Above photo: Ally Financial Tower, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The good times — for America’s super wealthy — are now rolling way past good. Our richest have in 2024 enjoyed their best year ever. No other nation’s deepest pockets have watched their fortunes grow as large or as fast.
Elon Musk, of course, perfectly embodies this unprecedented surge in the personal wealth of America’s wealthiest. Musk has entered 2024’s last two weeks with a net worth spilling past $450 billion, nearly half a trillion dollars. Over the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index neatly notes, Musk’s wealth has doubled.
But Musk’s good fortune hardly rates as unique. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is sitting on a quarter-trillion personal fortune, and the Facebook-driven net worth of Mark Zuckerburg has jumped comfortably over $200 billion as well.
Of the world’s 15 largest personal fortunes, 14 currently belong to Americans. All these 14 will be stepping into 2025 with at least $100 billion in personal assets.
Amid the ranks of America’s up-and-coming ultra-rich, in other words, $100-billion fortunes have suddenly become eminently imaginable. For the rest of us, a personal fortune of a mere single billion remains utterly unimaginable. An American with a job annually paying $75,000 would have to labor over 13,000 years to amass enough pay stubs to equal that singular billion.
This past September, analysts at the London-based Informa research group predictedthat Elon Musk, based on his then-current wealth trajectory, would hit trillionaire status sometime in 2027. Three other Americans, the researchers added, would likely join the trillion-dollar club before 2030. All these numbers, with this fall’s personal fortune figures now almost all in, appear to make for a severe underestimate.
Numbers, of course, can only paint part of America’s top-heavy picture. Where the riches of our richest end up going tells an even more disturbing story.
In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a Guardian analysis points out, the super rich of Silicon Valley alone spent almost $400 million to elect their favored candidate. Some $243 million of that total came from Elon Musk’s effort to elect Donald Trump. That huge outlay — the largest personal investment ever in a single American political campaign — amounted to a pin prick on Musk’s overall fortune.
Back in the old days — before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision in 2010 — America’s wealthiest faced restrictions on how much money they could invest in electing their political pals to office. Today those rich can essentially spend whatever they want on political campaigns.
Or on anything else. Take housing, for instance. In the first half of this year, elevated mortgage rates had U.S. home sales overall down 12.9 percent. But the luxury housing market has remained notably robust. Luxury sales rose 5.2 percent during this year’s first half — even in the face of a 14.2 percent rise in typical luxury home prices.
Elon Musk, not surprisingly, is leading the luxury way. Mansion Global is reportingthat Musk may soon be buying a $100-million condo in Florida’s West Palm Beach, a little home away from home right across the bridge from Donald Trump’s spread at Mar-a-Lago. A Musk acquisition at that level would more than double the $42.6-million existing purchase-price record for a West Palm condo.
Plenty of ultra-high-net-worth individuals have of late been rushing into Donald Trump’s Greater Miami environs, and this rush has created at least one major problem these rich never envisioned: Teachers in the local elite private schools that cater to their kids can’t find affordable places to live in America’s new “Wall Street South.”
Local housing prices overall have jumped about 75 percent over the last five years, Bloomberg notes, “bid up by thousands of affluent families moving south with jobs at firms like billionaire financier Ken Griffin’s Citadel.” Miami now ranks as America’s least affordable metro area for housing.
At Ransom Everglades, a private secondary school that charges over $50,000 a year for tuition, wealthy parents think they’ve come up with a teacher housing solution. They’ve created a $30-million endowment that will offer each of the school’s 132 teachers a housing stipend worth at least $11,000 a year.
Public school teachers in Florida, meanwhile, are facing their own tough times. Only one other state in the nation pays teachers in public school less than Florida. The main reason? The state has no income tax and depends overwhelmingly instead on sales taxes and excise tax levies on motor fuel, alcohol, and tobacco. This rich-people-friendly approach to financing public services has Florida’s working families paying in taxes over triple, as a share of their income, what the state’s richest 1 percent pay.
Is Florida going to define America’s future? Could be — if Donald Trump gets his way. He’s filling his new administration, Politico notes, “with people who learned how to throw elbows in Florida first.”
Those elbows, once in Washington, most certainly won’t be hitting too many rich people’s chins.