The San Francisco Bay Area is home to at least one-third of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Late last year, you couldn’t escape a chilling billboard campaign, meant to be cheeky, from an artificial intelligence start-up: “Stop Hiring Humans.” And on Saturday, somebody tried to AstroTurf a trollish Billionaires March through the city in defense of Silicon Valley’s 21st-century robber barons. Only a few dozen people showed up, heckled along the way by passers-by.
The billionaires themselves also seem to be on the move. In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have all purchased homes outside California, potentially bringing their hundreds of billions of dollars with them. Others have spent the past few months raging about the injustice of the state’s new politics of class warfare.
Why? A proposal — supported by the local congressman Ro Khanna but not the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and currently floating in limbo as a potential ballot initiative tentatively scheduled for the fall — that would impose a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, whose wealth has soared since the pandemic.
This isn’t exactly pitchforks in the streets, the nightmare entertained by every generation of aristocrats and oligarchs as a supremely flattering form of status paranoia. But about the symbolism, at least, the horrified billionaires and would-be billionaires are basically right. There has never been a tax of this kind so seriously considered in the United States before, and the policy would mark a genuinely new era of the politics of extreme wealth in this country.
Or is that new era already here? Politicians now casually invoke “the Epstein class” and more routinely name-check affordability than they ever campaigned on its close cousin inequality. Prominent plutocrats talk much more openly about their right to great fortunes and their hostility toward oversight and interference from the government, and leftists talk more openly about their hostility toward extreme wealth.
Last year was marked by class-warfare bookends: In January, as the tech right joined the president’s MAGA army for his inauguration in Washington, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man was handed close to unilateral control of the machinery of government, partly as a thank-you for political contributions of nearly $300 million. And in November a democratic socialist was elected mayor of the world’s financial capital, relying on public matching funds against the many millions spent opposing him and almost universal hostility from the banking class.
One big question is whether this backlash will go beyond lip service — whether the country’s partisan coalitions, which have seemed so unshakable in the time of President Trump, will be reshaped by antagonism for billionaires, and the response of those billionaires, as the sunset of Trump’s long reign comes slowly into view.
“Masks off — that’s the right way to put it,” says Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has helped craft wealth-tax proposals like the one in California and similar ones being considered internationally.
One year in, Trump’s second term is transparently and by many orders of magnitude the most brazenly corrupt administration in American history, with crypto meme coins and the president’s personal lawsuit against his own I.R.S. The outward deference of tech oligarchs to Trump seems to have outlasted the so-called vibe shift of young, Black and brown voters, many of whom have since abandoned him. And the billionaires’ apparent comfort with transactional, acquisitive MAGA politics seems to illustrate what Khanna — who represents parts of the Bay Area and many of those billionaires — has called Silicon Valley’s broken social contract.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter more than three years ago looks even more politically consequential both in retrospect and because of how widely it is now being imitated by others who share his desire to shape the country’s information diet from above. Larry Ellison’s Oracle now holds an ownership stake in TikTok, and his son, David, owns CBS News and is vying for control of CNN. Jeff Bezos just neutered what was either the country’s second- or third-most-important newspaper, about a year after he took control of its editorial page and steered it unmistakably to the right.
Then there is the flood of scandal contained in the recent release of files related to the Epstein investigation. So far they have failed to land any prominent American in obvious criminal jeopardy, but they fit neatly into a noxious vision of elite impunity and entitlement. “We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans,” Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said in a speech last weekend. “But this is a government of, by and for the ultrarich. It is the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class, ruling our country.”
That is all prologue, of a kind. Up ahead looms the prospect of radical social and economic transformation at the hands of A.I., whose ultimate effects remain largely unknown but were sold first as existential and now as merely epochal.
One consequence of that talk has been to remind people that they already feel pretty out of control of their own lives, in an age of big tech and a cost-of-living crisis. A.I. seems to promise another step in that same direction — handing what looks like a lot of social control over the whole human future to perhaps fewer companies, run by fewer executives, empowering perhaps even fewer algorithms, over which even less democratic oversight will be exercised than was the case in the hands-off social-media era.
“A.I. is going to wipe out at least 25 million jobs in the next five to 10 years,” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh declared in December, earning praise and applause from plenty of his haters across the ideological spectrum. Last week, the MS NOW host Chris Hayes warned, “I think it’s best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white-collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue-collar workers.”
Remember the Occupy movement and Thomas Piketty? Remember the Tea Party? Remember Bernie Sanders nearly winning the Democratic presidential nomination by relentlessly invoking the 99 percent, and Trump presenting himself that same campaign season as a tribune of America’s left behind, telling them at his 2016 convention, “I am your voice”? In certain ways, America never abandoned those politics — it just watched as they were warped by the gravitational force of Trumpism.
