amount of power in the government in a way that is undemocratic.
David Koch exemplifies how immense wealth can be converted into political power. He is a part of the Koch family, one of the wealthiest families in the world due to their ownership of Koch Industries, which was founded by the father of David Koch and stands as the second largest privately owned company in the country today. Along with his brothers, he inherited the business from his father, and has been a figure in the world of wealth ever since. He took his first real step into politics in 1980, when he ran as the Vice Presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party and only won a single percent of the vote (Yang). After this conventional approach to power failed, however, he took a different path to power by donating tens of millions of dollars to several conservative advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity, a super PAC (Political Action Committee) that Koch co-founded with his brother Charles (Yang). Super PACs like AFP have become more powerful figures for campaigns due to the FEC’s (Federal Election Commission) steady withering of the laws around how much these committees can coordinate with political candidates (Noti). A ruling vaguely stating how the prohibition of coordination between super PACs and political candidates does not apply to ‘canvassing activities’ leaves room for these super PACs to advertise their political candidates through means like going door to door and sending mail directly (Noti). David Koch is one of the wealthy people that use these vague loopholes to push their political agendas with their fortune. One of the agendas he hoped to push was against climate change activism because of how integral the oil and gas industries are to his fortune. Koch spent decades building up a network of other wealthy people to use lobbying, think tanks, and political donations that rival those of a
political party to push the idea that “government programs can only cause more harm than good and that market forces alone must shape human society” (Leonard). His most heinous display of he and his family’s disregard for the democratic nature of the country in favor of his own views was when he had 156 members of Congress sign a pledge to “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue” to secure the money and support of the Koch brothers in return (Mayer). Before his death in 2019, David Koch was just one of the many people in the sphere of the extremely wealthy that are granted the ability to use their wealth as political power that can impact the entire world, but his actions were more covert. Today, the corruption of politics by the extremely rich is being made clear as day.
If Koch is an example of the political power extreme wealth can give someone, then Elon Musk must be the face of the concept today with how his money has allowed him to not only infiltrate the White House unelected, but also have a spot next to the President. Similar to Koch, Elon Musk used the vague regulations around super PACs to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to the conservative parties of the 2024 elections using his own PAC, America PAC. One of the most damning ways he used his money was by hosting million dollar giveaways for registered voters in swing states who sign a petition “in favour of free speech and the right to bear arms” (Cabral). Those who were able to get another person to sign up were also promised a payment of $47. These giveaways are borderline illegal, as 18 U.S. Code Section 597 states that “Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate…shall be fined under this title or imprisoned” (LEI). Nonetheless, these giveaways are in a legal grey area, as it has been argued by lawyer, Brad Smith, that Musk is merely paying people to sign a petition, not to vote (Cabral). At the same time though, if a prerequisite to sign that petition is to
vote, then the giveaways are also being used to compel people to vote for financial gain, especially so because of how these giveaways are primarily being held in swing states with the goal of garnering more support for the conservative side of the election. Despite the questionable legality of his methods, Elon’s work paid off in making Donald Trump the president, and for his efforts and financial contributions, he has ended up with a spot right next to Donald Trump in the White House, going as far as being called the president’s ‘First Buddy’. Unlike his fellow billionaire Trump, he was not elected to be in such a powerful position, but rather appointed by the president as one of his many displays of gratitude for those who showed their support during the election. It was greatly due to his status as the president’s biggest financial backer that he had received a substantial amount of political potency, meaning that exercising the immense power he already had as a billionaire led him to even more power as a result. Truly, the rich just keep getting richer.
