#wealth-inequality

#wealth-inequality

"It's almost like a cop-out. You get to demonize this group of folks without fixing the actual system that exists, that's in play."

There have never been more billionaires on the planet than in 2026: According to an Oxfam report released earlier this year, there are now more than 3,000 people sitting on 10-digit fortunes. Leading the ranks is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has a net worth of $659 billion, followed by Alphabet cofounder Larry Page at $264 billion.

The core of the argument is that agentic AI will replace human labor in most white-collar industries and will do so with dizzying speed. The consequent abrupt and massive job displacements will lead to crashes in property values and local tax bases, with devastating impacts on communities and much of the public sector.

Nearly half of the apartments in the seven tallest towers in the area sit empty. At night the picture is even starker, with dozens of darkened floors turning the glittering status symbol into a vertical 'ghost neighborhood' scraping the sky.

I would say, Rachel, that my takeaway from today is that the president or Trump 2.0 is definitely living in a gilded bubble. I would say, even if you compare it to his first term, the president is now surrounded by an administration that says yes, yes, please, thank you, and yes again. He truly is living like a king in this White House.

He says that for boomers, who lived through an economic boom, accumulating wealth was easy-or at least easier than it has ever been since. Baby boomers currently hold more than $85 trillion in assets, making them the richest generation by far. Therefore, they earn the title "all about the money." Millennials, meanwhile, were handed a map and told the exact steps to follow to find the financial success their parents enjoyed.

San Francisco sits at the center of the wealth inequality gripping the country, a place where fortunes scale at historic speed while the gap between those who produce value and those who capture it continues to widen. As I reflect on my own NFL career and life playing the game that will light up screens for more than 100 million Americans this weekend,

New York is an incongruous state. We're home to fabulous wealth - if the state were a country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world - but also the highest rate of wealth inequality. We're among the most diverse - but also the most segregated. We passed the nation's most ambitious climate law - but haven't been meeting its deadlines and continue to subsidize industries hastening the climate crisis.

Trump ran on a promise to lower costs on day one, but a year into his presidency, the real beneficiaries are his billionaire donors. Instead of making life more affordable for everyday Americans, Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself and his billionaire allies, while making the largest cuts to Medicaid and food assistance in history and leaving working families behind.

Vibes-wise, the event was classic Trump 2.0-chic. Guests were handed monogrammed buckets of popcorn, framed screening tickets for their trophy shelves, and a limited-edition copy of Trump's 2024 book of the same title as her documentary, "Melania. " Prior to the screening, the black-tie guests were greeted by a taxpayer-funded military band that playing famous movie themes, as well as "Melania's Waltz," featured in the documentary and composed by Hollywood's Tony Neiman.

Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires from 24 countries are calling on global leaders to increase taxes on the super-rich, amid growing concern that the wealthiest in society are buying political influence. An open letter, released to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, calls on global leaders attending this week's conference to close the widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else.

As wealth inequality widens and billionaires become increasingly enmeshed with politics, the public is growing more and more disillusioned with the ultra-wealthy, and the role they play in society. It's not just those with low or median incomes who feel that way. A majority of millionaires now say that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy; that the ultra-rich buy political influence; and that political leaders should do more to tackle extreme wealth, like increasing taxes.

"At the end of the day, it's the investors and billionaires at Davos who have his attention, not the families struggling to afford their bills," said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank.

Since taking office, Trump has imposed a range of tariffs on countries, including key trading partners, leading to predictions of inflation skyrocketing, manufacturing screeching to a halt and unemployment soaring. None of those scenarios came true. Inflation, while above the Federal Reserve's target, was a modest 2.7 percent in December. The unemployment rate was relatively low, at 4.4 percent, last month.

Co-founder Arthur Clifton, a former leading figure in Just Stop Oil, explained the first strategy would involve a series of "take backs". Speaking to roughly 200 activists, he said: "We have seen that food is locked behind skyrocketing prices. Less and less people can afford less and less food. "So what we do is actually pretty obvious - we go in there, we take it out and we redistribute it to the local community. This is what we are going to be doing in March."

Sobering new research from the think tank Resolution Foundation shows that for aspirational Brits looking to move up the wealth ladder, not even a lifetime of savings would be enough. In fact, the average worker would need to save their earnings for 52 years, to raise £1.3 million ($1.7 million), the amount needed to move from the middle and become as wealthy as the richest 10%.

Credit scores are lower than they've ever been, particularly with Gen Z," Goodarzi told Editorial Director Andrew Nusca at Fortune Brainstorm AI last week. Credit balances across the board are also the highest they've been, Goodarzi added, but Gen Z are disproportionately hurting in this category, too. "[Gen Z] credit card balances are up 36-37%," Goodarzi added. But there's one silver lining: "They still have jobs," Goodarzi said. "And that's what's really keeping things together."

If Plato was the first Western political philosopher, Aristotle was the first political scientist in today's sense. Plato's Republic, for instance, envisages an unworldly political utopia. But in Politics, Aristotle investigates a comprehensive range of political forms and regimes, down to their unglamorous, operational details. To research the book, Aristotle sent pupils at the Lyceum, his school in Athens, to many Greek city-states to record their constitutions, forming a kind of empirical data set.

As a New York court weighed whether evidence was gathered illegally during Mangione's arrest on charges of fatally shooting a top healthcare executive on the streets of New York, America got a taste of the trial's potent mix of politics, social comment, conspiracy theory and Hollywood-style murder drama. Last week's lengthy proceedings yielded little new information in the way of rewriting Americans' collective understanding of Mangione's alleged role in killing United HealthCare executive Brian Thompson with a purported ghost gun.

In late October, Hurricane Melissa (that should have been called "Godzilla") battered western Jamaica with 185-mile-an-hour winds. It tossed the roofs of buildings about like splintering javelins, demolished municipal buildings and hospitals, snapped telephone poles like matchsticks, flattened crops, and dumped torrential floodwaters everywhere, leaving $8 billion in damage. That Category 5 storm's unprecedented ferocity was driven by an overheated Caribbean Sea, produced by 275 years of industrial civilization that has spewed obscene amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.