Thomas Piketty would love to have a word.

Piketty’s central argument is that when the rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g), wealth concentrates over time into fewer and fewer hands. This is his now-famous r > g inequality.

The implication is that capitalism, left to its own devices, doesn’t naturally spread wealth around. It does the opposite. The relatively egalitarian period of the mid-20th century (roughly 1930s-1970s) was the historical exception, driven by two world wars, the Great Depression, and deliberate policy choices like progressive taxation. The longer historical pattern, which Piketty traces with extensive data going back to the 18th century, is one of increasing concentration.

His practical prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth (not just income) to counteract this tendency. He acknowledges this is politically difficult but argues it’s the most straightforward mechanism to prevent a return to the kind of patrimonial capitalism that defined the Gilded Age and the Belle Époque, where inherited wealth dominated and social mobility was minimal.

The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work. Piketty and his collaborators assembled an unprecedented dataset on wealth and income distribution across multiple countries and centuries, which gave the argument a weight that prior discussions lacked.

There's 100+ people the FBI had tabs on for sex trafficking related to Epstein.

So far the only individual that has been meaningfully punished has been Ghislaine Maxwell.

This seems like a prime example of being too big to fail. The FBI puts on kid gloves whenever a rich person is accused of wrong doing.

The "all in podcast"

Please provide a list of all multi-billionaires who have somehow managed to lose any significant portion of their wealth outside of a divorce combined with bad marriage planning. And even in those rare cases, they don't approach bankruptcy.

It isn't that they get bailed out by the government (like the banks in 2008), it is that at the scale of their wealth there is no realistic way to lose it fast enough to make any significant negative difference when the neutral state of wealth at that scale is to snowball ever larger (mostly because we refuse to tax it appropriately).