How much wealth is too much?

Extreme wealth is concentrating economic, political and technological power in the hands of a tiny few. Healthy democracies cannot ignore the question of limits.

We hear a great deal these days about billionaires – the good, the bad and the very ugly.

Some have called the era we are living through the Age of the Billionaires.

Just as many of us were beginning to grasp the extraordinary economic and political power accumulated by this miniscule group, we learned that one of them, Elon Musk, had become the world’s first trillionaire.

Whether or not that particular milestone proves lasting, one thing is clear: the ranks of the ultra-wealthy continue to grow. Today, there are around 3,400 billionaires worldwide, a tiny fraction of humanity whose collective wealth now exceeds US$18 trillion.

This is not a value-neutral economic trend. It is reshaping our politics, our economies and, increasingly, our democracies.

My recent novel, Killionaire, explores the extraordinary power wielded by this billionaire class and asks a question that is becoming harder to ignore: Should there be a legal limit to how much wealth any one individual can accumulate?

The United States leads the world with almost 1,000 billionaires, followed by China with more than 600 and India with more than 200. Australia now has around 80 US-dollar billionaires.

Collectively they control more than US$18 trillion. Trillion with a “T”.

The world’s richest eight people, a group small enough to fit around a dining room table, own as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity – some 4.1 billion people.

The scale of this inequality is almost impossible to comprehend.

One million dollars is difficult enough for most of us to imagine.

One billion is one thousand times larger again.

The median net worth of humanity is roughly US$8,000. That means even the world’s poorest billionaire is approximately 125,000 times wealthier than the median person.

Numbers this large quickly lose meaning. So let’s look at them another way.

If the billionaire were Usain Bolt running the 100 metres in his world-record time of 9.58 seconds, the median person would take almost 14 days to finish the same race.

If the average person weighed 70 kilograms, the billionaire would weigh the equivalent of 58 blue whales, the largest animal ever to have lived.

And if the average person stood 170 centimetres tall, the billionaire would tower 220 kilometres into the sky.

In what moral, ethical or legal universe should disparities of this scale be considered acceptable?

The real problem, however, isn’t billionaires themselves. It’s the culture that keeps creating them. We don’t simply live in the Age of the Billionaire. We live in something far more dangerous.

More than two thousand years ago, Plato described societies driven by an insatiable desire for more. He called it pleonexia. Not simply wealth, but the endless pursuit of wealth. Not simply success, but accumulation without limit. Not simply ambition, but greed elevated to virtue.

That word feels remarkably modern.

Because today’s problem is not merely that billionaires exist. It is that we have built an economic system that celebrates limitless accumulation while accepting extraordinary inequality as somehow inevitable.

The consequences of this culture extend far beyond inequality. The world’s wealthiest individuals pay, on average, a fraction of the tax paid by ordinary workers. Many of the corporations they control contribute little or nothing at all.

How much tax did you pay last year?

The environmental imbalance is just as stark. The average billionaire generates around one million times more carbon emissions than the average person.

How can a system that asks ordinary citizens to reduce their emissions simultaneously allow a tiny handful of people to pollute on an almost unimaginable scale?

But perhaps the greatest danger isn’t economic or environmental. It is political. Extreme wealth is one thing. Unchecked political influence is something else entirely.

Across the world we are witnessing unprecedented concentrations of economic, political and technological power. Wealth no longer simply buys luxury. Increasingly, it buys influence, access and the ability to shape public debate.

As artificial intelligence accelerates and surveillance technologies become ever more sophisticated, those concentrations of power become even more significant.

The question is whether democracies can remain healthy when so much power is concentrated in so few hands.

For many people, the tide is beginning to turn.

Movements such as Patriotic Millionaires are calling for higher taxes on extreme wealth. Oxfam continues to document the widening gap between the richest and the rest. Politicians including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani have placed wealth concentration firmly at the centre of public debate.

What once seemed politically impossible is increasingly becoming part of mainstream discussion.

Solutions do exist.

Tax havens can be closed.

Financial secrecy can end.

Politics can be protected from the influence of extreme wealth.

Fairer taxation systems can be introduced.

And yes, societies can choose to place limits on how much wealth any one individual is allowed to accumulate. None of these ideas are impossible. They simply require political courage.

Changing the culture of pleonexia will not happen overnight. Those who benefit most from today’s system will resist every attempt at reform. They already are.

But history shows that no economic model lasts forever.

If enough people decide that unlimited wealth is incompatible with healthy democracy, then the Age of the Billionaire may one day become a historical curiosity rather than an economic reality.

I explore these questions through fiction in Killionaire because sometimes statistics alone cannot capture what is at stake.

Stories allow us to imagine the consequences of today’s choices before they become tomorrow’s reality.