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A century ago, royal families held crowns. For some strange reason Kings and Queens still exist today, In a supposedly rational, democratic world, crowns should be relics, but the system keeps monarchs around because they make inherited power seem traditional rather than predatory !

But today we have also the new royals, about one hundred dynasties of families whose fortunes stretch across oil fields, banks, tech platforms, and retail empires wield a quieter, but no less absolute, power. They do not command armies. They command accountants, lawyers, lobbyists, and media empires. Their strength lies not in overthrowing governments but in reshaping them, invisibly, until entire nations mistake oligarchy for democracy.

How they play the system


From the Waltons in Arkansas to the Mars family, the Kochs, the Ambanis in India, the Quandts in Germany, the Bettencourts in France, the Lee dynasty in South Korea, the Al Nahyans in Abu Dhabi — the list is long but finite. Roughly one hundred families sit at the heart of today’s oligarchic order. Collectively, they control trillions. Collectively, they have written tax codes, trade rules, and labor laws that preserve their grip.

The architecture of impunity
Leaks from Panama, Paradise, and Pandora Papers made it clear: offshore secrecy is not a loophole. It is infrastructure. Law firms from Panama to Zurich, accountants in London, and banks in New York build mirrored worlds where money is both everywhere and nowhere. Ordinary citizens cannot enter. Politicians rarely challenge it, because their own campaigns depend on it.

The human cost
In Greece, austerity hollowed out hospitals and schools while shipping families paid virtually nothing in taxes. In the U.S., billionaires’ pandemic tax breaks coincided with mass evictions. In Africa, mining royalties were siphoned offshore while local communities drank poisoned water. Every line in an offshore trust deed has a cost — measured in closed wards, unpaid teachers, and poisoned rivers.

The laundering of legitimacy
Philanthropy is the modern confessional. A dynasty funds an art museum wing or a global health initiative. The donation wins headlines and tax write-offs. But the power remains untouched. Sometimes the very money that closed a hospital is recycled into the nameplate above its replacement wing.

The reckoning
The TikTok video above of “ 100 families” is probably right in number and right in spirit. The truth is actually grimmer: about one hundred dynasties have captured democracy not with tanks, but with tax codes and shell companies. They have built an invisible crown, shared among them, passed silently from generation to generation and the whole planet, more than 8 billion people most of them living with scraps are OK with this.

So I have to ask: in a world where billionaires already play kings without crowns, why do we still bow to the ones who wear them? Why do we cheer for monarchs who inherit palaces while we inherit debt, precarity, and silence? Haven’t we had enough of crowns and dynasties, of bloodlines and backroom empires, of living as subjects instead of citizens? The pageantry is a distraction; the slavery is real. The time has come to wake up, tear off the invisible crown, and choose a future where no family, royal or billionaire, owns the destiny of billions. Maybe it is time for the 8 billion to wake up and claim the life they want.

You don’t really understand what a billion is.
None of us do.
Not because we’re stupid, but because we were never meant to.

The human brain evolved to keep track of faces in a village. Maybe food stores for the winter. Maybe the number of goats you own. But once you get past a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, the mental circuitry short-circuits. The numbers blur. Scale breaks.

Now think about this, which easier to understand:

A million seconds? That’s 12 days.
A billion seconds? That’s 31 years.

Let it land.
Not a metaphor. Not exaggeration. Just math.

So when you hear someone is worth a billion dollars, remember:
That’s thirty-one years’ worth of seconds—but in money.
Now imagine what one person could do with that.
Now imagine ten people hoarding that.
Now imagine 400 of them, and you begin to understand the spell we’re under.

We throw the word “billionaire” around like it’s a badge of genius.
But it’s not genius. It’s gravitational collapse.

A billionaire isn’t just a rich person.
They are a system malfunction.
An organism that grew so large it began consuming everything around it—land, time, resources, attention, labor, politics, imagination.

The scale is so broken we don’t even blink anymore.
We scroll past headlines that say someone made three billion this quarter, and we just keep scrolling.
No alarm bell rings.

But if we could feel what a billion really is, we would riot.

Let’s break it down. Slowly.

  • If you spent a thousand dollars a day, every single day, it would take you 2,740 years to spend a billion.
  • If you gave someone one dollar every second, it would take 31 years to finish the handout.

And yet, one person can “make” that in a year and still ask their employees to skip lunch breaks.

Does that feel right to you?

We’re not talking about envy.
This isn’t about “rich people are bad.”
It’s about numbers that no longer belong in a sane society and a healthy planet

A billionaire isn’t someone who worked harder.
They’re someone who figured out how to bend the rules, extract value, avoid tax, and accumulate faster than time can flow.

They don’t run businesses. They run pipelines.
And what flows through those pipelines is your time, your rent, your data, your exhaustion.

That’s not prosperity.
That’s a pyramid.
And you’re at the base.

We’ve been hypnotized.
Taught to look at billionaires the way peasants once looked at kings—mystified, reverent, hopeful that maybe they’ll bless us with a job or a tweet.

But kings at least had to fake divine right.
Billionaires just need a hoodie and a TED talk.

The worst part?
We defend them.
We say, “They earned it.”
As if it’s even possible to earn a billion dollars in a world where nurses work double shifts to afford rent.

You don’t earn a billion.
You extract it.

Here’s the trick:
The system keeps you chasing survival so you don’t have time to question the scoreboard.
But the scoreboard is rigged.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

A billion dollars is not success.
It’s the proof that the game wasn’t meant for most of us to win.

So what now?

You don’t need to hate billionaires.
But you do need to stop worshipping them.

