One of the most notable characteristics of 2025 has been the shamelessness of the billionaire class and the conspicuousness of its corruption.
For many years, whenever I’ve warned that an increasing portion of the nation’s wealth is falling into the hands of an ever-smaller number of people, the moneyed interests have responded: “But that’s just the free market,” or “the free market has decided they deserve it.”
Rubbish. There’s no such thing as a “free market” to begin with. Today’s so-called “free market” is the outcome of political decisions over monopolization, labor organization, private property, finance, trade, taxes, and much more.
Who’s behind these political decisions? Increasingly, the same small number of ultra-rich who have gained disproportionate influence over our politics. They’ve created five ways for themselves to accumulate a billion dollars or more.
1. First, exploit a monopoly.
Does Jeff Bezos deserve his billions because he founded and built Amazon?
No. Amazon is a monopolist with nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce retail sales in America. In addition, Amazon is protected by a slew of patents granted by the U.S. government.
In 2023, the U.S. government — through the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states— charged Amazon with illegally maintaining a monopoly by crushing competition, inflating prices, and harming consumers through anticompetitive practices like punishing sellers who offer lower prices elsewhere. (The trial is currently scheduled to begin in 2027.)
If the government fully enforced anti-monopoly (antitrust) laws and didn’t give Amazon such broad patents, Bezos would be worth far less.
If anti-monopoly laws were enforced, other titans of high tech would be worth far less, too — among them, Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
2. A second way to make more than a billion is to get insider information that’s unavailable to other investors.
Billionaire Steven A. Cohen headed up a hedge fund firm in which, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department, insider trading was “substantial, pervasive, and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry.” Nine of Cohen’s present or former employees pleaded guilty or were convicted. Cohen got off with a fine, changed the name of his firm, and apparently is back at the game.
Former billionaire investor Bill Hwang was convicted in late 2024 and sentenced to 18 years for fraud related to the collapse of his Archegos Capital Management. The charges focused on his trading on insider information, market manipulation, and fraud.
The crypto market often experiences sharp volatility linked to policy announcements by the Trump regime. Moments after Trump announced new tariffs on China, one inside trader became $150 million richer from a leveraged short position.
Insider trading is endemic in C-suites. SEC researchers have found that corporate executives are twice as likely to sell their stock on the days following their own stock buyback announcements, when their stock prices soar, as they are in the days leading up to the announcements.
If government cracked down on insider trading, hedge fund mavens and top corporate executives wouldn’t be raking in nearly as much money.
3. A third way to make more than a billion is to buy off politicians who will change the rules of the “free market” in your favor.
The first Trump tax cut has saved Charles Koch and Koch Industries an estimated $1 to $1.4 billion a year, not even counting tax savings on profits stored offshore and a shrunken estate tax. The second Trump tax cut saved the Kochs even more. They and their affiliated groups spent some $20 million lobbying for the Trump tax cut and $550 million seeking to get Trump elected in 2024. Not a bad return on investment.
Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, sank a quarter of a billion dollars into getting Trump elected in 2024 and is on the way to spending as much if not more trying to keep the House and Senate under Republican control. What does Musk get out of it? Lower taxes on himself and his businesses, rollbacks of regulations that limit his profits, and federal contracts that make him even richer.
Trump and his own family have also reaped big rewards by changing the economy’s rules in their favor. By the end of 2025, they had cleared at least $1.2 billion through their crypto investments — whose value has ballooned in large part because of Trump’s decisions to deregulate crypto and encourage its use.
The value of their crypto investments also rose with Trump’s pardon of Changpeng “CZ” Zhao — the billionaire co-founder of the Binance crypto exchange who pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. Binance was closely tied to World Liberty Financial, actively managed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
Earlier this year, a state-controlled United Arab Emirates firm bought $100 million of cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial — essentially a huge deposit for World Liberty, which could then generate returns in the tens of millions of dollars each year.
