Matt Ruckman

There is a number you have probably never said out loud. It is the income at which you would stop being afraid: the figure at which the low hum of financial dread, which for most of us runs day and night like a refrigerator, would finally click off. It drifts depending on the year and the city and the check engine light that has been on for a couple of weeks, but it is real, and you know yours, even if you have never written it down.

There was a stretch of the twentieth century, roughly three decades in the middle of it, when a thoroughly ordinary American paycheck could come with a surprising amount of reassurance: a union card or an employer that acted as if there were one, a house the paycheck could support, a pension that arrived on schedule, and a reasonable expectation that the children would land a little higher. For many households, this was just the deal. You went to work.

The pension has since become, for millions of workers, a personal research project called a 401(k), which is a bit like replacing the fire department with a pamphlet about fire safety.¹ The family that once got by on one paycheck now tends to need two. We have graphs for all of this (wages going flat while productivity keeps climbing; rent, tuition, and insulin heading for orbit), and we've seen them so many times that we've stopped looking, like the safety card in the seat-back pocket. Sure thing, it's stacked against us. You know where they are.

Meanwhile, at the far end of the same economy, Forbes counts 989 American billionaires with a combined fortune of about $8.4 trillion.² You could seat them in a high school gymnasium. There would be room for spouses. This is the end of the economy I want to look at: how much a handful of people can own, how that ownership keeps earning while they sleep, and what the rest of us can reasonably ask of it.

So I want to offer a different reference point. I want to measure us against a different century, a different millennium. I want to measure us against Rome.³

One man owns half a percent of America

Around the year 150, the Roman Empire held something like seventy million people under one administration. Two historians, Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen, reconstructed its economy from what survives: army payrolls, grain allowances, property requirements, the offhand sums mentioned in letters and laws. Money has always improved people's record-keeping.

Their numbers let you do something: treat an entire civilization as one big pile of stuff. Add up everything the Roman Empire owned (every farm, house, ship, and coin, plus, this being Rome, every enslaved person) and Scheidel gets something like 140 billion sesterces. The richest Romans each owned about a quarter of one percent of that pile. Now do the same thing to America. Add up everything here that is worth money, the houses and stock portfolios and factories and farmland, and the Federal Reserve gets about $169 trillion. Elon Musk, at Forbes's March 2026 estimate of $839 billion, owns about half of one percent of it. Measured against the country he lives in, the richest American is about twice as rich as the richest Romans were.⁴

Nearly two thousand years. Industrialization, antibiotics, entire university departments devoted to how an economy should work. We have invented a toothbrush that connects to the internet. And we have produced a private fortune that would make a Roman plutocrat feel inadequate, which is harder than it sounds, because Roman plutocrats kept statues of Priapus in their gardens, and Priapus was a god whose entire job description was an enormous erection.⁵

Musk is not the first American to manage this. In 1913, John D. Rockefeller was worth about $900 million, at a moment when the Census Bureau valued everything in the country at $186 billion, which gave him a little under half of one percent of America: Musk's share, near enough. He got there two years after the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil for being a monopoly, and the breakup turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. He owned a quarter of each of the thirty-four pieces, the pieces were worth far more than the whole, and his fortune roughly tripled.⁶

So is Musk the richest person, relative to his own country, who has ever lived? Probably not. Medieval England never added up its national wealth, so the comparison has to use a country's yearly income instead. Measured that way, the richest person in British history was probably Alan Rufus, a Breton cousin of William the Conqueror who was paid for his help with the Conquest in land, an almost unreasonable amount of it, from Yorkshire to East Anglia. When Alan died in 1093, his fortune equaled about seven percent of everything England earned in a year. Musk's equals a little under three percent of what America earns in a year; Rockefeller's equaled a little over two.⁷

Either way, Musk is in a very small club of people who have personally owned a noticeable slice of an entire country. The other members include a Breton warlord who was handed a large piece of Yorkshire, an oil baron whose company the federal government had to sue into pieces, and a few Romans whose fortunes survive mostly as gossip. Musk got in by building cars and rockets, which is a real improvement on the Breton method.⁸

There is one big difference between Musk and the Roman members of the club: how rich their countries are. Rome was poor in a way that is hard to picture from inside a house with a refrigerator. Most Romans lived close enough to subsistence that one bad harvest could kill them.⁹ If you had confiscated every great fortune in the empire and handed it out, you would have made a great many peasants slightly less hungry for a while, and the empire as a whole would have been exactly as poor as before, because it simply did not produce very much.

America has the opposite problem. Our economy produces about $86,000 a year for every man, woman, and child in the country, which is enough, if even a sensible fraction of it reached everybody, to cover the rent, the insulin, and the check engine light for nearly everyone. Rome could not afford to make an ordinary life safe. We can. What we have built instead, or at least alongside it, is a country where one man owns half a percent of everything and a lot of other people don't fill their tank all the way.

Rome's ranks, and ours

To set our two worlds side by side, we need to know how Rome arranged its rich, and here the Romans are almost eerily helpful, because they wrote their hierarchy into law, like first class and the folks who sit next to the bathrooms on a flight.

