In everyday conversation, a billion dollars is often recognized as just another huge unattainable figure—an amount only seen in news headlines about government budgets, corporate profits, or the net worth of the ultra-wealthy. We tend to brush past the number and it barely registers. However, a billion dollars is actually an amount far larger than people might tend to expect.
To put it in perspective, if someone were to earn $10,000 each day, it would take them 100 days to earn $1 million; to earn $1 billion, it would take 274 years. A person with $1 billion could spend $100,000 every single day for more than 27 years and still not exhaust that initial amount.
When understanding just how huge this number is, we also have to realize that there are over 3000 people worldwide whose net worth is this amount and more, totaling up to over $16 trillion. Meanwhile, millions of people live on the complete opposite side of that financial world. Rent consumes ever-growing shares of paychecks, medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, and food insecurities due to financial struggles continue to force families to skip meals. In the same economy that produces billionaires at a historic pace, ordinary people who work fulltime cannot reliably afford housing, healthcare, or childcare.
As of January, Elon Musk is on a steady path to becoming a trillionaire. Despite losing billions over the past year for political endorsements and compromising his brand image, Musk remains the wealthiest person in the world with an estimated net worth between $690 billion and $785 billion. Analysts from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) predict that with Tesla’s continued AI growth and a potential SpaceX IPO, Musk will become the very first person in history to attain a trillion dollars in personal wealth this year. However, as the Tesla Takedown protest movement has grown, more people have sold their vehicles and shares of Tesla stock, which has caused Musk’s wealth to become extremely volatile.
Another major criticism of Musk is his self-proclaimed “charity” efforts. The majority of Musk’s donations have served his own self interests, entities, and family. The Musk Foundation, which claims to be a private charitable STEM organization, has failed to meet the legally required minimum distribution standards for the past few years. Reportedly, the Musk Foundation fell an entire $421 million short of its 2023 distribution requirement. As a foundation with more than $9 billion in assets and several wealthy donors, the organization is highly capable of helping the public; they just choose not to.
Fortunately, there are some famous and wealthy people who choose to leverage their global platforms to advocate for economic justice. Billie Eilish isn’t a billionaire; she has a net worth of about $50 million from her success as a young artist. At the 2025 WSJ Innovator Awards, she chose to use her Music Innovator Award speech to challenge and question billionaires in the audience. She asked, “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” She proceeds to call on billionaires to “give [their] money away,” which is highly reflective of her charitable contributions to climate justice, food equity, and carbon reduction. After her speech, Stephen Colbert announced Eilish’s plans to donate $11.5 million to these causes after her successful Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour. Some of the billionaires in that audience included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and filmmaker George Lucas, who both refused to meet her speech or donation announcement with applause.
Over the past few decades, America’s most wealthy families have only added to their net worth, while those at the bottom have dipped into “negative wealth,” meaning the value of their debts is greater than the value of their assets. These families are living on the edge, just one minor economic setback away from tragedy. Even among higher-income families, the growth in income over the years has favored those at the top. In 1989, the richest 5% of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second quintile, $2.3 million compared to $20,300. By 2016, this ratio had increased to 248. The richest families in the US have experienced greater gains in wealth in recent decades, a trend that reinforces the growing concentration of financial resources at the top. As the rich only seem to grow richer and the poor grow poorer, we must recognize that this extreme concentration of wealth has become a major injustice plaguing our society, and ignoring these issues only allows these inequalities to deepen. If all the world’s billionaires gave away even 1% of their wealth, it would be more than enough to end hunger or extreme poverty worldwide. And even after donating this large amount of money, they would still remain billionaires. That said, the unethical, ultra-wealthy are the only minority to fear.
