Billionaires

In sixty years, we have gone from 2 billionaires in the United States to just under 2,000. How on earth did that happen? Today, Timothy Noah from the New Republic takes us all the way from our framers fearing excessive wealth to the country's first (potential) trillionaire. To learn about their proliferation, their desires, and their outsized effect on American policy, check out his article, How the Billionaires Took Over. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

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• 0:58Nick Capodice?

  What was your first job that you ever had?

• 1:00Speaker 03

  I was a counselor at the same theater summer camp that I attended as a child.

• 1:06Nick Capodice?

  What did you make?

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Probably like $6 an hour, maybe $6.50.

• 1:13Nick Capodice?

  That's not good.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  What was your first job?

• 1:19Nick Capodice?

  I was a dishwasher at Hermanos Cochina Mexicana with the firm wage of $4.25 an hour.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:26Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  It adds up, you know?

• 1:28Nick Capodice?

  I served Steven Tyler nachos once.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  OK, well, that's your payment.

• 1:33Nick Capodice?

  So I calculated how long I have to work at Hermanos to make a billion dollars?

• 1:37Speaker 03

  It's really not Airmano?

• 1:40Nick Capodice?

  No, it's in New Hampshire. It's Hermanos.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  All right, how long?

• 1:46Nick Capodice?

  Nonstop, no sleeping, 30,000 years.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  Shareholders are currently meeting to vote on Musk's new pay package. It could be worth nearly $1 trillion in stocks.

• 2:06Speaker 05

  Wedding bells are ringing in Venice for billionaire Jeff Bezos and fiance Lauren Sanchez. With a smooch on a yacht, it's a modern take on the ancient city's history of power and opulence.

• 2:17Speaker 06

  We make the rules now. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price of paperclip. We picked that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now, you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you, buddy?

• 2:32Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nikita DiJ.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 2:36Nick Capodice?

  And today, we are talking about billionaires. How they happen, what they do, and how many there are.

• 2:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, when I'm 67 years old, and when I was born, there were, in the United States, one, maybe two billionaires.

• 2:57Nick Capodice?

  This is Timothy Noah.

• 3:00Speaker 07

  My name is Timothy Noah, and I'm a staff writer at The New Republic and also author of the book, The Great Divergence, about the rise of income inequality in the 20th century.

• 3:13Nick Capodice?

  Now, I reached out to Timothy because he wrote the most in-depth breakdown of the rise of billionaires in America, and I have a link to the full article in the show notes.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Wait, he said when he was born, there were only two billionaires?

• 3:26Nick Capodice?

  Two.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Who were they?

• 3:28Speaker 07

  Depending on when you kind of looked at the numbers, there was H.L. Hunt, the oil billionaire, and there was John Paul Getty, benefactor of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. And I think when Getty died in 1976, he was the richest person in the world.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Okay, well, there are a lot more billionaires these days. I can name about 10 right off the top of my head, but how many are we up to now? Like, how many billionaires are in the US?

• 3:57Speaker 07

  Now, there's kind of not quite 2,000 billionaires in the country.

• 4:07Speaker 07

  They've been proliferating especially fast in the last 20 or 30 years as government policy has become more and more friendly to the accumulation and concentration of wealth.

• 4:22Nick Capodice?

  Hannah, before we get into how we have so many billionaires, I think it's important to just sort of stop for a second and just think about it and really understand what a billion is. Do you know what a billion is?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  It's a number. It's a one with nine zeros after it. It's a thousand millions.

• 4:45Nick Capodice?

  Did you know that in France, a billion is a million millions?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  What?

• 4:48Nick Capodice?

  Really?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  It's a number.

• 4:52Nick Capodice?

  Different countries have different meanings of the word billion. It was not until World War II that England started to use billion to mean a thousand millions. And I bring all this up because the reason we're all so slippery on what a billion is, is because it is so gosh darn big.

• 5:10Speaker 07

  No human being can count to a billion. You would be dead before you got done counting to a billion. You can count to a million if you really want to. I don't recommend it, but you cannot count to a billion.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  How long would it take me to count to a million?

• 5:27Nick Capodice?

  Without sleeping?

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 5:28Nick Capodice?

  11 days.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  All right, what about a billion?

• 5:32Nick Capodice?

  A billion seconds ago, Hannah, you were three years old.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 5:37Speaker 07

  So if you have a billion dollars, you literally own more money than any human being will ever be able to count. And that's $1 billion. We will probably see in our lifetimes the advent of the first trillionaire. So yes, billion is just an unimaginably large number. Through its sheer existence, it generates an unbelievable quantity of money and interest.

• 6:05Nick Capodice?