Despite the danger posed by placing such weight on the opinions and stances of a lucky few, some billionaires still manage to have a positive public image. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the clothing company Patagonia, became one of the ‘good ones’ in September 2022 when he would make headlines for giving away his company along with his 3 billion dollar fortune to “a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization…created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits –some 100 million a year – are used to combat climate change and protect underdeveloped land around the globe” (Gelles). On the surface, giving away a company worth billions to a nonprofit while continuing to push the eco-friendly values that the company has represented since its humble beginnings sounds like an extraordinary act of selfless kindness. However, the contents of this same New York Times article that praises the ‘former’ billionaire for his selflessness as well as that of Patagonia’s own statement about the donation hide the true story in plain sight
(Gelles). In reality, the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which holds 2% of Chouinard’s voting stock, still belongs to the Chouinard family, who will be “electing and overseeing Patagonia’s board of directors” (Chouinard). Additionally, since Chouinard donated the shares to a trust rather than giving it to his family directly, he only had to pay a fraction of the amount he would have to pay in gift taxes otherwise. As for the other 98% of the company’s shares, they were received by the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit organization established at the time that is also owned by the Chouinard family. And to make matters worse, rather than being a 501(c)(3) kind of nonprofit organization that serves as a charitable organization that cannot directly participate in politics, the Holdfast Collective is a 501(c)(4), making that it a social welfare group that can use its funds to publicly support and endorse or oppose political candidates. In other words, Chouinard essentially donated all of his money to his family in a way that not only minimizes the taxes on the donation, but also puts political power in the hands of his family for generations to come. Regardless of whether his stance on climate change is viewed as good-natured or not, Chouinard is intentionally hoarding immense sums of money to push his own political agenda and keep his family in power like a monarch, making him as egregious as the others while he portrays himself as a reluctant billionaire at the same time.
Graph 3: Differences between 501c3 nonprofit organizations, and 501c4 nonprofit organizations (Raj).
The U.S.’s current state has given freedom two extreme meanings, one a power trip, the other desperation, and split them respectively between the wealthy minority and the rest of the population. Societal change does not happen overnight, and the more time is allowed to pass idly, the tighter the stranglehold of the billionaire regime becomes, so action needs to be taken in order to preserve the core values of this country. For one, the loose regulations around PACs is a primary factor to why the extremely wealthy are able to dump so much money into important elections, so acknowledging and getting rid of the loopholes used by people like Elon Musk and David Koch would go a long way in preserving the sanctity of the U.S. democracy. Moreover, reclaiming the massive amount of money lost to rampant tax
evasion committed by extremely wealthy people would not only directly contribute to lowering the financial ceiling, but also give the government hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to potentially use to raise the financial floor overtime. Economist Gabriel Zucman’s proposal to install a global tax on billionaires goes a step farther in ensuring that those with immense wealth pay their warranted taxes. People do not need to be trained economists to contribute to the fight against inequality, though. By being informed, spreading awareness, and paying attention to the actions of the wealthiest people in the country, anybody can bring America one step closer to being a place where everyone has a chance to thrive.
If the U.S. is to combat wealth inequality, a ban on Super PACs is a must. As mentioned before, David Koch, and, more recently, Elon Musk have shown how wealth is currently capable of giving people a disproportionate amount of political power compared to everyone else due to vague laws around the activity of super PACs. While PACs have been around for a long time now, super PACs have only been around since 2010 (Whitaker). The difference between the two types is that PACs can coordinate with candidates, but must also abide by federal limits on the amount of money they can receive and pay, while super PACs cannot coordinate with candidates, but do not have any limits on the amount of money they can spend and fundraise on the grounds that they do not pose any risk of corruption. The reasoning given by the Supreme Court was that limiting individual expenditures was not only against the First Amendment as it is a form of speech, but also that “the absence of prearrangement and coordination of an expenditure with the candidate or his agent not only undermines the value of the expenditure to the candidate, but also alleviates the danger that expenditures will be given as a quid pro quo for improper commitments from the candidate” (Whitaker). Now firstly, using the idea that individual spending is a form of speech to justify the use of hundreds of millions of dollars by extremely
wealthy people with the motive of pushing their political agendas spits in the face of America’s core value of equality. It permits those with wealth to project their voices and visions immensely farther than the average citizen, as if one voice is more important than the other. It is as if they allow a select few individuals to speak in paragraphs while everyone else is limited to a sentence. But even if that first reason is dismissed, their second reason about a lack of coordination falls flat on its face in the context of the 2024 elections when its largest donor now infamously stands beside the president who runs the party he was donating to, and has publicly stated that his super PAC will “keep grinding” past the election in swing states (Wolf). That man has been able to blatantly coordinate with Trump, who stated that he would be making Musk the leader of his government efficiency committee long before Musk’s donations or even the elections had ended. The levels of corruption and influence over politics that billionaires have been able to achieve have gotten to such egregious levels that it is hard not to question what would constitute coordination with a candidate in the first place if not Elon Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump in the final months of the election and beyond. Super PACs have proven to be a problematic and borderline illegal loophole used by the extremely wealthy to intensely impose their political views onto the rest of the country, and advocating for going back to time without them could level the playing field once again.
