The first thing we do, let's kill all the billionaires.

How to resolve wealth inequality before it destroys us all.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

Shakespeare slipped that line into Henry VI, Part 2, and for centuries, people have debated what he really meant. Some take it as a cheap shot at lawyers (a timeless tradition), but in context, it’s more sinister. A would-be tyrant’s follower speaks the line, and the logic is clear: if you want to impose a corrupt system, first, you have to eliminate the people who uphold the law. In this case, lawyers were the last line of defense against chaos.

Which brings us to billionaires.

I used to think capitalism was a system that, despite its flaws, worked. It created wealth. It lifted people out of poverty. And sure, some people got rich—really rich—but that was just the cost of innovation, right? A rising tide lifts all boats. That’s what I believed.

Then I came across something Bernie Sanders said:

"Today, American workers are over 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago."

That couldn’t be true, I thought. The whole premise of capitalism is that hard work leads to prosperity. If we’re producing more, we should be earning more. And yet, the numbers didn’t lie. Since the 1970s, nearly all the gains from increased productivity have been funneled upward, into the hands of the ultra-wealthy.

Here’s another way Sanders put it:

"If the minimum wage had increased with productivity over the last 50 years, it would be $23 an hour today."

That number hit me like a gut punch. Because what it means is that capitalism isn’t broken for everyone—it’s working just fine for billionaires. The system isn’t failing; it’s rigged. The billionaire class didn’t just emerge from capitalism—they hijacked it.

So I had to go look for myself. I’m an economist by training, I can read raw reports. So I went to FRED and, sure enough, if Bernie wasn’t right. He was right about it all. That of course, begs, the obvious question: where the hell did “all the money go.” All that productivity was appropriated somewhere. The money didn’t just vanish.

So, I spend more time looking at asset and income classes and reading more reports. After about 20 hours of research, it becomes painfully apparent where all the productivity gains of the last 80 years went. They predominantly went into the hands of the decamillionaires ($100 million+) and billionaires—the wealthiest 1/1000th of 1% worldwide.

Wow.

And now I think: maybe billionaires aren’t just a byproduct of capitalism. They’re a sign that something is deeply broken. Maybe we have to kill all the billionaires (figuratively, of course, I’m not advocating wholesale murder. Yet.)

How Billionaires Hijacked the System

If billionaires were just a byproduct of capitalism—proof that the system rewards innovation, risk-taking, and hard work—you might expect them to give back at the same rate they take. Maybe they’d reinvest in workers, pay taxes proportionate to their wealth, or help fuel a thriving middle class.

But they don’t. Because billionaires didn’t just get rich within the system—they got rich by rewiring it to serve themselves.

Step 1: Rewrite the Tax Code

Once upon a time, the ultra-rich paid “their share.” In the 1950s—back when a single-income household could afford a home, a car, and college tuition—the top marginal tax rate was 91%. Even through the 1960s and 70s, the wealthiest Americans paid 70% or more rates. That money didn’t vanish; it funded infrastructure, education, and public investment that made economic mobility possible.

Then came the 1980s, when billionaires pulled off one of the greatest cons in history: tricking Americans into believing that taxing the rich would somehow hurt the middle class.

Reagan slashed the top tax rate from 70% to 28%. Corporations, which had once covered a third of federal tax revenue, saw their rates drop. The justification? Trickle-down economics—the idea that if we let the rich keep their money, they’d invest it in ways that benefit everyone.

That never happened.

What happened instead was trickle-up economics: the rich hoarded wealth, bought politicians, and reshaped laws to ensure they’d never have to give it back.

Step 2: Financialize Everything

Billionaires don’t just own companies. They own the mechanisms that extract wealth from all other market participants.

Take private equity: a business model where firms buy up companies, gut their costs (usually by “reducing labor costs,” also known as firing workers), load them up with debt, and cash out before the whole thing collapses. It’s how Toys "R" Us went under. It’s how Sears died. It’s why you can barely find a grocery store a hedge fund doesn’t own.

Or look at stock buybacks. In the 1980s, corporate America reinvested profits into workers, research, and expansion. Innovation and excellence drove equity value growth. Now, CEOs take those profits and use them to buy back their stocks—artificially inflating share prices, making themselves and their investors even wealthier. In 1982, stock buybacks were illegal. Today, they’re the primary way corporate America spends its money. As a result, innovation in America has suffered.

Meanwhile, billionaires don’t even earn salaries like “regular people” do. Jeff Bezos doesn’t need a paycheck. Instead, he holds stock, obtains a loan using the stock as collateral (so he doesn’t have to sell and pay taxes), and enjoys an interest rate lower than what most Americans pay on their credit cards. That’s how billionaires “make” money without earning a taxable income. Neat trick. It’s all legal to boot.

