\n<\/p>\n
The day that Elon Musk became the world\u2019s first trillionaire, Gilberto Rubio, a security officer in the San Francisco area, said he was thinking about how to cut back on meals to save money.<\/p>\n
Jessica Orde\u00f1ana, a bartender in midtown Manhattan, was worrying about air conditioning ahead of a heatwave because she can\u2019t afford her soaring electricity bills.<\/p>\n
Orde\u00f1ana and Rubio are just two of the millions of workers in the US struggling to make ends meet in an economy where inflation has wiped out recent gains in wage growth and consumer confidence is at an all-time low, even as wealth has surged for the ultrarich.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, California\u2019s controversial billionaire tax measure officially made it to the ballot after an expensive and hard-fought campaign that saw some of the world\u2019s richest people pour millions into efforts to derail the effort. That fight will now continue until November\u2019s general election, with Silicon Valley expected to spend even more money to prevent the measure from passing.<\/p>\n
The wealthiest 0.00001%, about 20 individuals, hold wealth equal to 12% of the US\u2019s gross domestic output, according to data compiled by the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, about four times greater than levels seen during the gilded age.<\/p>\n
Musk lost his trillionaire status on Wednesday. It dipped below the threshold as investors soured on AI. But he has still added $327bn to his fortune in the last 12 months alone. A stock market rally would soon push him back over the top and bring his cohort up with him.<\/p>\n
The rise in Musk\u2019s extraordinary wealth \u2013 up from about $28bn in 2020 to now close to $1tn \u2013 was cemented by SpaceX\u2019s stock market listing. More millionaires and billionaires will be minted in the coming months as SpaceX\u2019s share sale is followed by offerings from AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.<\/p>\n
The US is home to 989 billionaires. They owned more than $9.2tn in wealth in 2026, up 31.8% since 2025, according to a report by Americans for Tax Fairness.<\/p>\n
And as the billionaires\u2019 wealth has soared, workers in the US are falling behind.<\/p>\n
In 2025, US workers took their smallest share of gross domestic product on record since 1947, falling to 53.8% of GDP in the third quarter.<\/p>\n
The US inflation rate hit 4.2% in May 2026, wiping out 3.4% in wage growth for the past year.<\/p>\n
About 45% of all workers in the US, 66 million, make less than $25 an hour, while a living wage required to support oneself, according to MIT\u2019s living wage calculator, for a single individual adult with no dependents, exceeds $25 an hour in most of the largest metro areas.<\/p>\n
As wages have lagged behind inflation and productivity, workers have turned to debt to try to fill the gap; US credit card debt hit a record high in the fourth quarter of 2025 at $1.277tn, a 63% increase since the first quarter of 2021.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Protesters leave messages in chalk as they gather outside JPMorgan Chase\u2019s New York headquarters on 12 June 2026 in New York City. <\/span> Photograph: Spencer Platt\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Rubio, who has worked as a security officer in the San Francisco area for the past four years, has consistently had to work as many as three jobs simultaneously and lived out of his car due to high housing costs.<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t been able to get ahead working one job,\u201d said Rubio. \u201cYour life is working and we don\u2019t have anything to show for it. There\u2019s no savings, there\u2019s no retirement plan. I can\u2019t even afford to buy a house.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think [Musk] hitting that milestone really affected anybody in a positive way, other than himself,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cI don\u2019t think that he\u2019s really looking at the little people and seeing what the little people that are helping him get to these levels are going through financially.\u201d<\/p>\n Though he makes $25 an hour, he hasn\u2019t received a raise in years, and his salary is still far below the living wage for a single adult with no dependents in the San Francisco area, of more than $30 an hour.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve actually had to live in my car just to be able to get by and pay bills,\u201d he added. He has an apartment now, but added: \u201cI\u2019m never home. If I am home, it\u2019s two hours just to get a change of clothes, shower and get back on the road.\u201d<\/p>\n Orde\u00f1ana, the Manhattan bartender, makes a little more than $11 an hour plus tips, but she notes the tips fluctuate greatly and are unreliable, so she often takes on temporary jobs on the side to compensate for the lulls in gratuities she receives.