Trump’s wealth soared again in mid-December on news that Trump Media & Technology Group, the publicly traded company whose biggest shareholder is Trump, is merging with TAE Technologies, a privately held fusion technology company. The additional wealth was the consequence of more self-dealing by Trump: His Department of Energy had created an Office of Fusion to support the commercialization of fusion.
The family company of billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has also been making a bundle off political influence. Lutnick’s company helped raise capital for Toby Neugebauer, a billionaire who’s building one of the giant data centers that will power the next generation of AI, banking millions in fees in the process. Lutnick has also been twisting the arms of American allies and dangling policy favors in exchange for investments in U.S. industrial projects that have given his family’s clients access to foreign capital.
If we had tough anti-corruption laws preventing such political payoffs and self-dealing, the Kochs, Musks, Trumps, Lutnicks, and other high-rollers wouldn’t get the spoils of their political influence: tax breaks, regulatory rollbacks, and government subsidies that have enlarged their fortunes.
4. The fourth way to make more than a billion is to extort big investors.
Adam Neumann conned J.P.Morgan, SoftBank, and other investors to sink hundreds of millions into WeWork, an office-sharing startup. Neumann used some of the money to buy buildings he leased back to WeWork and to enjoy a lifestyle that included a $60 million private jet. WeWork never made a nickel of profit.
After Neumann was forced to disclose his personal conflicts of interest, WeWork’s initial public offering fell apart, and the company’s estimated value plummeted. To salvage what they could, investors paid him over $1 billion to exit the board and give up his voting rights. Most other WeWork employees were left holding near-worthless stock options. Thousands were set to be laid off.
A few wealthy fraudsters have been found guilty and forced to disgorge their ill-gotten gains (in 2024, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, whose net worth reached an estimated $26 billion, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for defrauding customers and investors of nearly $10 billion).
But many have not. If we had tougher anti-fraud laws and better enforcement, Neumann and others like him wouldn’t be billionaires.
5. The fifth way to make more than a billion is to get the money from rich parents or relatives.
A new UBS report finds that a record number — 91 people — became billionaires in 2025 through inheritance. Their total bounty was almost $300 billion.
It’s the beginning of what’s expected to be the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history, during which heirs will inherit at least $5.9 trillion over the next 15 years.
An estimated 45 percent of all wealth in America is inherited. That’s because, under U.S. tax law — which is itself largely a product of lobbying by the wealthy — the capital gains of one generation are wiped out when those assets are transferred to the next.
As Mitt Romney (remember him?) recently pointed out, had Elon Musk purchased his Tesla stock for, say, $1 billion and held it until his death, and if it were then worth $500 billion, he would never pay the 24 percent federal capital gains tax on the $499 billion profit. Under the current tax code, when Musk’s heirs inherit his stock, the assets will be treated as if the heirs purchased it for $500 billion. So no one will ever pay taxes on the $499 billion capital gain.
If unearned income were treated the same as earned income under the tax code, America’s non-working rich wouldn’t be billionaires. And if capital gains weren’t eliminated at death, many heirs wouldn’t be, either.
The good news is that Americans are becoming increasingly alarmed about the harms billionaires are inflicting on our system. A Harris poll released last month finds that over half of Americans (53 percent) believe that billionaires are threatening democracy.
In addition, a significant 71 percent of Americans believe there should be a wealth tax. And a majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate.
These schemes also threaten capitalism itself. The system doesn’t work when monopolies, insider trading, political payoffs, fraud, and large amounts of inherited wealth are rigging it. As the system loses public trust, it begins to unravel.
When and if sane and honest people ever again control the U.S. government, one of the first things they should do is enact a tax on large accumulations of wealth.
Also an end to the current rule that allows all capital gains to be erased when the owners of the capital die, thereby enabling heirs to inherit all the accumulated wealth tax-free.
Not the least, we must get big money out of politics — to end the bribes and corruption that have distorted capitalism for the benefit of a handful of people at the top. (Here’s a way to do it.)
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