  Just for fun, I want to add here that if we do indeed see a trillionaire in our lifetimes, a trillion seconds ago was 35,000 years ago. Sabre-toothed tigers prowled the plains. This was when the very first cave paintings were made. And you know what? I'm not going to stop there, Hannah, because I love visualizing large numbers. Let me try this one on you. Do you remember when you held your first $100 bill?

• 6:29Speaker 03

  I'm still nervous to hold a $100 bill. Um, probably not that long ago, Nick. It's basically a million dollars.

• 6:37Nick Capodice?

  It really was. The median personal income in the United States is about $45,000 a year. And if we took that whole year's salary and we put it in $100 bills, that is 450 $100 bills right there on the table. Are you with me so far?

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:53Nick Capodice?

  Okay, that stack is about two inches high. It's like a deck of tarot cards, basically. That tarot deck of cards is a year's salary. Now, if we were to stack a trillion $100 bills, that stack is 670 miles high. Tight stack of $100 bills all the way from New York City to Cincinnati.

• 7:21Nick Capodice?

  Well, we are not a weights and measurements podcast. We're a civics podcast, so I'm going to get back to it. Where were we, Hannah?

• 7:27Speaker 03

  There used to be two billionaires and now they're just under 2,000 billionaires.

• 7:32Nick Capodice?

  Right.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  And how did we get to this point?

• 7:35Nick Capodice?

  Well, let's go to a time in our country when we didn't have any.

• 7:40Speaker 07

  The founders were very concerned about this. They were very concerned about the creation of a wealth aristocracy. Thomas Jefferson, in particular, was very concerned about this and enacted measures intended to do things like outlaw the giving of aristocratic titles and going after the entail, which was a legal provision intended to preserve family wealth by outlawing the breaking up of large estates. You know, this carried over for, you know, many generations. It was understood that for the United States experiment to work,

• 8:23Speaker 07

  you could not have an aristocracy of wealth. Louis Brandeis, I think, went so far as to say, you know, you can have democracy or you can have extreme concentration of wealth, but you can't have both. And we did manage to avoid oligopoly, except in the South, which was an oligopoly from colonial times onward.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Hang on, can you explain what an oligopoly is? Is that different from an oligarchy?

• 8:52Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely. An oligarchy is a system of government where a small, wealthy, connected group of people have all the power and make all the decisions. A monopoly, like the game, is when one company controls an entire industry, and an oligopoly is when a small number of companies control an industry.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  And when Timothy says that the South was an oligopoly at the time of our founding, this was because a small number of enslavers had an enormous amount of wealth and power.

• 9:18Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and I think W. E. B. Du Bois put it best. In 1935, he wrote, quote, "Even among the 2 million slaveholders, an oligarchy of 8,000 really ruled the South."

• 9:30Speaker 07

  But nationally, we did manage to avoid having a strict oligopoly until the end of the 19th century, during the Gilded Age, when so much wealth was concentrated in the hands of the few, that it completely corrupted Washington. And Washington was an absolute cesspool of corruption in the, for the last 30 years of the 19th century, focused particularly on Congress. Members of Congress were bought and sold.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  And that's the era of the robber barons, right?

• 10:07Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Railroad companies flagrantly bribing politicians to get laws passed that benefited them.

• 10:13Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and it wasn't just the rails, Hannah. When Timothy calls it a cesspool of corruption, that is an understatement. There were scandals involving whiskey distillers. There were wealthy people cornering the gold market, even postmasters, the people who sold stamps, making a fortune through cheating the system. About 4,000 people owned 20% of all the wealth in the United States.

• 10:36Speaker 07

  We had an oligopoly at the end of the 19th century. Then we had the progressive era, which was a reaction against that. Then we reverted to oligopoly in the 1920s. You know, once again, you saw the buildup of vast fortunes, even though the United States had enacted an income tax. The tax policy was tamped down by Republican presidents during the 1920s. So in the 1920s, we got a dry run for the presidency of Donald Trump and the Treasury Secretary, who was Treasury Secretary for about a dozen years, Andrew Mellon.

• 11:21Speaker 07

  Who was not a billionaire, but pretty close and certainly one of the absolute richest men in the United States. And he kept taxes low, like Trump, he kept tariffs high. You would think that the advantage of having a very rich man in power would be that you can avoid financial calamity. This guy's supposed to be smart about money, right? Except he was caught completely unawares by the 1929 stock market crash and had absolutely no idea what to do.

• 11:58Nick Capodice?

  So we had a strong reaction to that. Then after the crash, after the Great Depression, policies were enacted to strengthen unions and to tax the super wealthy at a super high rate. Incomes around the country started to become more equal. But then the pendulum started to swing back in the 1970s.

• 12:20Speaker 07

  We started in the late 70s, seeing incomes become more unequal. And that trend has continued to this day. And the end result was the presidency of Donald Trump.