When Citizens United was decided in 2010, billionaires had spent $18 million on the 2000 presidential election, $13 million in the 2004 cycle and $16 million in 2008. Then came the deluge. In 2012 the total was $231 million, and the figure roughly doubled again in each of the next three election cycles — to $682 million in 2016, $1.2 billion in 2020 and $2.6 billion in 2024. The number of billionaires grew over this time, too, of course, roughly doubling between 2010 and 2024. But their political spending grew by more than 150 times.
The partisan meaning of this shift might’ve been a bit clearer were it not for Trump. Political scientists like Paul Pierson and Omar Wasow have written about the president’s pluto-populist rhetorical and coalitional style, a mix of affected anti-elitism and explicit crony transactionalism familiar elsewhere in the world but new enough here that it’s sometimes hard for Americans to see the shape of Trumpism clearly.
In 2016 Trump shed legacy Republican patrons and gained heavily among small-scale donors and voters, but in 2020, when he performed even better among the nonwealthy, he also regained ground among the rich. Outwardly, the rebalancing seems to have continued into 2024. As recently as 2008, Stanford’s Adam Bonica has documented, donors giving over $1 million accounted for just 4 percent of Republican campaign fund-raising. In 2024 they provided more than half of a much larger party budget. (Democrats are not immune to the appeal of plutocrats, but by contrast only received 18 percent of their 2024 donations in denominations of $1 million or more.)
And since the pandemic, the right-wing plutocrats have grown ever more outspoken as advocates of unregulated entrepreneurialism, defenders of social inequality and relentless critics of any liberal effort to level the playing field on behalf of those with less. Most conspicuous has been the positioning of members of the tech right: Some of them have equated any effort at oversight with totalitarian safetyism, while others suggest that “commies” should be “blown up.”
In her comparative study “The Backsliders,” published last fall, the University of Chicago political scientist Susan Stokes looks at the global democratic recession of the last several decades and identifies income inequality as the driving force — producing resentful populism, often ethnonationalist, but also a broad distrust of social institutions and political grievances among the very wealthy.
In America, Zucman says, “there is a clear democratic backsliding.” “You now have a number of people who say: Look, there should be different laws for certain groups of the population, the superrich.”
What is most striking about these protestations is that they emerged during a period in which the very rich have not exactly been brought to heel — or even pushed onto the back foot. The conventional measure of overall income inequality, the Gini coefficient, is close to a record high. Between 1989 and 2022, the 1 percent added 100 times as much wealth as those at the national median, and between 1982 and 2022, the share of national wealth owned by the top 0.00001 percent has risen by a factor of almost 10. According to Oxfam, the top 0.0001 percent in the United States now controls a greater share of wealth than it did in the Gilded Age — the time that middle school history tells us most clearly showcases what it looks like when the very rich take command of democratic society.
None of this has gone unnoticed. Eighty-four percent of Americans now say the rich have too much political power in our country, according to YouGov, and though the sentiment is most common on the left, the number is 87 percent for independents and 68 percent for Republicans. Eighty-one percent of Americans say that the gap between rich and poor is at least a “somewhat big problem,” and more than half of the country supports government efforts to reduce wealth inequality.
A one-time billionaires’ tax won’t fix all this. It might not even change all that much: Its projected revenues in California look more like a budgetary help than a game-changer, and would have many possible unintended consequences beyond capital flight, including more intense spending on politics by the very rich now that the material stakes are so high. But the policy would be the first of its kind to be implemented anywhere in the world, Zucman emphasizes, and it is perhaps telling that it might be happening in California, where the state’s 1978 tax revolt — which capped property tax increases, creating fiscal doom in the decades that followed — neatly foretold the national Reagan revolution to come.
Are the Democrats on a similar path, toward what’s been called — hopefully by some, anxiously by others — a left-wing Tea Party? “I mean, at this point, it’s going to take a lot just to get back to full SNAP benefits and affordable health care,” Stokes says. And the party isn’t exactly well positioned for a politics of class warfare — educational polarization, donor dependency, fear of backlash and the flight of economics wonks from the Republican Party into the liberal brain trust all look like guardrails against the scrambling of the Democrats’ coalition or their policy priorities.
But if we told ourselves that the 2024 election was about memes and podcasts and vibes, in retrospect, the real lesson, Stokes says, is that cost-of-living issues really mattered to voters. And going forward, she says, it does look as if politicians and political parties are going to be pushed to carry out more redistribution.
Zucman puts it more emphatically. “I think democracy versus oligarchy is going to be the battle of the 21st century,” he says. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the Democratic Party to actually understand that.”
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