Step 3: Rig Politics to Protect the Grift

If you want to keep your fortune, you need the government working for you. And billionaires have made sure of that.

The Citizens United¹ Supreme Court ruling in 2010 allowed unlimited political spending by corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Suddenly, billionaires didn’t just influence elections—they became the elections. They fund candidates, write legislation, and ensure that both parties stay friendly to their interests. This single opinion shifted politics in a way that is fundamentally not understood by nearly everyone. That fact is partly how this opinion remains and why there isn’t national outrage to change the laws.

Billionaires even rewritten the language of capitalism itself:

• We can’t afford universal healthcare? (Meanwhile, the U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other country, and billionaires pay less in taxes than nurses.)

• A $15 minimum wage is unrealistic? (Meanwhile, if wages had kept pace with productivity, the minimum wage would be $23 today.)

• If you tax billionaires too much, they’ll leave the country? (They won’t. Their wealth is tied to U.S. markets, infrastructure, and currency stability—things they need the government to protect.)

The result? A system where billionaires don’t just exist—they dominate the national discourse. They own the media, shaping public opinion. They fund the think tanks that write policy. They dictate the economy to ensure wealth flows upward, never downward. There is an illusion of a free market and a democracy, a gilded cage of which we are all largely unaware.

And when the economy crashes, as it inevitably does under their watch? They get bailed out. You get foreclosed on.

What Happens When Billionaires Run the World?

It’s one thing for billionaires to hoard wealth. It’s another thing for them to control everything else—politics, media, industry, even space. And yet, here we are. The ultra-rich don’t just benefit from capitalism’s loopholes; they’ve positioned themselves as the future architects, deciding who thrives, who suffers, and what kind of world we’ll all live in.

And if the last few decades (heck, the last few weeks) have shown us anything, it’s that when billionaires take charge, the result isn’t prosperity—it’s chaos.

They Treat the Economy Like a Casino

For most people, the economy is a real thing. It’s wages, rent, food, healthcare—actual necessities. For billionaires, it’s a game where they never lose.

Take Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. In 2021, he made $36 billion in a single day just from a jump in Tesla stock value. Not because Tesla made some revolutionary breakthrough, not because it hired more workers or raised wages. It's just because stock traders decided it should be worth more—speculation.

Meanwhile, most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and if the stock market tanks—due to speculation, corporate greed, or straight-up fraud—their retirement savings and homes vanish. The billionaires who caused the crash? They buy up cheap assets and start the cycle again. If they win, it’s a boon; if they lose, it’s a bailout.

They Rewrite the Rules of Work—To Benefit Themselves

Remember when companies used to hire employees? With benefits, pensions, and job security? That’s been replaced by the gig economy, where billionaires convinced people that "being your own boss" (i.e., working without labor protections) was the future.

Uber, DoorDash, and Amazon rely on a permanently precarious workforce, where people scrape by on unpredictable pay while executives pocket billions. If workers try to organize? Companies spend untold millions on “legal” union-busting lawyers to crush them before they can demand a fair wage.

Now, there’s the AI revolution. Tech billionaires love to tell us automation will "create more jobs than it destroys." It's funny, then, how every time a new AI tool replaces a human worker, the profits don’t go toward retraining those workers. They go straight into billionaire bank accounts. The cotton gin didn’t make workers more money, it eliminated the labor force. The car didn’t make horses more money, it eliminated them from the labor force. AI won’t make laborers more money, it will eliminate them from the labor force.

They Own the Information You See

A handful of billionaires control what you read, watch, and hear. If the Monopoly board was made today, it wouldn’t be railroads you’d want to own, it would be media companies—broadcast, social, news, & entertainment.

• Elon Musk bought Twitter (X)—not for profit, but for power. It’s now a platform where he amplifies insane and fascistic voices, spreads misinformation and perfidy, and bans journalists who criticize him.

• Rupert Murdoch built Fox News—not to inform the public but to ensure billionaires could dictate political narratives. It’s political entertainment and propaganda wrapped up as pseudo-journalism.

• Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post—a newspaper that, coincidentally, doesn’t spend much time investigating Amazon’s union-busting practices.

Billionaires don’t just influence public opinion—they shape it to serve their interests.

They Want to Escape the Mess They Created

And when the world they’ve exploited starts to collapse? They won’t be around to suffer the consequences.

Musk, Bezos, and other tech billionaires have invested billions into space travel. Not to explore or improve life on Earth but because they see themselves as too important to die with the rest of us. They aren’t fixing climate change or inequality.

They’re building escape plans. They are literally building penis rockets designed to screw us all.

