Why the billionaire class has to go

One of the saddest aspects about the global wave of right-wing populism is how many people are in awe of the billionaires who are literally destroying our future.

Back in the age of feudal despots, lavish palaces, pomp and ceremony, the superstitious belief in the “divine right” of the rulers helped keep the masses in line.

While many of those old superstitions have worn thin, they have been replaced by the myth that the mega rich are where they are because they have brilliant minds, or have worked their way to the top.

But this myth is also wearing thinner — thanks to United States President Donald Trump’s narcissistic outbursts and the obscene growth in the wealth of the mega rich.

All that remains in the billionaire’s ideological armoury is their capacity to fund the spread of more racism, misogyny, hate and bigotry.

Hence Trump’s toxic bullying and the blatant white supremacy propagated by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, through his social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

The sheer amount of wealth accumulated by the billionaire class refutes the lie that it was earned through hard work. Oxfam estimates their combined wealth at $18.3 trillion.

This year, Musk became the first trillionaire.

If a worker somehow managed to save $50,000 a year, it would take 20 million years to get to a trillion dollars.

Great wealth only comes from exploiting others and plundering nature. The wealth of every billionaire has grown exponentially because it is used to make more and more people work for their profits.

The hidden power of the billionaire class is the collective labour and creativity of billions of working people. If all these people stopped working to make those billionaires profit, that wealth would not grow by a cent.

The combined wealth of the billionaire class rose by $2.5 trillion last year — enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over.

Instead of eradicating poverty, billionaire rule is actually sending more people into poverty.

According to the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) 2026 update of its global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), 1.2 billion people (18.9%) of the 6.3 billion people in 108 countries surveyed are now living in “acute multidimensional poverty”.

MPI measures health, education and standard of living, instead of just income levels.

Even by the World Bank’s narrower measurement of poverty based on income, globally, 826 million people (10%) still live in extreme poverty.

Poverty eradication has stalled because billionaire rule continues to impose neoliberal policies of privatisation, austerity and impossible debt repayments on the poorest countries in the world. At the same time, it is degrading and destroying the environment that people depend on for survival.

On top of that, the billionaire class has imposed permanent war on a large part of the Global South to preserve its privileges and the political and military hegemony of the powerful states that protect its interests.

Four out of five people living in extreme poverty are in ecologically devastated sub-Saharan Africa, or in other fragile and conflict-affected countries.

The world lost more than 7 million hectares of forest to deforestation last year and a further 65.4 million hectares of forest “lost ecological integrity because of human activities”, according to the Forest Declaration Assessment 2026, prepared by a coalition of civil society organisations and researchers.

The out-of-control wildfires in Indonesia, which have blanketed Southeast Asia with toxic smoke for months, burnt a further 1.92 million hectares of rainforest by the end of last month, according to satellite data.

According to Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research’s latest annual Planetary Health Check, authored by more than 60 scientists, seven of the nine “planetary boundaries” have been transgressed.

Planetary boundaries are interconnected Earth-system processes that must remain within safe limits to preserve the planet’s stability and resilience. The seven transgressed boundaries are: Climate change; change in biosphere integrity; land system change; freshwater change; modification of biogeochemical flows; introduction of novel entities; and ocean acidification.

Boris Sakschewski, the report’s lead author, warned that this means that “the risk of large-scale, persistent and potentially irreversible change is increasing, while our margin for error in tackling these problems is shrinking”.

Billionaire rule is destroying our planet and condemning billions of people to a life of war, poverty and displacement.

If you agree with Green Left that we urgently need to sweep billionaire rule — along with the divine rights of kings — into the dustbin of history, then you should become a supporter and donate to our Fighting Fund.