The New Plutocracy
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The United States is not a democracy. It is a plutocracy. It is not simply a plutocracy because of Donald Trump’s presidency and the likes of Elon Musk and other billionaires who are running the government. The most recent Forbes listing of the richest Americans points to a concentration of wealth never seen in US history.
Plutocracy is defined as government by the wealthy. It is not just when the wealthy rule directly, but it is also about who governs. Yet to ask the question “Who governs America?” one needs to look to who benefits from its public policies and the economic system. To answer that, let’s look at the distribution of wealth in America.
Yearly Forbes releases its list of the wealthiest individuals in the world. The 2025 ranking is dominated yet again by Americans, with Elon Musk topping the chart at $394 billion. He is closely followed by Mark Zuckerburg at $254 billion, Jeff Bezos at $242, billion, Larry Ellison at $216 billion, and Larry Page at $153 billion. The five richest Americans alone are worth $1.259 trillion. Put into perspective, in 2023 the ten richest Americans according to the Forbes ranking were worth one-trillion dollars. Now if we looked at the ten richest Americans, they are collectively worth $1.9 trillion. In barely two years the richest have nearly doubled their wealth.
But how do our richest stack up compared to the rest of us? Estimates are that the net wealth of Americans is $124 trillion. This includes $269 trillion in assets, $146 trillion in debts. Who holds the wealth?
According to Statista the bottom 50% of the wage earners holds approximately 2.5% of all wealth in the US. This means that the bottom half of this population has a net wealth of about $3.1 trillion. The five richest Americans own approximately one-third of that amount. The ten richest Americans own about two-thirds of that amount. The richest thirty Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 50%. Given that wage earners only include adults and many times they are the sole earners in their household, in a nation of 335 million individuals with nearly seventy-five million children, easily the thirty wealthiest are worth more than 200 million plus individuals.
Other studies corroborate this wealth concentration. The Federal Reserve has been calculating household incomes since 1989. Back then the richest 0.1% of the US households held 1.76% of all the wealth compared to the bottom 50% holding 0.71%. The wealth distribution was already concentrated. In the third quarter of 2024, the former held 22% of the wealth, the latter 3.9%. Yes, the bottom did make some gains in their share of the wealth, but the richest saw more than a twelvefold increase in their share.
For many these statistics and numbers do not come as a surprise. It has been clear to many what is happening in America. What is new now is how clear and obvious the class warfare is under Trump, and how his voters are willing to support this assault even as it will hurt them.
For at least forty years the wealth distribution in America has been skewed in favor of a plutocratic few, while increasingly concentrating at the top. What we have seen in the last two years is an acceleration of the centralization of wealth in the US. Trump’s America will only make it worse with a probable combination of tax cuts for the wealthy and social service cuts for everyone else. What the Trump administration is finally stripping bare is the mirage that the US is a democracy. For decades only a few have benefited. Such a plutocratic system can only endure so long before the public withdraws support from it. The question then becomes whether plutocracy leads to democratic revival or other more repressive means to maintain free market capitalism that benefits only a few.