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t afford air conditioning, so this will be my second summer without AC,\u201d said Orde\u00f1ana. \u201cI\u2019m 43 now, so I\u2019ve been working full-time since I was 15, and I just don\u2019t see our economy getting any better.\u201d<\/p>\n The sight of Musk and other mega-wealthy individuals getting ever richer is concerning for her future, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that the rich keep getting richer for no good reason is really, really, really disgusting to me. It worries me a lot. I don\u2019t even know if I\u2019m going to have social security to retire,\u201d she said. \u201cWe all need an affordable life. We all need to be able to invest, to save, to have money for our family, to have time for our families, to be able to take off a day or two.\u201d<\/p>\n The ascent of the super-wealthy is facing backlash. Alongside the California vote, worker advocates see opportunities for change as public sentiment sours on AI and the plutocrats.<\/p>\n Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, a national group that advocates for increasing wages for restaurant and service workers, said the surge in wealth inequality has resulted in a surge in the work around increasing minimum wages.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never experienced this kind of explosive campaign growth over the last year as I have in 20 years, 25 years of organizing,\u201d said Jayaraman. She said support for wage rises was crossing party lines. \u201cWe are feeling real urgency to have a bold, inspiring vision around affordability, around wages in particular, and then to deliver on it.\u201d<\/p>\n Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkley, said that it\u2019s unclear when or if a tipping point is reached at which democracy becomes oligarchy.<\/p>\n \u201cIs it when the wealth of the ultrarich exceeds 50% of GDP, as in the US today? 100%? 200%? When they own not 80% of privately held media, but 100%?\u201d he said. \u201cNobody knows the exact concentration of wealth at which the kinds of plutocratic collapse we have seen in history becomes inevitable. The best we can do is study history and keep a close eye on developments around the globe in order to form an opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n For Cienna Pangan, a barista and shift supervisor for four years at a Starbucks in Chicago, the tension between average workers\u2019 wages and the super-rich is not just about plutocratic tech lords.<\/p>\n Pangan points out there is a stark contrast between the struggle many workers experience and CEO pay. The median pay for a Starbucks worker in 2024 was $14,674, compared with CEO Brian Niccol\u2019s compensation of $97.8m the same year.<\/p>\n CEO pay grew 20 times faster than the average worker\u2019s pay in 2025, according to an analysis from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation,<\/p>\n \u201cWe aren\u2019t making enough to pay for groceries, we\u2019re not making enough to pay rent,\u201d said Pangan, whose Starbucks store recently unionized, joining more than 700 locations that have won union elections. \u201cI think it\u2019s really disgusting to see the huge disparity.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been really hard to see myself and my co-workers struggle just to get by,\u201d Pangan added. \u201cMeanwhile, Brian Niccol commutes to work with the company\u2019s private jet, and I know Starbucks isn\u2019t alone in that \u2013 that\u2019s happening everywhere around the country with all these corporations.\u201d<\/p>\n For Daniel Mandell, emeritus professor of history at Truman State University, the national debate over tech plutocrats\u2019 wealth could signal change and is a reminder of the US\u2019s founding principles.<\/p>\n \u201cWill the current awareness of the dangers of this yawning economic chasm, spotlighted by the outrageous behavior of \u2018tech bros\u2019 like Elon Musk with his $1tn, lead to policy changes? I hope so,\u201d said Mandell. \u201cThe US\u2019s foundational democratic ideal included the warning that great wealth, especially in politics, was toxic for the republic, and that one of the duties of our government is to prevent that evil.\u201d<\/p>\n Starbucks and SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The day that Elon Musk became the world\u2019s first trillionaire, Gilberto Rubio, a security officer in the San Francisco area, said he was thinking about how to cut back on meals to save money. Jessica Orde\u00f1ana, a bartender in midtown Manhattan, was worrying about air conditioning ahead of a heatwave because she can\u2019t afford her<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[5388,1547,5607,5099,10646,1440,13318,11091,6734,3329,1438],"class_list":{"0":"post-50683","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-billionaires","9":"tag-good","10":"tag-income","11":"tag-inequality","12":"tag-reason","13":"tag-rich","14":"tag-richer","15":"tag-soars","16":"tag-struggle","17":"tag-wealth","18":"tag-workers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018We\u2019re not making enough to pay rent\u2019<\/h2>\n