How To Make $60 Billion November 13, 2025November 13, 2025 If you have $60 billion, you’re around the bottom of the 25 wealthiest Americans. To make $60 billion, Gary Gulman has noted, you need only win the Mega Millions $100 million jackpot every week for 600 weeks. Except that lottery winnings are taxed as ordinary income, so he’s wrong. Even in a no-tax state you’d need more like a 1,000 straight wins. So how do a few people grow so rich? Often it’s by making great advances for society for which they should be celebrated rather than demonized. But . . . . . . it sure helps not to pay taxes. If your billions came mainly from investments, that’s easy. Instead of selling some of your $60 billion in stock and paying an already low capital gains tax, just borrow a few million against it each year instead. Problem solved. If it came from inheritance? “Only morons pay the estate tax,” says White House’s Gary Cohn. (See, also: The Haves and the Have-Yachts.) In her new book, The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, Ray Madoff warns: The United States has allowed many of its wealthiest individuals to quietly secede from the country that benefits them financially. As the richest 1 percent of Americans have come to control more than 30 percent of the country’s wealth, the tax code has given them the tools to abdicate their responsibilities and, in a sense, to relocate to a tax-free version of American life—a wealth island of sorts. While millions of working Americans . . . pay substantial portions of their resources to support the expenses of the country—its social safety net, national defense, interest on the national debt, and the myriad other expenses that are needed to support the most economically developed country in the world—the individuals on wealth island are insulated from such workaday burdens by a tax system that imposes little or no tax on their most common sources of wealth: investments and inheritances. Their ability to avoid taxes in those areas allows their wealth and power to grow unabated and exponentially. The existence of these two different systems—one for people who earn money, one for people who own wealth—bears remarkable resemblance to the tax system of prerevolutionary France, in which the aristocracy was written out of the tax system, leaving the burdens of the country’s expenses to everyone else. As the French economist Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours (who later fled to America with his two sons, one of whom founded DuPont chemical company) said to the French National Assembly, “In order to become noble, it is sufficient to become rich; and to cease to pay taxes, it is sufficient to become noble. So there is only one way of escaping taxation, and that is to make a fortune.” In France, these untaxed rich were known as the Second Estate—nobility who enjoyed sweeping financial and social privileges on the basis of their wealth. As was the case then, the existence today of a class of untaxed elites signals something broken and alarming about the US economy. It also invites the question of how a country founded on principles of equality—and with a special aversion to aristocracy—could end up where it has. High tax rates suck when you’re struggling to build a comfortable life and security for retirement. I’m against them. But once you have $20 million? Or $50 million? Or $200 million?? Or a billion??? Which is nothing compared to what some Americans have. It’s this kind of inequality that leads to demagoguery and dictatorship. Cuba, Russia, and China spring to mind; likewise, Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler. Join the Patriotic Millionaires! Support the party that votes for affordable health care, against tax cuts for the ultra-rich! Have a great weekend.