First, a translation, because a sesterce means nothing to anyone. It's money, their currency. A Roman legionary around this time earned 1,200 sesterces a year, so I'll count in soldiers' salaries. At the top sat the senators, about six hundred families, and to join them you needed property worth at least a million sesterces, which is 833 years of a legionary's pay. Below them came the equestrians, the knights, at least twenty thousand families, with a minimum of 400,000. Below them, spread across the towns of the provinces, came the decurions, the town councilmen whose names got carved into fountains, who usually needed about 100,000. And below them came everyone else, which was nearly everyone.

These ranks decided who could hold which offices, who sat where at the theater, and who could wear which colors. Senators wore a broad purple stripe on the tunic; knights wore a narrow one and a gold ring.¹⁰ The rich had a dress code with consequences.

The ranks were concrete enough that you could buy a friend into one. Pliny the Younger, who turns up in the table below with a fortune of about twenty million sesterces, once wrote to an old school friend who was a decurion (rich, but not private-jet rich) back home and offered him 300,000 sesterces "to make up the equestrian qualification," so that Pliny could enjoy his company "not only as a decurion, but as a Roman knight." It is the most Roman gift I can imagine: a fortune, handed over so a friend could wear a gold ring and sit in the good rows next to his billionaire friend.

Rome's ranks, and the price of getting in¹¹Each bar is the least property you could own and still belong to that rank, drawn to scale. For comparison, a Roman soldier earned 1,200 sesterces a year.

Senators · about 600 families
1,000,000 sesterces
About $300 million today, or 833 years of a soldier's pay
Wore a broad purple stripe on the tunic · got the front rows at the theater
Equestrians (the knights) · 20,000+ families
400,000 sesterces
About $120 million today, or 333 years of a soldier's pay
Wore a narrow purple stripe and a gold ring · sat in the 14 rows behind the senators
Decurions (town councilmen) · about 130,000 families
usually 100,000 sesterces
About $30 million today, or 83 years of a soldier's pay
Ran the town council · paid for things like the fountain, and got their name carved on it
Everyone else · about 17 million households
No minimum. Most lived at or near subsistence, and roughly 1 person in 10 was enslaved.

Those dollar figures need an explanation, because turning sesterces into dollars is complicated. A sesterce bought things nobody can legally buy anymore (people), couldn't buy things we consider basic (antibiotics, phones, shoelaces), and circulated in an economy whose idea of overnight delivery involved a horse. Convert through the price of wheat, or of silver, or of a day's labor, and each one gives you a different answer for what a senator was worth. The table below uses the conversion that is the most defensible: divide a fortune by what the average Roman produced in a year, then price the result at what the average American produces today. By that method, a senator's minimum of a million sesterces comes to about $300 million.

The comparison looks at fortunes, meaning net worth: everything you own minus everything you owe, including the house, the retirement account, and the business that keeps earning while its owner takes the afternoon off. The rows pair groups of roughly similar rank, from the typical family up to the richest tenth of one percent. Most Romans left no fortune for anyone to estimate, so their rows show what share of the population they were instead.¹²

What they owned¹³Net worth by rank, then and now. Roman sums are converted to today's dollars as described above.

Net worth by rank in the United States today beside Roman fortunes converted to dollars, with shares of the Roman population where no estimate of wealth survives.
Rank	United States	Rome · sesterces in parentheses
Typical	$192,900 median family Poorest quarter: $3,500	~90%, mostly peasants and laborers, at or near subsistence; no wealth estimate survives (a house in Roman Egypt: about 700) 7–13% enslaved, owning nothing (an unskilled adult: about 1,500)
Top 10%	$3.79M	The “middling,” 6–12%: craftsmen and merchants earning 2.4–10× subsistence A retiring soldier got ≈$3.6M (12,000)
Top 1%	$24.4M (excluding the top 0.1%)	Decurions and other rich families ≈$45M+ (150,000+)
Top 0.1%	$183M	Equestrians ≈$180M+ (600,000+)
Senators	$4.36M	≈$1.5B+ (5M+)
Billionaires	Average $8.5B (median $3.1B)¹⁴	Pliny the Younger ≈$6B (20M)
The richest	Musk $839B Page $257B Brin $237B	Lentulus ≈$120B (400M) Narcissus ≈$120B+ (400M+) Pallas, Seneca ≈$90B each (300M)

Read the table by rank and the middle barely moves in two thousand years. A Roman knight and a household in America's richest tenth of one percent both come out around $180 million, about 2,100 times what an average person in their society produced in a year. A retiring Roman legionary and the middle of America's wealthiest tenth both land at about $3.6 million. At those ranks, the rich stand about as far above everyone else as they did under the emperors. The ends are where everything moved. At the bottom, the typical Roman lived at subsistence and left no fortune to record, while the typical American family owns $192,900. At the top, the richest American is worth about seven of the richest Romans. Rome's senators, though, were far richer than ours. A Roman senator needed at least a million sesterces, about $300 million, just to join, and the average one was worth more than $1.5 billion. The median American senator is worth $4.36 million, twenty-five times the job's $174,000 salary. It may be the only comparison in this essay in which American politicians come off as modest. Musk's fortune grew by $4.36 million about every four and a half minutes last year.¹⁵