Furthermore, wealthy people also use a number of different loopholes to evade taxes; by introducing a universal tax on billionaires, America can impel the rich to pay their fair share as they had in the past. As stated before, Yvon Chouinard gave his fortune to a political nonprofit organization that he owned to guarantee his family billions of dollars worth of political power and avoid having to pay gift taxes in the process. But other billionaires such as Jeff Bezos take a different approach by lowering their salaries and instead relying on their wealth. In 2019,
Bezos reduced his annual salary to $80,000, but made 30 billion in profits in 2023 because he owns about 10% of Amazon (Zucman). In doing so, along with holding and reinvesting the profits Amazon makes, he avoids the majority of both his income tax as well as the tax bill he would have to pay after giving the company’s profits back to Amazon (Zucman). Methods like these make billionaires practically untouchable by current tax structures, so how can a country make them pay what is owed? Economist Gabriel Zucman proposes the solution of a global tax that makes billionaires pay a very small percentage of their wealth each year (Zucman). Besides preventing billionaires from fleeing to countries with low tax rates to further avoid taxes, this idea would also universally impel billionaires to pay their taxes regardless of which tax evasion scheme they choose. Additionally, even a 2% income tax on the mere 3,000 billionaires in the world could amount to a quarter of a trillion dollars in additional tax revenue per year (Zucman). Though the constitutionality of a wealth tax may be debatable, allowing the wealth of billionaires to continue festering has proven to pose much more of a threat to the freedom of the American people.
While the ideas and decisions made by the people trained and in positions to make change are important, the people of this country are ultimately the wielders of the most power. By spreading awareness about the current state of affairs, anybody can make their own impact on the country, and perhaps the world as a whole. One of the reasons why billionaires are able to act as freely as they have is because they are rarely called out or demonized by the very people they are collecting the power to dominate. People like Bezos and Chouinard build their public images off of making themselves and their stories appear as positive and humbling as possible when in reality, they are building strong monopolies that take jobs from small business owners across the country and hoarding money that could be used to relieve the suffering of those who are less fortunate. On top of that, billionaires like Musk,
Zuckerberg, and, once again, Bezos have used their wealth to take control of both physical and digital news media, making it even harder for the average person to be in the loop about political and economic loopholes, as well as just how much money they possess in comparison to everyone else. Each year, their stranglehold on the country gets tighter, so even in this time period where people are divided politically, it is imperative that people spread the news about what is happening, and speak out against it so that long-term change can accelerate.
Throughout the 1960s, before the income growth gap had arisen, the 400 richest Americans had to pay more than half of their income in taxes, resulting in a society with less division in terms of wealth and more funding for social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps (Zucman). However, in just six decades, the state of wealth distribution has displayed a total flip of the script. A country without wealth inequality is possible, and was even a reality not too long ago, so there is no reason why the people of America cannot fix the mistakes that have caused such a drastically negative development in the economy. If America is to become a place not where people succeed because they are deemed worthy by invisible metrics, but instead where everyone has the opportunity to live decently, eat, and have shelter, it is up to the people with a voice to speak up and address the elephants in the room.
But how? With the government being led by a billionaire in a struggle to limit what children can be taught in school, and with physical media like the Washington Post as well as digital media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all being in the hands of billionaires, how can individual people speak against them? The present situation can make people feel isolated and disheartened, but by showing others that they are not alone in this fight, the flames of rebellion against oligarchy remain. The freedom of the normal citizen and the ones with extreme wealth have become incompatible, leaving one side without that which was promised to
them by this country, and the other side with enough to make him believe he should overthrow the government. Democracy has been distorted into a darker form right under the people’s noses, and those who are contributing to its transformation use their wealth to parade themselves around as good samaritans. “Justice for all” has proven itself toxic as the myth of meritocracy makes its people complacent in the face of a civil war of wealth. However, it is within those very people that the ability to change America lies. We, The People, can close the gap between ourselves and the oligarchs and preserve our freedom.
So, any ideas?
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