BEYOND "YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT!"

The assertion is artless campaign rhetoric from the likes of former president Barack Obama and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth "Fauxahontas" Warren, who like to argue that any fortune relies in part on public spending on schools or highways  or perhaps the institutions that enforce contract and property rights.

Accumulate a large enough fortune, and the envious voices don't scold about ingratitude; they channel their inner Pierre Proudhon and assert the fortune was stolen.

According to Oxfam, 60% of billionaire wealth globally is not “earned” in any sense of the word that you or I would recognize, but derived from inheritance, monopoly power, or crony connections.

By UBS’s own count, the great wealth transfer is accelerating, with a record $297.8 billion passing to just 91 heirs in 2025. Musk’s own wealth did not surge through some new invention, but through a private-market revaluation of SpaceX and his AI company xAI, a paper merger that pushed his net worth from $500 billion to $800 billion in just four months.

Put another way, there's more show business in Elon Musk's fortune than there are a trillion dollars.  But for "crony connections" read "corruption" or "rent seeking" or "regulatory capture," which is to say failures of good governance.  If you're writing for Common Dreams, it's easy enough to screech about a fortune being stolen, not built.

Tesla, the engine of much of his wealth, runs on public subsidy, tax incentives, and regulatory frameworks his own companies have spent years bending into shape. Musk’s trillion does not materialize from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidized, and that the public is now invited to applaud.

It's more accurate to say that Tesla cars exist, and that "the public" ought have opportunities to buy them, without any special tax preferences.  It might be more productive to suggest that the way to reduce the rent-seeking might be for governments to generate fewer rents.  That's not how the populists of the left see things.  "Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and where they do not hold office outright, they buy the people who do. When wealth concentrates at this velocity, democracy is revealed as a sham."  You don't like money in politics?  Fine.  Stop using politics to generate rents.

That's too adult a solution for the fans of wealth taxes.

A wealth tax sufficient to fund universal healthcare and education across the Global South has been modeled, costed, and proposed repeatedly. The obstacle has never been the arithmetic. It has always been the politics, and the politics is owned by the people the tax would affect.

Forgive me an impertinence.  Elon Musk is a refugee from the "Global South."  Why is he developing those businesses, rent-seeking or otherwise, in the United States?

The politics of resentment, though, have purchase far beyond my poor power to call attention to rents generated and dissipated.

Billionaires—and soon trillionaires as well—are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence our elections while working Americans struggle to afford food, housing, and healthcare. It’s clearer than ever that those two facts are connected. We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.

Good luck with any of that.  James Joyner, who does not oppose property taxes in principle and endorses additional taxes on estates, asks "It's easy if you try?" about imposing such taxes.