How few own how much¹⁶U.S. household net worth · mid-2026

Billionaires occupy the far tip of that already tiny group, and even among them the money piles up at the top: the average American billionaire is worth about $8.5 billion, the median one $3.1 billion. The biggest of these fortunes are more money than anyone could spend. Consider what it would take to spend Musk's. If he had started spending a million dollars a day in 264 BC, the year Rome first went to war with Carthage, he would be running out right about now. Except he wouldn't, because even at an ordinary 5 percent return, a fortune that size earns the million back in less than a quarter of an hour. And his has been doing far better than ordinary. In the year before Forbes's March 2026 estimate it grew by about $500 billion, or $1.4 billion a day, which means it added the median American family's entire net worth, everything that family has managed to own after decades of work, roughly every twelve seconds.¹⁷

Since a fortune like that can't be spent, it gets put to work: buying companies, newspapers, and social networks, and funding the campaigns of the people who write the tax code. That is the part of inequality the word "inequality" is too polite for.

I might as well admit that the first thing I did with the table was look for myself on it, the way you check a group photo for your own face before conceding that anyone else is in it. The result was not flattering: most of us would have been in the ninety percent living at or near subsistence. The row I kept going back to, though, was the decurions', because of what Rome expected from them.

Who pays for the fountain

A decurion was a rich man with a seat on his town council, and the seat came with a bill. He was expected to pay, out of his own pocket, for things the whole town used: a fountain, the public games, road repairs, grain when the harvest failed, a stretch of the town wall. In return, the town carved his name on whatever he paid for. Everyone could see who had given what.

I don't want to romanticize any of this. A lot of that generosity was vanity.¹⁸ What I envy is how easy it was to check. If the richest man in town had done his part, there was a fountain in the square with his name on it and water coming out. If he hadn't, everybody knew.

America answered the same question, what the rich owe the public, in 1913, and it came up with two answers in the same year. In February the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified, which allowed a federal income tax, and in October Congress passed one, with a top rate of seven percent. In between, in May, New York chartered the Rockefeller Foundation, the same year Rockefeller's fortune peaked. So within eight months, the richest man in the country had a way to give his money away with his name on it, and everyone else had a way to fund the government with nobody's name on it.¹⁹

The Romans had a formula for building inscriptions: de sua pecunia fecit, "he made this with his own money." It is still there in stone across the old empire, under the donor's name, on fountains and baths and markets. The American version is a sign at the edge of a highway construction zone. It says YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. If a billionaire's portfolio had a sign, it would say HIS OWN MONEY AT WORK, and it would stand next to a hammock on Epstein island.

Never sold, never taxed

The top federal income tax rate is 37 percent. For a single filer in 2026 it starts at $640,600 of taxable income, and above that it stops climbing, so the ten-millionth dollar of salary is taxed exactly like the 640,601st.²⁰

That sounds like a ceiling on how much the rich can be taxed, and it is for those who earn a salary. But for the very largest fortunes, the billionaires, it is mostly beside the point, because those fortunes are based on equity and asset appreciation. Not a day's work.

Picture a surgeon who earned a million dollars this year and a founder whose shares went up by a million dollars this year. They are equally richer. The surgeon owes income tax on the million in April. The founder owes nothing, because a rise in the price of shares you still own isn't taxed until you sell them, and nobody can make you sell.

The IRS's word for this is unrealized, which makes it sound as though the gain hasn't quite realized it exists. It has. It is sitting right there on the brokerage statement, and the bank can see it just fine.

The strategy that follows has a name that sounds like a law firm with a billboard on the interstate: Buy, Borrow & Die, LLP. Free consultation. Two of the three partners are available.

You buy assets and hold them, because selling would trigger a tax on the gain. When you want spending money, you borrow against them instead, which the IRS doesn't count as income, since a loan has to be paid back. The bank gets collateral, you get cash, and the sale that would have produced the tax never happens. Then, when you die, your heirs inherit the assets as though they had bought them on the day of your death, at that day's price, so all the growth that happened while you owned them is never taxed as a capital gain by anybody.²¹

While you're still alive, the real advantage is control over timing. A paycheck shows up when your employer decides, with the tax already taken out. A big enough portfolio lets its owner decide when to sell, when to borrow, and when to simply let the number grow, which is how a person can get a billion dollars richer in a year while filing a tax return that looks like a slow year at a dental practice.

Rome's decurions had to work much harder at getting out of their share. Once the later emperors made them personally cover their towns' tax shortfalls, they fled the job, into the army, the imperial civil service, or the Church, and the ones caught running could lose their property or their lives.²² America's rich don't have to run anywhere. They borrow against their shares, and the law is fine with it.

