![[OC] The Growing Influence of America's Billionaire Class](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2wn3q61da6gf1-819x1024.png "[OC] The Growing Influence of America’s Billionaire Class")
Main data source: Forbes Billionaires Evolution (2001-2025), Penn Wharton Budget Model – June '25
Specific Data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rXspNQpluNKdXZPbEuB1Ex2fdIr6GpxPNzssTVqbHPw/edit?usp=sharing
Tool: Adobe Illustrator
Posted by DataPulse-Research
30 Comments
If you’re an average American earner you have a better life than 99.99% of all humans to ever live, including kings and queens.
Go away with this nonsense.
Wonder what happened in China for them to have such a huge rise and fall within such a short span?
Not correcting for inflation? Not sure if this is the most useful chart. It would be more interesting to see how much of a percentage of the total wealth is held by the top 0.01% or something.
The same applies to the chart at the bottom, which is now in absolute dollars instead of percentages and hence doesn’t mean much.
What is this rise of communism on reddit with sayings like billionaire class.
The value of $1 billion fell by 58% due to inflation over this time. We would expect the number of billionaires to rise even if no one in the world was getting any richer.
I welcome our billionaire overlords.
It is one thing to have people getting richer because of their ideas and business practices. It’s another to have them getting rich by buying elections and changing the rules. America is borrowing money to give to the ultra rich! The tax cuts never paid for themselves! Trickle down economics was a fairy tail.
Couple the debt with the fact that the ultra rich are deciding how we should live. The gilded age is back!
This is underselling it. People like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk have as much power as 200-400 billionaires forming a union for collective bargaining…
In terms of power, they are closer to trillionaires than billionaires.
It’s what America wants. They voted for a county controlled directly by billionaires. That’s how stupid they are
Pretty sure PPP loans also helped make Billionaires… Never really protected anyone’s paycheck
To be fair Russia has a defenestration policy that caps their number.
If the rate of billionaires is advancing far faster than the population as a whole are we heading for some strange distant dystopia where a vast population of billionaires are dependent on one individual working class person?
The statement that these plots show the influence of billionaires has absolutely zero validity. You have to be either stupid or dishonest to somehow think these two plots have anything to do with each other.
Or that somehow it is evidence for a causal relationship.
If you want to post data like this publicly at least understand what the hell you’re doing before you make a fool of yourself by posting such nonsense
Billionaire should be illegal.
Interesting topic! When I need a lot of data organized or processed, I usually scrape using tools like Webodofy. It helps automate the boring stuff so I can focus on analysis.
With any tax change the ones with the most money are always affected the most – both for tax increase and tax cuts. 1% to a billionaire is a lot more than 1% to a millionaire.
I’m not sure why this says “number of US billionaires nearly tripled since 2007” when in 2007 it looks to be around 580 and in 2025 it’s 877. That’s not even doubled.
Edit: it was pointed out that the arrow is pointing at 2020, not 2007. I think that’s bad design but at the very least the little factoid about “nearly tripled” is actually correct if you can read an x-axis.
How is “influence” represented here?
Would love to see data of billionaires per capita and best countries to live rankings. I’m worried the days will show that billionaires make countries more desirable to live in.
Using raw numbers for that bottom chart is a bit misleading. Since we have a progressive tax code, *any* blanket tax cut will naturally inflate the gains for higher earners. The real story is how it translates as a *percentage* of yearly income:
Yearly Income | Tax Cut (middle value)
:- | :-
51-93k | 1.6-0.9% (1.3%)
93-174k | 3.3-1.8% (2.6%)
174-263k | 3.3-2.2% (2.8%)
263-388k | 3.3-2.2% (2.8%)
388-988k | 5.1-2.0% (3.6%)
988-4,325k | 4.5-1.0% (2.8%)
It still favors the wealthy, which isn’t great, but it’s not nearly as skewed as the chart in the post implies.
Billionaires should not exist. You should be able to be as happy and free and celebrated as can be if you’re a millionaire, but the second you’re a billionaire you should be thrown into a volcano
Billionaires per capita is also interesting. In [this analysis](https://forbes.co.il/e/special-analysis-forbes-israel-top-of-the-countries-with-the-most-billionaires-2025-israel-among-leading-countries-in-billionaires-per-capita/) by Forbes, Sweden and Norway, both often cited as models of social democracy, strong welfare states, etc., have *higher* billionaires per capita than the US – Sweden’s per capita rate is nearly twice as high as America’s.
Why is the billionaire counting relevant? Shouldn’t the number of people in poverty be the focus? People are just assuming that billionaires are making money by making more people poor, but that’s not necessarily the case. If anything, more billionaires could be a good indicator that the country is getting more rich.
Yea I couldnt care less how many billionaires there are. Everyone is richer now compared to decades prior.
Yeah, I’d rather live in a country with fewer billionaires and fewer opportunities too
The bottom chart says income change *resulting* from the OBBB. That is misleading. It is a projection based on the changes in the law. We don’t have actual data on its effect yet.
I think an interesting point to consider is that although the US has the most billionaires on the list it’s overall population is multiple times smaller than china or India.
China has 1.42 billion people vs the US 345 million.
In other words according to this graph and those population numbers China has a billionaire rate of 1 in every 3.3 million people.
The US on the other hand has a billionaire rate of 1 in 410,000 people. The US has a billionaire per Capita rate that is 8 times higher than china. That’s a stark difference.
At the risk of being pedantic, shouldn’t the label read “Billionaires per Country by Year”?
Why do we keep seeing legislation that redistributes wealth *upward*? This chart shows low-income Americans losing income under a new bill, while the top earners see 5-figure gains. Would love to hear from anyone who can justify this kind of tax policy design.
It makes sense as you shift towards a consumer economy.
The lower the margin on a good, the more you have to sell to make a profit.
The more you have to sell to make a profit, the larger you have to be.
The larger you have to be, the more valuable you have to be.
The more valuable your company is, the wealthier your owner.
The wealthier your owner, the greater the divide between them and the non-owners.
Systemic Inequality in a Capitalist economy is derived from the logic of scale.