This groupthink belief, widely circulating on social media and popular among left-wing politicians, suggests that you can't "earn" a billion dollars without being morally corrupt. This may sound compelling at first, but it's a lazy overgeneralization that distracts from the actual problem with wealth concentration.
To start, it's important to understand that virtually no one in the world is sitting on a billion dollars in cash. Even Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, holds less than 0.1% of his net worth in cash. The rest lies in equity, or value tied up in his companies that he can't easily liquidate without tanking the stock or triggering legal restrictions. Unlike cash, his net worth is determined entirely by what the market believes his companies are worth, and because of that, you'll see it fluctuate by hundreds of billions each month.
But even if it were all in cash, why draw the moral line at 1 billion dollars and not 900 million, or 500 million, or even 50 million? At what dollar amount does earning money supposedly become exploiting people? If I have a startup idea and go raise $10 million from VCs does that make me unethical? Or did the 20-something-year-old billionaire founders of Cursor suddenly become unethical right as SpaceX acquired them? The billion dollar threshold everyone loves echoing is arbitrary and is not based on some principled moral cut off.
Wealth is also not a zero-sum game, or simply put, someone making money does not necessarily mean they took it from someone else. Think of any product that's made your life easier, like a microwave or an app like WhatsApp. Did you feel exploited because the company that made those products got wealthier? You probably didn't, and the fact that you benefited too shows that value can be created, not just moved around. Unlike an hourly wage, that value can scale as the same product can serve the millionth customer for almost nothing. Someone reaching billionaire status usually means they created a huge amount of value, spread across a huge number of people. Paul Graham's essay talks about this in more detail.
The argument for a higher tax rate on billionaires might have some merit, but even granting it, what happens even if you manage to successfully implement it? Is there any assurance that the government will do its job properly and actually spend the money on things that matter? History would argue no — the federal government reported $186 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2025, and roughly $3 trillion since 2003. That figure doesn't even begin to cover the unnecessary spending on defense or foreign aid over the last couple of decades. Taxing billionaires harder doesn't fix a government that already mishandles hundreds of billions a year.
Other arguments about worker exploitation usually point to stories of workers at the bottom being underpaid. The disappointing truth is that wages reflect how replaceable you are, not some moral worth of the work you are doing. It's just how labor markets work, and some firms underpaying does not somehow delegitimize the existence of an entire social class.
So they earned it. But that's not actually the problem.
The real problem is that the ultra-rich, through PACs and back-channel relationships, have a disproportionate influence on politics. A New York Times investigation found that the average amount a billionaire donated in 2024 was equal to 100,000 ordinary donors combined.
One of their stories that I found so obviously corrupt was Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone, and his relationship with Tim Sheehy, a senator from Montana. Blackstone had previously invested $150 million in Tim Sheehy's aerial firefighting business. When Sheehy ran for Senate in 2024, Schwarzman, along with 64 other billionaires, contributed $47 million to Sheehy's campaign. Sheehy then went on to sign a pledge against tax increases, including ones that would have stopped private equity executives like Schwarzman from paying a lower tax rate than most middle-class Americans. Even Jon Tester, the senator Sheehy defeated after 18 years in office, described the role of money in politics as "a form of prostitution, quite frankly."
Billionaires have already poured more than $433 million into the 2026 midterms. You can believe that they've earned their place in society, but you can't argue that a handful of people having more of a say than millions of American citizens is compatible with democratic principles. Even in an era of sharp divide, 72% of Americans favor limits on political spending.
Stop debating about whether billionaires "earned" their wealth and start worrying about what they've been buying with it.