There is an American song about the other kind of borrowing. Merle Travis wrote "Sixteen Tons" in 1946, and Tennessee Ernie Ford took it to number one in 1955: a coal miner loading sixteen tons a day, getting older and deeper in debt. He owes his soul to the company store, which is where the company that pays him also sells him his food and his tools, so every payday the wage and the debt come from the same hand. Imagine if you worked at Amazon.com.

Put the song next to Buy, Borrow & Die and the same word, debt, does opposite things. The billionaire borrows against his shares so he never has to sell them and owe tax on the gain, and the interest is usually small next to what the shares gain in a year. The miner borrows from the company store to eat until payday, and on payday the store takes what he owes out of his wages first, so he starts the next week in debt again. The billionaire's loan keeps his fortune growing. The miner's loan keeps him in the mine.

The company store is back, as an app. In 2022, more than seven million American workers paid to get their wages before payday through apps their employers signed up with, and the money came out of their next paycheck. The average user did it twenty-seven times a year, at fees equal to about 110 percent annual interest.²³

Rich families stay rich

Americans put up with billionaires because of a promise: anyone can become one, even a kid born poor... supposedly. If that isn't true, the top is just inherited.

Two economists at the Bank of Italy, Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti, found records that let them test that promise across six centuries. Florence, Italy taxed its residents in 1427 and wrote down their names, and the modern city keeps tax records too. The researchers matched surnames across the gap and found that the surnames near the top in 1427 were, disproportionately, still near the top in net worth in 2011.²⁴

Six hundred years. The Medici rose and fell. The Republic collapsed. Napoleon came through, and Italy was invented around the city, and two world wars passed over it, and the same surnames kept turning up near the top.

America has its own version. The du Pont company was founded in 1802 to make gunpowder. In 2024, Forbes counted about 3,500 du Ponts sharing $18.1 billion, or about $5 million each. Even abolishing slavery didn't keep slaveholding families down for long. They lost the most wealth when the Civil War ended, and their sons had caught up with comparable families by 1900, largely by marrying each other.²⁵

Rich families pass down more than money. Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues found that children from the richest 1 percent of families are ten times as likely to become inventors as children from the poorer half. Talent explains very little of it: among the best math students in third grade, the rich kids were still far more likely to become inventors. The difference is who they grow up around: kids who grow up around inventors are far more likely to become inventors, and poor kids are less likely to grow up around any.²⁶

About 90 percent of Americans born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents. Of those born in the 1980s, about half did.²⁷ The rare kid who goes from nothing to a fortune makes the news. The half who earn less than their parents don't. This is currently America.

Catastrophe, or Congress

Rome's great fortunes did disappear, eventually. It took the end of the western empire.

In the early 400s, a historian named Olympiodorus reported that the richest senatorial families in Rome were taking in more than a ton of gold a year from their estates, about 4,000 Roman pounds, plus grain and wine worth about a third as much again. Over the next two centuries the western empire came apart around them: Rome was sacked twice, the Vandals took the senators' estates in North Africa, and Italy was fought over for much of the 500s. Rome, a city of perhaps 800,000 people around the year 400, was down to fewer than 100,000 by 593, when Pope Gregory the Great, a senator's son who had once governed the city as its prefect, asked in a sermon, "Where is the senate? Where are the people now?" The senate appears in the records one last time ten years later, acclaiming new statues of an emperor who lived in Constantinople.²⁸

The same Walter Scheidel who counted Rome's incomes later asked what had produced the biggest drops in inequality in human history, and the fall of the western empire is one of his examples. His answer comes down to four kinds of disaster: wars that draft nearly everyone, revolutions, the collapse of states, and plagues.²⁹ Destroying everything is a poor menu from which to order a more affordable apartment.

The middle of the twentieth century, the American period of stronger unions, steadier jobs, and narrower income gaps, came out of an era that included a depression and two world wars. But it also took decisions, and Congress wrote them into law. In 1935 it passed Social Security and the Wagner Act, which made it illegal to fire workers for joining a union and required employers to bargain with the one they chose. In 1944 it raised the top income tax rate to 94 percent and passed the GI Bill, which paid for school or job training for 7.8 million veterans and backed nearly 2.4 million of their home loans. The top rate was still 91 percent in 1963, eighteen years after the war ended.³⁰

Keeping it there was a choice, and the country had already tried the other one. After World War I the top rate had also been high, 77 percent in 1918. Within seven years Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, one of the richest men in America, had gotten it cut to 25 percent, and by 1928 the richest 1 percent were taking almost a quarter of all income, a record. After World War II, the rates stayed high, the unions stayed strong, and the gap stayed narrow for thirty years.³¹

The pension from the beginning of this essay is what those unions bargained for. In 1950 the autoworkers' union got General Motors to sign a five-year contract with a pension, half the cost of health insurance, and raises tied to the cost of living. Fortune called it the Treaty of Detroit, and other industries copied it.³²

The lesson I take from Scheidel is an uncomfortable one: it is very hard to change who owns what, and history's most reliable tools for doing it are horrible. I would rather take that as a reason to do it on purpose, while everyone is still around to vote. Waiting for a catastrophe to handle the negotiations requires a certain flexibility about who survives the meeting.

