Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The collective net worth of America’s top twelve billionaires has surpassed $2 trillion as of December 3.
This is an unsettling new milestone for wealth concentration in the United States. The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever, and they are endowed with extreme material power that can be used to pursue narrow political interests at the expense of democratic majorities.
There is one newcomer to the moneyed club that we surveyed back in 2020: Jensen Huang. He replaces Walmart heiress Alice Walton.
The collective wealth of this iteration of the oligarchic dozen has increased by more than $1.3 trillion, or 193 percent, since Forbes published its 34th annual list of global billionaires in April 2020.
The ascendancy of Huang is noteworthy. As cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, his wealth has skyrocketed from $4.7 billion in 2020 to $122.4 billion — a mind-boggling 2,504 percent increase — over the last four years.
Huang’s surging wealth is directly tied to the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. The demand from Big Tech for Nvidia’s semiconductor chips to power AI has pushedthe company’s stock market value to new heights. To put that demand into perspective, Huang could have been the world’s first trillionaire if his ownership stake in Nvidia, currently at 3.5 percent, mirrored Larry Ellison’s 40 percent stake in software giant Oracle.
The looming expansion of the oligarchic dozen’s carbon footprint is worrisome. Every single individual owns or is a controlling shareholder of a business that is investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence.