Some, like Peter Thiel, are buying up New Zealand doomsday bunkers in case civilization collapses. Others dream of off-world colonies where they can start over—presumably without democracy or the working class.

The Billionaire Vision of the Future is a Dystopia

If you let billionaires run the world, what do you get? In a society where wealth is hoarded, democracy is a joke, and the rest of us are expected to accept our place as expendable cogs in their profit machine.

They don’t want a system that works for everyone; they want a system that guarantees they will always win.

And unless we stop them, that’s precisely what they’ll get.

So What Now?

If billionaires have hijacked capitalism, rigged the system, and are actively steering us toward a dystopian future, what do we do about it?

The knee-jerk reaction—the one implied in the title—is violence and revolution. That’s what Marx advocated. That’s what the accelerationists want. In a warped way, that’s what the MAGA red-hatted imbeciles want (although why they voted for a billionaire and his cadre of fellow billionaires is beyond me.)

The guillotine fantasy. If we just got rid of the billionaires, the system would magically correct itself.

But here’s the honest truth: it’s not just about the billionaires themselves. It’s about the structures that allow them to exist.

Billionaires aren’t a bug in capitalism. They’re a feature—one that was deliberately designed over the last 50 years. We can’t just take out the players if we want to fix the system. We have to rewrite the rules. We already know how to make a system that benefits everyone. We had it from 1945 to 1980.

Step 1: Tax the Hell Out of Extreme Wealth

We used to do this. It worked.

• In the 1950s, when the U.S. economy was booming and the middle class was thriving, the top marginal tax rate was 91%. That didn’t stop innovation. It stopped hoarding.

• Even in the 1970s, the rich paid 70%. Then Reagan slashed it to 28%, and the billionaire class exploded.

• Today, billionaires pay less in taxes than the average worker because they make their money through stocks and loopholes, not salaries.

A simple fix? Bring back high marginal tax rates on extreme wealth. Not just income but assets. A 2-3% annual wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million would generate trillions and stop billionaires from amassing wealth at the expense of everyone else.

Step 2: End the Billionaire Business Model

Billionaires don’t just exist—they exploit. How they make their money is often more destructive than the wealth itself. So, we fix the incentives.

• Ban stock buybacks (which used to be illegal) so corporations reinvest in workers instead of artificially inflating their value.

• Make corporations pay their fair share—no more Amazon and Tesla getting billions in subsidies while paying zero in taxes.

• Break up monopolies—Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Pharma have become cartels. Antitrust laws worked on Rockefeller and Standard Oil; they can work again.

• Reinstitute Glass-Steagall—we have to stop treating the world banking system as if it’s a casino. Banks can either be “Gordon Gekko” (speculative merchant banks) or “George Bailey” (depositor institutions with people’s money), but they can’t be both.

Step 3: Give Power Back to Workers

Billionaires don’t get rich alone. They do it by squeezing labor.

• Raise the minimum wage—if it had kept pace with productivity, it would be $23/hr today.

• Strengthen unions—billionaires hate them because collective bargaining is the only real check on corporate power.

• Mandate worker representation on corporate boards—it works in Germany, and it prevents CEOs from treating employees like expendable parts of a machine.

Step 4: Cut Off Their Political Influence

The reason billionaires control the system is simple: they buy it.

• Overturn Citizens United—elections can no longer be determined by who has the biggest Super PAC and who’s willing to spend the most money.

• Ban all dark money in politics—if billionaires can’t spend unlimited cash to fund politicians, politicians might serve the people. If we want to “get nuts,” ban all soft money in its entirety and only have hard money that must be fully disclosed.

• End the revolving door—no more billionaires becoming government officials, deregulating their own industries, and then cashing out. This means strengthening 18 USC Section 208 and dramatically revising the ethics rules across the federal government. In short, you can either be in government or business, but not both. Think of it as “Glass-Steagall” for politics and business.

Step 5: Change How We Think About Billionaires

We’ve been sold the myth that billionaires are economic gods—brilliant minds who create jobs, drive innovation, and deserve every cent they hoard. But history tells a different story.

• Billionaires didn’t create the greatest technological advancements (the internet, GPS, vaccines)—they were funded by public money.

• The greatest economic booms happened when wealth was widely distributed, not concentrated at the top.

• The best-run economies don’t have billionaires hoarding wealth—they have strong safety nets, high wages, and economies that work for everyone.

Maybe the real problem isn’t just that billionaires exist. It’s that we’ve been convinced we need them. We don’t.

No More Billionaires

So, while we may not need to kill all the billionaires (figuratively or otherwise), we do need to make it impossible for them to exist because no one should ever have that much power over the rest of us.

And if the billionaires don’t like it?

They can take their penis rockets and terraform Mars.

1. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)