What a fortune owes

Essays like this one usually end by pointing at Scandinavia, and their readers have learned to stop reading at about that point. So I'll be quick, and I'll stick to the money. Norway found a less apocalyptic way to decide who owns what, and it did it by copying the billionaires. It struck oil in the North Sea in 1969, and starting in 1996 it put the government's oil money into a fund that buys stocks, bonds, and buildings around the world. The fund now owns, on average, about 1.5 percent of every listed company on Earth, Tesla included, and the government spends only about 3 percent of it a year, roughly what it earns. It's Buy, Borrow & Die, minus the borrowing and the dying. At the end of June 2026 the fund was worth about $2.3 trillion, roughly two and three-quarter Musks, or a little over $400,000 for every Norwegian.³³

Britain pumped oil out of the same sea in the same decades and spent the money as it came in, which is why it has no oil fund. Same sea, same oil, different decision. Alaska made the same decision as Norway on a smaller scale, and Alaska is not a left-wing state: it has voted Republican for president every time since 1968. Every fall it pays almost every resident a share of its oil fund.³⁴

That leaves the private fortunes. What does one like Musk's owe? My answer is the same thing the decurion's did: its share of what the whole town uses. What the whole town uses now is insurance: help when the baby arrives, when a parent gets sick, when the job ends. That's the modern Roman fountain, and it's also what lowers the number this essay started with, the income at which the dread clicks off.

This is the part of an essay where the writer is supposed to produce a policy, and I've noticed that I'm a little embarrassed to have one. Here it is anyway. Tax a fortune's gains when its owner borrows against them or dies, the way a paycheck is taxed the day it's paid. That one change would end Buy, Borrow & Die, and it would not raise the tax on a single paycheck.

The old deal had some of that: the pension, the union contract, the house the paycheck could actually cover. A household can't earn its way into that stuff alone. Somebody has to set it up, and for a few decades Americans did it together, through Congress and their unions.

When that setup falls apart, each household has to carry the risk alone, and we call that personal finance. People get a savings target, a retirement calculator, and a budgeting app. None of it can fix a country this unequal. A family can do everything the app says and still be ruined by one bad year, while a fortune at the top grows by $1.4 billion a day without anyone budgeting at all.

A line drawing of a family standing at the end of a small-town dock as an enormous superyacht with a helicopter on its top deck pulls away. The child waves goodbye while the yacht's wake rolls toward the dock.

That's why the number from the start of this essay, the income at which you would stop being afraid, depends on more than your budget. It depends on the year, the city, and the check engine light, and on what Congress passes and whether workers unionize.

When Congress passed Social Security in 1935, the country produced about an eighth as much per person as it does now.³⁵ Americans started building it anyway, by organizing, bargaining, and voting.

The hard part is making it last. Pliny the Younger, the Roman billionaire from the table, worked that out for his hometown nineteen centuries ago. He had promised the town 500,000 sesterces, about $150 million by this essay's math, to feed its children. Cash, he worried, might be squandered, so he wrote the payment into the deed of his own land: 30,000 sesterces a year to the town, forever, whoever owned the land and however they felt about it.³⁶ That's all a tax on a fortune is. It writes the town's share into the fortune, so the town doesn't have to count on a billionaire's mood.

So, is America less equal than Rome? Its richest man owns about twice the share of his country that Rome's richest men owned of theirs. Pliny wrote his taxes into his deed. America's richest pay lawyers to write theirs out.

It is named after section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code, which tells you how much love went into it. Congress added the section in 1978. Two years later a benefits consultant named Ted Benna read it aggressively enough to let ordinary employees save part of each paycheck before taxes, with a company match, and the first 401(k) plan was his own firm's. Retirement for tens of millions of Americans now rests on a creative reading of a subsection. ↩
Forbes's 2026 billionaire census counts 989 American billionaire citizens, their fortunes valued as of March 1 and adding up to $8.4 trillion. Forbes means net worth: everything they own, minus everything they owe. The gymnasium is strictly a seating plan. Please do not let them elect the school board. ↩
Full disclosure, in the spirit of an essay that is largely about disclosure: I am a white American male. I claim no exemption from the demographic's preoccupation with the Roman Empire. I would only ask that the follow-up question be what, exactly, we are thinking about. In my case: the logistics. It is always the logistics. ↩
The arithmetic, since the whole essay leans on it. In "Roman Wealth and Wealth Inequality in Comparative Perspective", a 2019 working paper, Scheidel puts the richest Romans at 300–400 million sesterces apiece (p. 10, note 43), about a quarter of a percent each of the roughly 140 billion sesterces he estimates the whole empire was worth. For the American side I took Forbes's March 1, 2026 figure for Musk, $839 billion, and divided it by the Federal Reserve's estimate of U.S. national net wealth at the end of 2025, $168.7589 trillion (Table B.1 of the March 19, 2026 release). That comes to about 0.50 percent. A caveat the economists will want noted: the Forbes and Fed figures are a few months apart, the Roman one is a careful guess built on other careful guesses, and the two totals count different things (Scheidel includes the value of enslaved people; the Fed leaves out land the government owns). I have also left the emperor out, since his finances blurred into the state's, a problem America didn't have to think about until the first half of 2025.

