Ready or Not, Trillionaires Are Coming

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Transcript

00:00There are zero trillionaires in the world right now, but they're coming. You've heard about the

00:03man likely to become the first, but I think it's likely we'll have as many as seven trillionaires

00:07in the next three to five years. That's because their wealth is mostly in shares of their companies,

00:12and that means it grows a lot faster than cash when their companies do well. And I mean a lot

00:16faster. Shares of Oracle, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta grew by more than 20% a year in the past

00:21decade, including dividends. Tesla and NVIDIA grew even faster, by 42% and 76%. Once you know

00:26that their money is tied up in stock, it's easy to see why America's richest entrepreneurs can't do

00:31something that seems easy at first, which is solve America's vast affordability problem.

00:36Take Musk, for example. His new pay package gives him more Tesla stock rather than cash

00:40as the company's earnings and market value grow. If Musk sold millions of Tesla shares to donate

00:45to affordability programs, the stock's price would decline and some investors would freak out,

00:49leading to even more selling and might even threaten the company itself. That would hurt

00:53all shareholders, including millions of ordinary workers who own stock funds in their retirement

00:57accounts. But billionaires can absolutely do something to help, and it would be huge. They can

01:02pay their workers better wages. Many companies do just the opposite, suppress wages to help grow

01:07their profits. That's why I favor compensation disclosures for public companies, for a start,

01:11so that policymakers can evaluate wages relative to living costs. Congress can also give companies

01:16tax incentives to grow wages alongside profits. There are a lot of concrete steps we can take to solve

01:21the affordability problem. I just want us to focus on the ones that will make a difference

01:24rather than the ones that might grab headlines.