Plutocrat Piñata

Confiscating and redistributing the assets of the wealthiest people is a perennially popular idea, so let’s unpack it.

Elon Musk is supposedly worth nearly $1 trillion. We hoist him up by his ankles and shake him until all his money falls out of his pockets, and when we’re done, let’s say we have 800 billion dollars. We will now divide up and redistribute that money. There are roughly 8 billion people on the planet, so we must divide 800 billion by 8 billion. But we can cancel out the billions, so that it’s just 800 divided by 8, and—as you’ve probably guessed—the answer is 100. Elon gets a bad day, and the rest of us get $100.

There are places where $100 is a decent sum of money, but I bet you don’t live in one of them. If you live in a city in a developed country, your $100 will be gone in less than a week, maybe even in a day. So we bankrupted the world’s richest guy, and it was fun, but we did not solve anyone’s problems permanently.

And suppose we had 100 Elon Musks and we bankrupted all of them? In that case everyone gets $10,000. It’s nice, and again, there are places where that would be a king’s ransom, but not where I live, and probably not where you live either. In many developed countries, if you only make $10,000 a year, you don’t have to pay taxes, and the government might even toss you some money or at least some free food.

But it’s wishful thinking, because we don’t have 100 Elon Musks. As of March 2025, the combined net worth of the top 100 individuals on Forbes’ Billionaires List is approximately $3.8 trillion. If we seize it all and divide it up evenly, everybody gets $475. Lunch is on me, but again, don’t think this solves anyone’s problems permanently.

You might ask, how much money is there to divide up, in total? In 2024, world GDP was approximately $110 trillion. If we divide that up evenly, everybody gets $13,750. In a perfectly egalitarian world, we all get $13K a year. You can forget about taking a vacation.

There is no way that we all suddenly become rich, because there simply isn’t enough productivity to pay for it. For everyone to become a millionaire, we’d need a GDP of $800,000 trillion. Not a typo, and not going to happen.

In fact, it’s much worse than that. The reason we’re so “productive” is that we’re mining the future. We offload our costs—climate change, toxic pollution, resource depletion—onto the future, and get away with it because the future is defenseless. People who haven’t been born yet can’t complain about our selfishness. Supporting 8 billion people is so expensive that we loot our own future to pay for it, and distributing the loot more equitably won’t change that.

But there’s an alternative. Instead of increasing the population to 10 billion, as experts claim is inevitable, we could wise up and cut it in half instead. With 4 billion people, we’d have half as much GDP, but we’d also have half as many people sharing it. We would still squabble over equitable distribution, just as we do now. The difference is that we might have a future.