The same sources point the other way on the rest of the distribution, and I should say so. Scheidel's reconstruction (pp. 6–7) has Rome's richest one percent holding about half of everything; the Fed put America's richest one percent at 31.8 percent at the end of 2025 (the chart's note, below, has the breakdown). By that measure, Rome looks like the more concentrated society. The claim in the text is only about the very top: one fortune, measured against everything. ↩
Priapus was a rustic fertility god whose statues stood guard in Roman gardens, sickle raised against thieves. Wikipedia describes him, with admirable composure, as "marked by his oversized penis, and his permanent erection." Horace wrote a whole poem in the voice of one of these statues (Satires 1.8). It opens with the statue recalling that it used to be a fig trunk, and that the carpenter, "uncertain whether to carve Priapus / Or a stool, decided on the god." It ends with the statue scaring off two witches by splitting its fig-wood buttocks "with a crack as loud / As the sound of a bursting bladder," whereupon one witch drops her false teeth and the other her wig. This is the classical tradition I am working in. ↩
The $900 million is Ron Chernow's figure for the 1913 peak, from his biography Titan, and in an interview about the book he points out that the entire federal budget that year was $715 million. Rockefeller could have paid it himself and had enough left over to start a foundation, which, as it happens, he did. For the denominator, the Census Bureau estimated the country's wealth at $186,299,664,000 at the end of 1912 (Wealth, Public Debt, and Taxation: 1922, p. xii), and 900 million over 186.3 billion is about 0.48 percent. The Census was counting physical property and the Fed builds its totals differently, which is why the text says "near enough." For comparison, Bill Gates's $85 billion on the 1999 Forbes 400 came to about 0.2 percent of U.S. net wealth, which was then $41.8 trillion by the Fed's count. As for how Rockefeller got there: he was worth something like $300 million when the Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil broken up in 1911. Shares in the thirty-four successor companies went to Standard Oil's stockholders in proportion to what they already owned, which gave him about a quarter of each (Standard Oil), and then the pieces went up. Theodore Roosevelt, whose Justice Department had brought the case, reacted as follows (Chernow again): "No wonder that Wall Street's prayer now is: 'Oh Merciful Providence, give us another dissolution.'" ↩
The ranking comes from Philip Beresford and William D. Rubinstein's The Richest of the Rich: The Wealthiest 250 People in Britain since 1066 (Harriman House, 2007), which puts Alan Rufus's property at about £11,000 when he died in 1093, more than 7 percent of England's national income. (He is usually described as William's nephew. He was more likely a double second cousin, the kind of relation that takes two families marrying each other twice.) On the same yardstick, Musk's $839 billion is 2.9 percent of 2024 U.S. GDP, $29.3 trillion, and Rockefeller's $900 million was 2.3 percent of 1913 GDP, $39.5 billion (MeasuringWorth).

The dollar figures use the table's method: divide a fortune by what the average person produced in a year at the time, then multiply by what the average American produced in 2024, $86,146. In 1913 the average was about $406 a head, so Rockefeller's $900 million comes to about 2.2 million years of it, or roughly $190 billion, a little under a quarter of a Musk, a unit I'm going to keep using. Alan Rufus's 7 percent of England's income, spread over the 1.7 to 2.25 million people historians estimate for Domesday England, comes to 120,000 to 160,000 years of average output, or $10–14 billion, about one and a half percent of a Musk. Counting per person rewards a big population, which flatters twenty-first-century America and shrinks eleventh-century England; counting shares of income ignores population entirely, which does the reverse. Neither one is the true measure, and whichever you pick decides the winner, which is worth remembering the next time a list of the richest people who ever lived goes around without saying which one it picked.

