It’s been a pretty good pandemic for some. While others have struggled with illness, bereavement, unemployment, privation and bankruptcy, the world’s super-rich have managed to become even richer. Forbes magazine’s annual global rich-list showed that in 2020 their combined wealth surged by $5 trillion to a little over $13 trillion. By the end of last year, an unprecedented annual increase of 493 newcomers had been added to the list of 2,755 individuals whose capital is reported in the billions.

A total of 724 of those billionaires hail from the United States of America, while the People’s Republic of China clocks up a score of 698. India comes in third, with 140 people who count their riches in at least ten figures. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos topped the list with $177 billion; Tesla’s eccentric visionary Elon Musk came in second, with the more pedestrian presence of Microsoft’s Bill Gates taking the fourth spot and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg running fifth. The only figure in the top five from outside the world of cutting-edge technology was French businessman Bernard Arnault, whose company (which owns such brands as Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton) doubled in value during 2020. Overall, the wealth of the top ten increased by more than two-thirds that year. Of course, it helped a great deal if your company worked digitally or sold things online.

The likes of Bezos and Gates have funnelled massive sums of money into their charitable foundations – foundations which, for example, support global health and strive to mitigate the effects of climate change. We may, however, recall that charitable donations can represent one of the many methods by which the mega-wealthy sometimes seek to reduce their tax liabilities. Alternatively, they can deploy offshore corporate registrations and financial arrangements, establish deductible expenditures and investments, and, rather than accept direct incomes, secure loans against the collateral of their net worth. Billionaires can generally afford to employ teams of lawyers and accountants to lawfully minimize their tax payments – even down towards sums comparable with those paid by the average citizen.

Some of these billionaires seem to have resolved to use the surplus cash burning holes in their bank accounts to turn the universe into their playgrounds. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and British billionaire Richard Branson have all in recent months grabbed the headlines with their high-profile ventures in the fields of space exploration and programmes of space tourism for the super-rich. At a time of extraordinary levels of global suffering, this doesn’t necessarily represent the most sensitive strategy for the disbursement of their funds. Indeed, the unedifying sight of Bezos and Branson competing to be the first to trek to the edge of outer space looked less like a mission to secure the long-term future of our species and more like the culmination of a pair of schoolboys’ vanity projects. When, last month, Musk beat Bezos to the contract to build America’s new fleet of rockets to return to the Moon, jealous Jeff offered NASA a full waiver on his tender’s $2 billion price tag in a shot to get back into the space race. There’s a vainglorious rivalry between these astronomically wealthy egotists that makes Khrushchev and Kennedy look positively chummy.

But let’s not complain excessively about those British and American billionaires who choose to spend their spare change on flying off into space. It may, after all, be the best place for them. It’s better at least than what happens when they go into politics. 

The conspicuously well-heeled form of Donald Trump hasn’t left this planet; instead, he tried to transform his entire country into his playpen, a backyard arena for his infantile sport. Mr. Trump is reported to have first tried his hand at the American presidency as a publicity stunt designed to enhance his leverage in a bid to increase his fee for fronting a reality television show. One gets the distinct impression that his engagement in politics has never been driven by patriotic passion or by social conviction born of any personal experience of pain or hardship, so much as by a desire to play the game, to be lauded by his supporters as his nation’s greatest hero, to assure his own bloated, fragile ego that he’s not himself the loser he’s so often chided his enemies for being. Trump never had to struggle to get where he got: all his life, he’s received wealth and power on a golden plate. It’s all been a game to him.

Such affluence and advantage are hardly exclusive to the backgrounds of American politicians. Britain’s current Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson met his predecessor David Cameron when they studied together at a pre-eminent private school; they continued to socialize as members of an exclusive club at a leading university – where they met the future Tory Chancellor George Osborne, the son of a Baronet. Meanwhile, the current Chancellor Rishi Sunak attended another top school and the same university, before marrying the daughter of an Indian billionaire. 

