On Millions, Billions, and Maybe Someday Trillions

Dear Reader,

When Elon Musk’s net worth jumps $30 billion in a single day—more than the entire GDP of Nepal—while teachers in Wisconsin communities hold fundraisers to buy classroom supplies, I find myself asking: What kind of game are we playing?

I believe in capitalism. I’ve built businesses, taken risks, and benefited from the rewards that come with enterprise and initiative. The ability to create something from nothing, to solve problems that people will pay for—that’s noble work.

That should be rewarded.

But somewhere between rewarding innovation and allowing unlimited accumulation, we’ve lost the plot. The numbers are staggering. The world’s fifty wealthiest individuals control more wealth than the bottom half of humanity combined—nearly four billion people. Read that again. Fifty people. Four billion people.

And those fifty individuals keep playing the game, watching their billions multiply into hundreds of billions, while half the world struggles to meet basic needs.

I’m not arguing against wealth. I’m arguing against hoarding. There’s a difference between building something meaningful and simply accumulating zeros on a balance sheet because the system allows it.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: At what point is enough actually enough? Is it $100 million? A billion? Ten billion? At some point, the number becomes absurd—not because the person didn’t earn it, but because no one can meaningfully use it. What’s the difference between having $50 billion and $150 billion? You can’t spend it.

You can’t even conceive of it. It’s just score-keeping while people go without medicine, education, and hope.

And yet some of the world’s wealthiest show charitable giving that barely registers as a rounding error against their net worth. They’ll donate to a museum or fund a new wing at an elite university while communities crumble. When Forbes celebrates a billionaire’s philanthropy and it amounts to less than one percent of their wealth, something is deeply wrong.

In the communities we serve across Wisconsin, I see the real-world impact of this inequality. Family farms that have operated for generations can’t compete with corporate agriculture backed by venture capital. Main Street businesses struggle while Amazon—built on the backs of warehouse workers earning barely above minimum wage—funnels wealth to the very top. Local newspapers like ours survive on tight margins while tech monopolies extract advertising revenue that once sustained community journalism. The invisible hand of the market, it turns out, is pretty good at slapping people down and lifting others to impossible heights.

I’m not naïve enough to think there’s a simple solution. But I do think we can acknowledge that a system which produces this level of inequality isn’t working for most people. And those who’ve won the game spectacularly—who’ve accumulated more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes—have a moral obligation to do more than watch the number grow.

Maybe that’s through taxation. Maybe it’s through genuine philanthropy that addresses root causes rather than slapping nameplates on buildings. Maybe it’s through paying workers a living wage instead of fighting unions. I don’t have all the answers.

But I do know this: They can’t take it with them. And if there is an afterlife—if there’s any accounting beyond the Forbes list—the currency won’t be dollars. It’ll be what you did when you had plenty and your neighbor had nothing. It’ll be whether you used your abundance to build ladders or walls. It’ll be measured not in what you accumulated, but in what you gave away when it could have made a difference.

The great equalizer isn’t just death. It’s the question that echoes beyond it: What did you do with what you were given?