By share of output, incidentally, two living non-Americans also beat Musk: Bernard Arnault and family, at $233 billion on Forbes's 2024 list, about 7.4 percent of French GDP, and Carlos Slim, at $72 billion on the 2014 list, about 5.3 percent of Mexico's (World Bank). All three men's companies sell to the whole world, so measuring any of them against one country's output flatters everyone involved. ↩
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. He didn't found Tesla, strictly speaking: Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started it in 2003, Musk led its first big funding round in 2004, and a 2009 legal settlement lets him call himself a co-founder (Tesla, Inc.). As for the help, a 2025 Washington Post analysis counted at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits going to his companies, nearly two-thirds of it promised in the previous five years. Much of that paid for real work, mostly under contracts with NASA and the Pentagon, but the timing of the first big one matters: SpaceX's first three rockets failed, the company nearly went under, and in December 2008 NASA awarded it a $1.6 billion cargo contract that kept it alive. Tesla borrowed $465 million from the Department of Energy in 2010 and repaid it in full in 2013 (Department of Energy). It has also made about $11.4 billion selling regulatory credits, which other carmakers buy because government emissions rules require them to, and for much of the past fifteen years its buyers could claim a federal tax credit of up to $7,500 per car, until the credit ended on September 30, 2025. So the public bought his launches, lent his car company money, wrote the rules that made his credits worth billions, and helped pay for his customers' cars. It did not get any shares. ↩
Alfani, Bolla, and Scheidel's "A comparison of income inequality in the Roman and Chinese Han empires" (2025) explains the subsistence ceiling and puts Rome's "inequality extraction ratio" at 69 percent. There was only so much income the elite could extract before the people doing the work stopped eating, a practical difficulty even for an employer with limited interest in morale. The ceiling only applies to income, since it is entirely possible to own nothing and keep eating. Economists call it the inequality possibility frontier, a phrase that manages to make the point at which people stop eating sound like somewhere you might open a branch office. ↩
The purple is Tyrian purple, named for Tyre, a Phoenician port in what is now Lebanon. (If, like me, you keep wanting to say Troy, blame Virgil: the Aeneid sends Aeneas, a refugee from Troy, to Carthage, a city founded by Dido, a refugee from Tyre, and has them fall in love. It's, uh, complicated.) The dye came from sea snails, several species of murex, and specifically from a small gland in each one. It took a staggering number of them: by one historian's estimate, 12,000 snails yield about 1.4 grams of dye, "enough to colour only the trim of a single garment," which is about one senator's stripe. The Greek geographer Strabo, describing Tyre, notes that its many dye-works made "the city unpleasant to live in," and also made it rich (Geography 16.2.23). Pliny the Elder (the uncle of the Pliny in the table) explains that this is the color that "distinguishes the senator from the man of equestrian rank," then wonders why anyone pays so much for it, since "the smell of it is offensive, and the colour itself is harsh, of a greenish hue, and strongly resembling that of the sea when in a tempestuous state" (Natural History 9.60). The most exclusive stripe in Rome was made of crushed snails, and it smelled like it. ↩
The household counts are Scheidel and Friesen's (Table 6), and the minimums are the standard ones: a million sesterces for senators, the level Augustus set, and 400,000 for equestrians. The decurions' 100,000 varied from town to town, but it is the figure Pliny uses in his letter to Romatius Firmus (Letters 1.19), the same letter in which he offers Firmus the other 300,000. The legionary's 1,200 sesterces a year is also Scheidel and Friesen's (note 76). For the stripes and the ring, see Wikipedia on the equites. The fourteen rows come from the lex Roscia theatralis of 67 BC, a law about who sits where at the theater, which is the most Roman category of law I know of. The household total is my own rough figure: Scheidel and Friesen's elite made up 1.2 to 1.7 percent of households, which implies 17 to 18 million households in all. Put another way, a typical town of 1,000 households had about 7 decurion families, 1 equestrian family, and no senators, and you would have had to visit about 29 towns that size to find a single senator's family (130,000 decurion families is about 7 per 1,000 households, 20,000 equestrian families about 1 per 1,000, and 600 senatorial families about 1 per 29,000). ↩
The population shares are from Scheidel and Friesen (pp. 84–85 and Table 10), who put around 90 percent of the empire at or near subsistence and a "middling" 6 to 12 percent above them, earning somewhere between 2.4 and 10 times what it took to stay alive; craftsmen and merchants are their examples (p. 72). They had to work from income, because almost nobody recorded what the poor owned, and their shares include enslaved people without separating them out. Scheidel's later paper (p. 6) estimates 5 to 8 million enslaved people out of about 65 million, or 7 to 13 percent, and prices an unskilled adult at about 1,500 sesterces. The soldier's bonus comes from Cassius Dio (55.23.1), who records the rate set in AD 5: 12,000 sesterces for a legionary after twenty years, 20,000 for a praetorian guardsman after sixteen. Scaled like the fortunes, the legionary's comes to about $3.6 million, though Scheidel and Friesen think ordinary soldiers only just reached the middling threshold (p. 84), and Scheidel notes that nobody knows how much of the bonus a veteran managed to hold on to (2019, note 16). For the cottages: 26 house sales from Roman Egypt, dated between the 60s and the 170s, average close to 700 sesterces (Scheidel 2019, note 27). The table leaves those in sesterces. Scaled like the fortunes, the house would come to about $210,000 and an enslaved person's price to about $450,000, figures that are arithmetically correct and describe nobody's life. ↩
Where the table's Roman fortunes come from, for anyone who wants to check my arithmetic, which I encourage. The three orders are Scheidel and Friesen's estimates of average wealth (Table 6 and p. 76): more than 150,000 sesterces for decurions and for the wealthy families who never joined an order, more than 600,000 for equestrians, more than 5 million for senators. The plus signs are theirs, because they give each average as a floor, and every one of those floors sits above the legal minimum for joining. Pliny the Younger's 20 million is their figure too. To get dollars, I divided each fortune by what the empire produced per person in a year (about 286 sesterces: 20 billion of output shared among 70 million people) and multiplied by what the United States produced per person in 2024, $86,146. That measures how big a fortune was next to an ordinary person's share of the economy. It says nothing about what a sesterce would buy at Costco.