Johnson and Trump, although themselves such highly privileged individuals, have somehow managed to reinvent themselves as populist revolutionaries. These ‘privolutionaries’ (as one might be forgiven for dubbing them) have paradoxically risen to political power on a tide of anti-establishment sentiment, even though their personal backgrounds are so deeply steeped in established wealth and privilege. They’ve promoted themselves as champions of ordinary working people, despite the fact that they were both born into socioeconomic elites and have never had to complete a normal day’s hard work in their lives. (Incidentally, both are also career internationalists who’ve proclaimed agendas of national isolationism. And both are libertarians who’ve sought to impede free debate in their national legislatures.)

They thrive on these paradoxes. Rather than shying away from them, they revel shamelessly in their brazen cant. Mr. Trump has made a rabble-rousing virtue out of being a massively wealthy businessman who’s paid almost no taxes at all. The similarly incendiary Mr. Johnson’s rhetorical trademark is to use abstruse vocabulary and Latin phrases that mark him out as socially superior to the common folk. 

Obviously, none of this makes very much sense. Their divisive demagoguery gets away with being riven with such contradictions because it appeals precisely to those who’d prefer not to think very much about such things.  

At the end of last month, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (another wealthy ‘man of the people’, the privately educated former commodities trader Nigel Farage) made headlines when he declared that lifeboat volunteers were acting as a taxi service for asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel, flooding the country with immigrants by risking their own lives to save the lives of those refugees. A liberal-leaning columnist writing for The Times newspaper described this as a new low for British politics, and was immediately harangued on social media for daring to say so. But this journalist’s trolls weren’t supporters of that son-of-a-stockbroker, Mr. Farage; on the contrary, they were leftists who objected to the idea that a writer for a right-wing paper might express such progressive views.

It is of course highly inconvenient for those (on either side of the ideological divide) who seek to perpetuate a politics of division when they discover that a supposed adversary might support perspectives which coincide with their own. How after all can we continue to demonize our political opponents if it turns out we share some of their fundamental moral values? Wouldn’t that undermine our sense of our own exclusive moral integrity and ideological identity?

The so-called ‘culture wars’ that the media like to portray as raging across western nations require that neither side empathizes with the other’s basic humanity or shared values, or acknowledge the fact that, though they may profoundly disagree, both sides tend to act out of their own sincere sense of the common good. In truth, very few people in the West find themselves naturally at the extremes of these manufactured cultural conflicts between the ‘woke’ progressives and the ‘gammon’ traditionalists. Yet these conflicts are fuelled by perceptions of radical injustice: on the one side, the injustice of economic inequality and social inequity; on the other, the injustice of liberties lost to a bloated state. Both perspectives are inflamed and exploited by populist figures of both the Left and the Right who would seek to overthrow the political establishment and replace it with their own power-base. And when the world’s twenty-two richest men are said to control more combined wealth than all the women in Africa, it’s not difficult to see how such resentments and tensions can spin out of control, and how the economic polarisation of this acute concentration of capital leads to political polarisation and to social conflict too.

Yet that’s not quite the end of the story. At the far end of the scale of global opulence reside those hidden plutocrats whose wealth is at once so pervasive and so invisible that its presence doesn’t even register on Forbes magazine’s radar, yet whose influence is felt across the world, at the point at which material wealth and political power directly coincide. Donald Trump’s apparent aspirations in this area were foiled by the limited control he held over the American media and by the finite extent of his boasted resources; and as a result, for the time being at least, liberty prevailed. But the history of Donald Trump’s irresistible rise should remain as a warning to the world: the massive agglomeration of unaccountable political power generated by an absurdly iniquitous concentration of wealth poses, in itself, a dire threat to freedom and peace, on a planet whose immediate future is already put at severe risk by the twin jeopardies of pandemic and climate change.

So, unless these billionaires can really resolve these existential problems, as they’ve suggested they might, our economies, societies and political systems might start to appear to be better off without them. We might therefore eagerly await the outcomes of Jeff, Bill and Elon’s science projects. Our survival, as individuals and as a species, may in the end depend on them.