Don’t build your dreams in their image.
Force governments to build systems where wealth flows instead of accumulates.
Where no one hoards lifetimes.
Where no one wins alone.

You are not broken for struggling.
Our world is broken for making that normal.

And maybe that’s the real revolution.
Not rage. Not envy.
But clarity.

Clarity that starts with one strange, sticky truth:

A billion seconds is thirty-one years.
Now ask yourself—how many lifetimes is one billion dollars?

Image via @freepic

In a world of unprecedented wealth, millions still struggle to meet their basic needs. The richest individuals amass fortunes so vast they could single-handedly end world hunger—and still remain billionaires. Yet, we are told this is the best system we have.

At what point does extreme wealth stop being a mark of achievement and start being a sign of systemic failure?

This is not just an economic question—it is a moral one, a political one. It is about democracy, justice, and what kind of society we want to live in.

The Myth of the “Self-Made” Billionaire

The idea of the self-made billionaire is one of the most enduring myths of modern capitalism. The narrative suggests that through sheer determination, talent, and hard work, individuals ascend to extraordinary wealth. But no billionaire builds an empire alone.

Wealth of this magnitude is rarely the result of individual effort. It is a product of systems—of labor, resources, tax structures, and often, exploitation. The fortunes of figures like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are not just testaments to innovation but also to the underpaid workforce that enables them, to tax loopholes that preserve their fortunes, and to monopolistic practices that stifle competition.

Amazon, for example, did not become a trillion-dollar company solely because of Bezos’s business acumen. It did so because hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers labor under grueling conditions for wages that often leave them dependent on government assistance. It did so because of aggressive tax avoidance strategies and anti-competitive behavior.

This is not the free market rewarding innovation. It is a system tilted in favor of those who already hold power.

The Concentration of Wealth in a World of Scarcity

A billion dollars is an almost incomprehensible sum. If a person earned $50,000 a year, it would take 20,000 years to reach $1 billion. Yet some individuals have amassed fortunes that stretch into the hundreds of billions.

The world’s top 10 billionaires control more wealth than entire nations and many of them are soon to become trillionaires. Meanwhile, half of humanity lives on less than $6.85 a day. The cost to end world hunger is estimated at around $330 billion per year—less than half the combined wealth of the five richest individuals.

Despite this, there is a persistent claim that there simply isn’t enough money to provide universal healthcare, eliminate student debt, or address housing crises. But the issue is not a lack of resources—it is how those resources are distributed.

Extreme wealth is not just excessive; it is extractive. It represents money that is not circulating in the economy, not increasing wages, not funding education or infrastructure. It is money sitting in offshore accounts, in private investment funds, in assets that serve only the ultra-wealthy.

Billionaires and the Corrosion of Democracy

Extreme wealth is not just an economic problem. It is a political one.

Billionaires do not simply accumulate money—they accumulate power. Their wealth allows them to influence elections, shape policies, and control industries in ways that undermine democracy.

They fund campaigns, ensuring that politicians remain loyal to their interests. They lobby for tax cuts and deregulation, securing policies that further entrench their wealth. They own media outlets, shaping public opinion and discourse. In some cases, they even own the platforms on which political debates unfold, as seen with Elon Musk’s control of Twitter (now X), Zuckerberg Meta network etc

This is not democracy in action. It is a form of oligarchy, where a small elite wields outsized influence over the political system, often at the expense of the majority.

Philanthropy is Not the Answer

Faced with criticism, billionaires often point to their philanthropy as evidence that their wealth benefits society. Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, and others have donated billions to causes ranging from global health to education. But philanthropy is not a substitute for systemic change.

Most billionaire philanthropy operates within a framework that preserves power rather than redistributes it. Many charitable foundations serve as tax shelters, and money laundering, allowing billionaires to avoid taxation while controlling how and where money is spent. Unlike public spending, which is determined democratically, billionaire philanthropy is governed by individual preference.

A billionaire’s decision to fund climate initiatives or medical research is not the same as a government enacting policies that address these issues at scale. Private charity cannot replace progressive taxation, labor protections, or wealth redistribution.

A World Without Billionaires

Critics argue that eliminating billionaires would stifle innovation and ambition. But the question is not whether individuals should be allowed to succeed. It is whether any single person should be allowed to accumulate more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes while millions go without basic necessities.

A society without billionaires would not be one without prosperity. It would be one where excess wealth is reinvested into the economy, where public services are properly funded, where opportunity is not concentrated in the hands of a few.

What might such a system look like?

  • A wealth cap: After a certain threshold—say, $999 million—any additional wealth is taxed at near 100 percent and reinvested in public goods.
  • Higher progressive taxation: In the mid-20th century, the United States taxed the wealthiest Americans at rates as high as 90 percent. The economy thrived.
  • Breaking up monopolies: Tech giants, media conglomerates, and financial institutions should not be allowed to consolidate unchecked power.
  • Universal basic services: Healthcare, education, and housing should be rights, not privileges determined by market forces.

None of these measures would prevent innovation or economic growth. What they would do is ensure that prosperity is shared rather than hoarded.

Throughout history, societies that allowed wealth to concentrate in the hands of a few—while the many suffered—have faced dire consequences.

From the fall of Rome to the French Revolution to the Gilded Age, extreme inequality has always led to instability.

The world is once again at a crossroads. The rise of trillionaires is not a sign of progress. It is a warning sign, a signal that the system is failing the vast majority while rewarding a select few.

If billionaires exist, it is because policy choices allow them to. The question is whether societies will continue to tolerate a system that produces such extreme disparities—or whether they will choose to build something fairer, more sustainable, and more just.

Because the true measure of a society is not how many billionaires it creates.It is how many people it lifts out of struggle.

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