There’s not just a K-shaped economy of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. This K shape of diverging paths extends to politics, a new report found, and experts warn it’s threatening democracy as a result.
According to Oxfam International’s “Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power” report this week, a billionaire boom has coincided with the rise of the richest exerting political influence, with billionaires 4,000 times more likely to hold office than less wealthy people globally.
And if those billionaires aren’t running for office, they’re pouring money into campaigns. Per Oxfam, one in six dollars spent by all U.S. candidates, parties, and committees in the 2024 elections came from 100 billionaire families.
The majority of Americans are already concerned the Trump administration will benefit the rich more than ordinary people. A CBS/YouGov poll conducted in December found 65% of respondents believed Trump’s policies favored the wealthy, while 12% believed they favored the middle class, and 1% said his policies favor the poor.
According to Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America’s senior director of economic justice, the rise of billionaires’ participation in politics not only empowers the ultrawealthy few to pursue their agendas; it disempowers everyday people from feeling like their votes or campaign contributions matter.
“There is way too much power that is being held in the hands of way too few right now, and that undercuts people’s economic freedom, political freedom, and it also fundamentally undermines the value of one’s participation in the political system,” Ahmed told Fortune. “We actually do face a moment in which there is a fundamental choice between oligarchy and democracy.”
Billionaires’ political influence
The United States is experiencing this reckoning now, the Oxfam report suggested, as powerful figures mix money, business, and policy in service of their own interests.
Watchdogs have criticized the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial for its significant overseas investments—as well as the launch of its own memecoin and mining operations—claiming they represent conflicts of interest. The president, with a $6.8 billion net worth, added $1.4 billion in digital assets to his family’s wealth in the first year of his second term, a Bloomberg analysis this week found.
“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fortune in a statement. “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has explicitly proclaimed intentions to influence lawmakers to help Trump. Musk donated at least $132 million to the 2024 election bid of Trump and his GOP allies. He’s back at it for the 2026 midterm election and funneled $10 million this week to the campaign of Kentucky Republican Nate Morris, a pro-Trump candidate bidding to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell following his retirement, Axios reported.
In addition to swaying elections, wealth may also be tipping the scales in court. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published this month and led by Columbia Business School economist Andrea Prat found pro-wealth policies and actions are correlated with judicial outcomes. In 1953, Democratic and Republican Supreme Court appointees had statistically indistinguishable rulings on matters regarding wealth, the study found. By 2022, Republican justices voted in favor of cases benefitting the wealthy 70% of the time compared to 35% of the time for Democratic justices.
Learning from an American tradition of the powerful wealthy
“There’s an American tradition and there’s an American tension” in reckoning with how the U.S. government and private sector have both enabled and prevented the growth of wealth and wealth disparities, Ahmed said.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called out this tension earlier this week, saying in his opening remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the AI boom resembled a period of concentrated wealth not seen since the Cold War’s end, which sparked a surge of globalization. Without intervention, Fink warned, global tech companies could recreate these dynamics, seeing their own wealth increase at the expense of white-collar workers and the professional class.
“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain,” Fink said. “Early gains are flowing to the owners of models, owners of data and owners of infrastructure.”
“The open question: What happens to everyone else if AI does to white-collar workers what globalization did to blue-collar workers?” he added.
Curbing billionaire’s political power
Oxfam has advocated for a slew of policy changes to curb the political power of the wealthy, including the regulation of lobbies and campaign financing, as well as imposing wealth taxes to reduce the political and economic powers of the superrich.
These solutions are proving challenging to implement. California’s proposed wealth tax, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on all assets of state residents with a $1 billion or greater net worth, has drawn criticisms from even more politically progressive figures. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has opposed the potential ballot measure, saying it would cause billionaires with vital resources to leave the state, as illustrated by the exodus of Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Others have suggested that because many billionaires are actually cash poor, holding most of their wealth in illiquid assets, the ultrawealthy get away with paying few taxes even when they are implemented. Edward Gellis Fox and Zachary Liscow, law professors from the University of Michigan and Yale University, respectively, argued the solution to the “billionaire borrowing loophole” is to tax the proceeds of wealth so that borrowing funds is treated like income.
“Our nation faces concerningly high wealth and income inequality, and strong revenue needs,” they wrote in a 2024 paper. “Closing the borrowing loophole on the super wealthy would combat both challenges and raise more than $100 billion in a highly progressive and reasonably efficient way.”
