William Morgan
We live in an age of unparalleled wealth, where the 30 most-valuable companies in America have seen their stock values boom by over 200 per cent in just nine years, according to the Dow Jones index.
But simultaneously to this rapid expansion of wealth at the very top one percent of society, there has been a much smaller 40 percent increase in the average worker's paycheck - an increase wiped out entirely by a similar rise in inflation over the same period.
Last week, this class divide became even more explicit when the world's richest man, Elon Musk, was offered the craziest pay deal of all time by the Tesla board, with a potential payout of a record-smashing $1 trillion if certain terms are met.
If you're at that point in the seemingly never-ending affordability crisis where you are daydreaming about expropriating the vast fortunes of various billionaires, you might be curious to know how big a windfall you could expect if the wealthiest man on Earth's assets were shared with everyone in the US.
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Yesterday, we revealed that Musk's growing fortune would work out as a relatively paltry $180.06 per person if shared with every single human on our planet.
This total was found by calculating the Tesla founder's expected new wealth through adding his promised $1tn pay packet to his already gargantuan $482.2 billion net worth, then dividing that $1.482tn sum by the 8,231,613,070 of us sharing the Earth with the owner of X.
Should the 54-year-old ultra-capitalist decide to share his crazy $1.48tn expected wealth with the entire population of the United States, however, it might not be quite the huge windfall you might be dreaming of.
Split among 348 million Americans, this wealth expropriation would net everyone about $4,259. So not quite enough for a holiday home, but a good chunk of money to treat yourselves.
In fact, this would be more than double the $2,000 stimulus check floated this week by President Trump in a bid to build public support for his tariff war, which is believed to have pulled $220 billion into federal coffers from importers since the start of the year.
However, even when using the low bar of excluding all Americans earning over $100,000, this cash bribe to the public has an associated total cost of $300 billion - so he might need to ask ally Musk to chip in a small portion of his upcoming $1tn paycheck.
To put this extraordinary sum into perspective, this will make Musk 1740 times richer than the British Royal Family ($850 million). For a US worker on a median wage ($61,984), it would take around 24 million years to earn this amount of money.
At the turn of the 19th century, when a small group of industrialists began raking in millions and billions through their control over natural resources, government institutions, and business monopolies, they were described as 'robber barons' by their contemporaries.
Barely a century after robber baron John D Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire through his control over the US oil market, Musk looks set to take on his mantle of obscene wealth.