Portside

The new year has begun with old news: The world is continuing to become colossally more unequal — with the United States leading the way.

In 2024, wealth trackers at Bloomberg have just reported in a year-end review, “the world’s 500 richest people got vastly richer.”

Of the world’s 15 richest individuals, the Bloomberg data show, 14 call the United States home. The richest of these rich: Elon Musk. He started 2024 with a personal fortune worth a mere $229 billion. He ended it with a net worth of $442 billion, the largest personal fortune the world has ever seen.

Overall, the world’s 500 richest ended 2024 worth a combined $9.8 trillion. Some 34 percent of the $1.5 trillion they gained over the course of the year came in the five weeks after Donald Trump’s election.

Trump himself enjoyed quite a rewarding 2024. His personal net worth last year nearly doubled, to a bit over $7 billion. The president-elect now holds a fortune over 137,000 times greater than the average household wealth of a family in America’s poorest 50 percent.

A little humbling context for Trump: His new $7-billion fortune amounts to less than 2 percent of the personal wealth his new good pal Elon is now holding.

Musk does, to be sure, have ample American company in the exclusive 12-digit personal wealth club. Fifteen American deep pockets now boast fortunes worth over $100 billion.

More context: Back in 1982, the year Forbes magazine began publishing its annual list of America’s richest, only 13 of the nation’s 400 wealthiest held as much as a single billion in net worth. To rate inclusion in the latest annual Forbes 400 list, the Institute for Policy Studies analyst Chuck Collins points out, an American of means needed a fortune of at least $3.2 billion.

The enormous global surge in the wealth of the wealthy — a surge that Americans of means have now been driving for nearly a half-century — has wealth industry professionals rethinking just who really rates as truly super rich. These investment pros, for many years now, have been defining an “ultra-high-net worth individual” as anyone worth at least $30 million.

That $30 million, the Gulf Analytica consultancy president David Gibson-Moore recently related, used to be comfortably enough to allow for “significant investments across multiple asset classes” — everything from stocks and bonds to real estate and private equity — and still have plenty left over for luxuries like private-jet travel.

These days, says Gibson-Moore, many analysts have upped the “ultra” ante. They’re now considering $100 million as “the new yardstick for anyone who wants to keep their head held high at private equity parties.”

That makes some luxury sense. Simply maintaining a 100-foot-long private yacht today, for instance, can now run as much as $2 million a year.

But relief for the rich feeling this yacht-maintenance squeeze appears to be on the way. Leaders in the new Republican-majority Congress, Politicoreports, are already busily debating just how they can most expeditiously lower the already low taxes the richest among us need to pay. Their goal: to at least extend the expiring Trump tax cut originally enacted in 2017.

In 2025, households in America’s top 1 percent will save an average $61,090 thanks to that 2017 tax cut. Households in the top 0.1 percent will pocket even more, with an average savings of $252,300. And households in the bottom 60 percent? They’ll on average save less than $500 each.

“Extending the Trump tax cuts that expire at the end of 2025 — namely, the law’s individual income and estate tax provisions — would provide further windfall benefits to high-income households,” conclude Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysts Chuck Marr, Samantha Jacoby, and George Fenton.

To make matters worse, Marr and his colleagues add, those windfall benefits “would come on top of the large benefits they would continue to receive from the 2017 tax law’s permanent provisions.”

“Tax cuts for people making over $400,000,” the Center analysts conclude, “should end on schedule.”

Keeping to that schedule — given the new Republican control over the House, the Senate, and the White House — will be exceedingly difficult. Welcome to Trump II.

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