By Eddie McCabe
The slogan ‘Billionaires Should Not Exist’ has become popular in recent years, and it’s one that all socialists would subscribe to. It helps that so many of these ulta-wealthy individuals more and more resemble cartoonish evil villains, but the case can also be made with basic maths.
A world without billionaires would naturally be a more equal one, with the wealth they hoard – $16.1 trillion in 2025 – being shared out among the rest of us. According to Oxfam, even if the 3,000 billionaires in the world were allowed to keep $1 billion each, what’s left could end annual global poverty eight times over. These supposed ‘wealth creators’ are, therefore, directly (if not solely) responsible for the existence of poverty in the world. That alone more than justifies their abolition. But there are plenty more reasons, relating to questions of morality, democracy, economic rationality, environmental impact, and so on.
But leaving aside the problems with their very existence, let’s look at the question of whether they deserve their wealth. After all, the notion that they earned their wealth fair and square is unfortunately widely accepted.
If we take Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as an example, it would take an Amazon warehouse worker 350,000 years to make what Bezos made last year alone (2024). It could perhaps be argued that Bezos works harder than those workers, but not that much harder! So it’s not really about hard work, which gets to a crucial point. Bezos is paid as a CEO but his wealth comes from being an owner; he doesn’t earn his money by working, but by owning – in this case a company run on the hard toil of 1.5 million actual workers.
In fact, the idea of the ‘self-made’ billionaire – or millionaire – is largely a myth. And not just because most new billionaires today inherited their wealth (including all the billionaires under 30). The wealth in society is the product of collective labour by millions, indeed billions of workers, including previous generations. A tech tycoon like Bill Gates couldn’t have made his fortune if he didn’t live in a society with the economic infrastructure or the technological advancements built up socially, by countless people before he ever came along. Not to mention the political and legal systems that support capitalist ventures – by making possible the freest exploitation of workers and nature, protecting property and copyrights, and providing corporate welfare policies to boot.
Right-wingers like to think of capitalism as a ‘meritocracy’ – where everyone is on an equal footing, and those who get ahead do so on their own merits – their talent, intelligence, or sheer gumption. But as the writer George Monbiot put it: “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
The truth is that the system is rigged – through cronyism, corruption, monopoly power and other systemic imbalances. Everyone doesn’t start on an equal footing: some people have wealthy parents, live in safe neighbourhoods, go to private schools, and have well-connected networks, while others are held back by social deprivation, generational trauma, institutional racism, etc. Indeed, generally speaking, it costs a lot more to be poor than to be rich. Poor people are hit harder by price inflation, interest rate rises, tariffs and other regressive taxes, as well as economic shocks. They’re also more likely to have to rely on debt to get by, which is far more costly than relying on wages and savings.
And that’s all assuming one is fortunate enough not to be born into an economically underdeveloped country or region, as most people in the world are.
So rich people have all the advantages, which go way beyond whatever merits they may have. No one deserves to be a billionaire, nor even a multimillionaire, which is only ever possible through the exploitation, extortion, or shafting of others, or through the unearned means of inheritance.
Far from rewarding hard work, capitalism leaves most workers in perennial insecurity. Socialism, on the other hand, could genuinely reward it, and raise the living standards of all (except the billionaires), through the socialist principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”
