Eloise
Goldsmith
Just
12 U.S. billionaires now have a collective net worth of over $2 trillion—a
figure that amounts to a little less than a third of total federal spending in
2023—according to an analysis out Tuesday from Inequality.org, a project of the
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
The
$2 trillion number is also twice the amount of wealth that the top 12 US
billionaires held in 2020, according to researchers at IPS, a progressive
organization.
The
full list of 12 billionaires includes Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg,
Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey
Brin, Jim Walton, Rob Walton, and Jensen Huang.
"This
is an unsettling new milestone for wealth concentration in the United States.
The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever, and they are endowed with extreme
material power that can be used to pursue narrow political interests at the
expense of democratic majorities," wrote the author of the analysis, Omar
Ocampo, a researcher at IPS.
New
to the "oligarchic dozen" is Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of
the tech company Nvidia. Nvidia, which became the most valuable publicly traded
company this year, has seen its profits jump thanks to the world's ravenous
appetite for the artificial intelligence chips that the firm produces.
According to the analysis, Huang's personal wealth "has skyrocketed from
$4.7 billion in 2020 to $122.4 billion—a mind-boggling 2,504 percent
increase—over the last four years."
Each
of the billionaires on the list "owns or is a controlling shareholder of a
business that is investing billions of dollars in artificial
intelligence," according to Ocampo, which raises concerns about their
respective carbon footprints.
Fueling
AI is energy intensive, and AI data centers in the U.S. are largely powered by
fossil fuels, meaning their proliferation poses a threat to the environment and
a transition to a green economy.
Ocampo
also discusses the political reach of the billionaires on the list. Elon Musk
and Jeff Bezos, who respectively own X and The Washington Post, "have both
purchased large media platforms, which has granted them the ability to set the
terms of public debate with the hopes of influencing public opinion in their
favor."
Musk
specifically has established himself as a major power broker within the GOP.
The billionaire spent hundreds of millions helping to re-elect Donald Trump and
is now poised to play a major role in the president-elect's administration,
helping oversee a new advisory committee tasked with slashing government
spending.
As
of early December, Trump had tapped an "unprecedented" total of seven
reported billionaires for key positions in his administration, according to a
separate piece of analysis by Inequality.org.
"We
see the effects of this growing concentration of wealth and economic inequality
everywhere—plutocratic influence on our politics, wealth transfers from the
bottom to the top, and the acceleration of climate breakdown," Ocampo
wrote on Tuesday.
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