• 12:33Nick Capodice?

  Now, we are singling President Trump out here because he is indeed our first billionaire president.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Do we know his net worth?

• 12:40Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, we kind of do. It vacillates a lot very quickly. The most recent estimate I could find was about $7 billion. And Donald Trump is not alone when we are talking about the executive branch. The combined wealth of Donald Trump's cabinet is $14 billion.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Is that including Elon Musk?

• 12:59Nick Capodice?

  I'm not including him, even though the White House has said that Elon Musk would continue to advise the president after he left his special government employee post in May 2025. If I did include Musk, we would add another $500 billion.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  How does that compare to former cabinets? Did others have far less wealth?

• 13:19Nick Capodice?

  Significantly, the people in Joe Biden's cabinet had about $188 million, all told. And President Barack Obama's was about $2 billion, though most of that was due to one single billionaire, Penny Pritzker, who served as the Secretary of Commerce.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Okay, Nick, so you have told me, sort of, how the rise of billionaires happened in broad terms.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  But can we talk about some specifics? What is happening here? What specific laws and policies have made this possible?

• 13:48Nick Capodice?

  I'll get into that, as well as the kinds of political power a person has when they happen to have a billion dollars, right after this break.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  But before that break, a reminder that we are not billionaires.

• 13:58Nick Capodice?

  Do you think any billionaires have ever listened to our show?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  On diamond headphones. I don't understand billionaires at all. Maybe, I have no idea.

• 14:08Nick Capodice?

  I mean, if they liked it, if you're a billionaire out there and you like our show, you could fund not just us, but pretty much the entirety of public radio in the United States.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  And if you are not a billionaire and still would like to support our show, which by the way, is what we depend on entirely to keep going, you can make us a gift in any amount, no millions at all, at our website, civics101podcast.org.

• 14:37Nick Capodice?

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• 15:22Nick Capodice?

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• 15:44Nick Capodice?

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• 16:28Nick Capodice?

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• 16:48Hannah McCarthy?

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• 18:43Nick Capodice?

  We're back. We're in the money today on Civics 101 and we're talking about billionaires.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  All right. So can we talk about how billionaires become billionaires like in 2025?

• 18:55Nick Capodice?

  The first part of this is something I think everyone knows or understands at a base level, which is that it's a lot easier to make money when you already have money. You can just make money by having it just on the interest alone. And for this, I'd like to use a billionaire we haven't mentioned yet. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has $242 billion. He makes about $9 million an hour. So if we're talking about interest, Hannah, do you know what the percentage rate of return is on like a savings account, a typical one you could get from a bank?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  I know that it differs. There are high yield accounts and then there are like standard savings accounts.

• 19:36Nick Capodice?

  It's like a really good, high yield savings account. That's going to have a 5% rate of return. So if Jeff Bezos just had his money in that, he would be earning $12 billion a year just by having it sit there.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  I'm going to guess though, that Jeff Bezos keeps his money somewhere else. He's getting more than 5%.

• 19:54Nick Capodice?

  Exponentially more. And this brings me to the second way billionaires make more money. Here again is Timothy Noah.

• 20:01Speaker 07

  Well, you see it in tax policy. You see it in the difficulty Democrats have had in passing legislation to reverse the Anti-Labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which sharply reduced union power after unions had gotten very strong, starting in the 1930s. And you see it in things like the, you know, the pass-through provision and the, and the recent big, beautiful reconciliation bill.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  This was the spending bill passed in July of 2025 that, among other things, did not increase tax rates for the wealthy.

• 20:42Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 07

  There was a lot of focus on the top rates not going up. And that was significant. But I think even more significant for the billionaire class was this very complicated pass-through provision, which I won't even bother explaining here. But it had great value to the rich.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  But how much value? How did it pay off?

• 21:05Speaker 07

  Well, it paid off in, one way to look at that is to look at the taxation of capital versus labor. It used to be that we taxed capital in the United States more heavily than we taxed labor. And those lines crossed about six or seven years ago. We now tax labor more than we tax capital.

• 21:28Nick Capodice?

  There's a very famous book that came out a few years ago by an economist named Thomas Piketty. The book is titled Capital in the 21st Century. And central to this book is one equation. R is greater than G.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  R is greater than G.

• 21:45Nick Capodice?

  R is greater than G. His name is Robert Paulson.

• 21:51Nick Capodice?

  And because my brain sometimes shorts out when we talk about economics, I had to read what it meant a dozen times, which means that our listeners are going to have to learn about it as well. So R, Hannah, R is capital. That is the money that people are making from the money they already have, like the interest we were talking about before. Now, G, on the other hand, G is labor. You and I go to work, we make a podcast, we get a check every two weeks. A baker sells 100 loaves of bread. Apple sells 3 billion iPhones, whatever. It is the money made from labor, from working.

• 22:30Speaker 07

  So traditionally, G, labor, was responsible for more wealth in the country than R. But relatively recently, this is no longer the case. And now R is greater than G, basically. Money makes money faster than people make money. And that's a process that is driven by government policy and tax policy.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  So earlier, Timothy said that if you are a billionaire, you have more money than you will ever be able to count. What are billionaires spending their money on?

• 23:10Speaker 07

  How much can you really spend? How much can a person, say, I just want to live like a ridiculous rich person. You run out of things to buy pretty quickly. It's hard, you know, to spend even as much as $100 million in a year just on stuff for yourself, you know, the mansion, the butler, the private plane. There was a wonderful piece in Yahoo Finance did last year and found that the billionaire lifestyle could be maintained with, I think it was something like $50 or $60 million a year,

• 23:48Speaker 07

  which, if you're a billionaire, your investments are throwing off at least that much annually. So you're rich, Palmer. Well, what am I going to spend my money on? I can't buy more stuff. All I can do is buy power. So that's what they do. They buy power and they've been, you know, buying their way into our political system at a rapid clip.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  We've talked about this a few times on the show, how after the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, we have an episode on that case, by the way, you can find it on our website, the super wealthy can spend unlimited funds on campaigns. So it's possible to conceive of, you know, a campaign speech where a candidate is really giving that speech to one person who cares about a handful of things, right? Are most billionaires involved in politics?

• 24:43Nick Capodice?

  Many are. The most recent data I read on this was from 2013, which polled the top 1% of wealthy people in the United States. So 47% of these people reported that they had directly contacted someone in Congress in the last six months. And when asked what it was about, the most common answer was it was about something of, quote, "a fairly narrow economic self-interest," end quote. People with money can and do steer policy to make them more money. And I asked Timothy for an example of this in practice, and he brought up President Trump.

• 25:24Speaker 07

  There was a fantastic story in the New York Times a few weeks ago. It was the lead story in the New York Times, didn't stick somehow. But the United Arab Emirates wanted to buy some AI chips from the United States, and the Biden administration had said, no, you can't have them because you've been doing military exercises with China. Trump comes in, and the United Arab Emirates buys $2 billion worth of World Liberty Financial stable coins. And World Liberty Financial is control, you know, the bulk of it at the time, anyway, was owned by Donald Trump and the Trump family.

• 26:00Nick Capodice?

  Real quick, World Liberty Financial is a cryptocurrency company. We have got to do a breakdown on crypto one of these days. And in brief, Donald Trump owns a lot of it.

• 26:11Speaker 07

  So the UAE, in fact, put $2 billion into the pocket of Donald Trump. And two weeks later, they were, they got the go-ahead to get the AI chips that they wanted.

• 26:24Speaker 09

  By the way, did you know that the Trump family is set to benefit from a $2 billion deal with a foreign government? I did not, but the New York Times broke this story, and this is what the story is.

• 26:35Nick Capodice?

  Currently, President Trump alone, not including his family, owns $5 billion worth of World Liberty Financial crypto.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  All right, billionaires may be new, but we are talking about an old, old story here, Nick. From presidents to robber barons, to kings, to Roman emperors, people with wealth have power, and people with power accumulate wealth.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Now, for those who might want to change that, is this something that could change?

• 27:07Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, that was the last thing I asked Timothy. Is a change to the system possible?

• 27:13Speaker 07

  There's always something that can be done. I mean, this is a, this is a status quo that was created by our political system. And we live in a democracy and the political system can change. The existence of an oligopoly makes it difficult, but it doesn't make it impossible. I think that the most essential thing to do is to build up union power because it is the only organized sector that can compete with capital and with conservatives and the status quo. The problem is it's very weak right now, but it was, you know, it was not weak 60, 70 years ago, and it can be made strong again with passage of legislation to encourage

• 27:58Speaker 07

  union organizing. I think that's the most important thing, but it's also true that, that, you know, we can, we can go out and organize. We can organize communities. We can, we can educate people. The polls show that people really don't like when they're told about these facts. They don't like them. It is not, the oligopoly is not popular in the United States. And therefore, a, a skillful marshaling of that outrage can yield political results.

• 28:49Nick Capodice?

  Check, check, check. Let's hope that works. That is it for billionaires. Turns out after I made this episode, Elon Musk was awarded a $1 trillion stock package. So there you go. This episode was made by me, Nikita Padichai, with you, Hannah McCarthy. Marina Hanke is our producer and Rebecca Lavoy, our executive producer. Music in this episode from all the usual suspects, Epidemic Sound, Blue Dot Sessions, Halizniko, and the great non-billionaire, Chris Zabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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