The richest row starts from Scheidel's 2019 paper, which puts the largest private fortunes at 300–400 million sesterces (p. 10, note 43) without naming anybody. Scheidel and Friesen (p. 76, note 57) point to Richard Duncan-Jones's collection of the biggest known fortunes, and four reported by ancient writers land in that range: the augur Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus, 400 million (Seneca, On Benefits 2.27); Claudius's freedman Narcissus, more than 400 million (Cassius Dio 60(61).34.4); another of Claudius's freedmen, Pallas, 300 million (Tacitus, Annals 12.53); and Seneca himself, 300 million (Tacitus, Annals 13.42). All four lived about a century before the reconstruction's snapshot, and their numbers are what ancient authors heard and wrote down. Seneca's comes from a furious enemy, as Tacitus tells it, and Seneca in turn describes Lentulus as a man with an enormous fortune and very little to say. Two of the four were former slaves. ↩
Even among billionaires, the money piles up at the top. The 991 Americans in Forbes's 2026 list data hold $8.43 trillion between them, an average of about $8.5 billion each, while the one in the middle has $3.1 billion and 833 of the 991 have less than the average. The richest ten hold 30 percent of it all. The bottom half, 495 people, every one of them a billionaire, hold about 11 percent. Musk alone accounts for a tenth; take him out and the average falls by $839 million. Jeff Bezos, fourth on the list at $224 billion, owns a 417-foot sailing yacht, Koru, which comes with its own 246-foot support yacht, and when it was delivered it was only the second-largest sailing yacht in the world. The largest, 472 feet, belongs to a Russian billionaire, though Italy has had it impounded since 2022. There's always a bigger yacht. ↩
The American numbers, row by row. The median family's $192,900, the $3.79 million in the middle of the wealthiest tenth, and the poorest quarter's $3,500 are from the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances (Table 2), in 2022 dollars, with homes counted. The two top-one-percent rows are averages from the Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts for the end of 2025 (file dfa-networth-levels-detail.csv in the downloadable data): the wealthiest 0.1 percent held $25.1 trillion across 136,858 households, about $183 million each, and the rest of the top one percent held $29.7 trillion across 1,214,927 households, about $24.4 million. An average gets pulled up by a group's biggest members, and the Roman estimates are averages too, so at least both columns are flattered the same way. The senator is the median of all 100 estimates in NOTUS's March 2026 dataset; the middle two belong to Richard Durbin ($4,357,506) and Catherine Cortez Masto ($4,363,006.50). Senators disclose their assets in ranges, which is a little like answering "how old are you?" with "between thirty and fifty," and the method behind the estimates takes the midpoints, counts spouses and dependents, caps the open-ended ranges, and misses some personal assets entirely. The $174,000 is what rank-and-file members of Congress have been paid every year since 2009 (Congressional Research Service). The billionaire average is the combined $8.43 trillion of the 991 American entries in Forbes's 2026 list data divided by 991, about $8.5 billion. The median, the 496th entry, is $3.1 billion, and 833 of the 991 are worth less than the average. (Forbes's March article says there are 989 American billionaires; the downloadable list has 991; I have made my peace with the other two.) Musk, Page, and Brin are from Forbes's March 1 ranking.

On the pairing: Scheidel and Friesen count about 600 senatorial households, 20,000 or more equestrian, 130,000 decurion, and 65,000 to 130,000 other wealthy ones, together 1.2 to 1.7 percent of all Roman households (Table 6). That makes the equestrians roughly the top tenth of one percent, and puts the decurions and the other wealthy families through most of the rest of the top one and a half percent, which is how they ended up beside the Fed's top groups. The last three rows are matched by title and sheer size instead. A Roman senator sat far higher in his society than an American senator does in ours, as the table makes plain enough. ↩
From the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts (file dfa-networth-shares.csv in the downloadable data, downloaded October 2026), which run quarterly from the third quarter of 1989 through the second quarter of 2026. The chart shows the last quarter of 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020, and the latest quarter. The Fed ranks every household by net worth, homes and retirement accounts included, and splits them into five groups that add up to everybody. At the end of 2025 the wealthiest 0.1 percent held 14.6 percent of the wealth, the next 0.9 percent 17.2, the next 9 percent 36.5, the next 40 percent 29.3, and the bottom half 2.4. By the middle of 2026 the top 0.1 percent was up to 15.0 percent, the highest in the series; in 1989 it was 8.6. The bottom half's share hit its low, 0.4 percent, at the end of 2010, in the wake of the housing crash. The top 0.1 percent is about 137,000 households and the bottom half about 68 million (the household counts are in dfa-networth-levels-detail.csv, same download). Most of the top 0.1 percent are nowhere near a billion dollars; Forbes's 989 billionaires are a thin crust on top. I was tempted to divide Forbes's billionaire total by the Fed's household total, but Forbes counts people and the Fed counts households, and the answer would have been a tidy percentage with an untidy definition. ↩
The spending math: from the start of 264 BC to September 2026 is about 2,289 years, or roughly 836,000 days, and at a million dollars a day that is $836 billion, leaving about $3 billion of Musk's $839 billion. Five percent a year on $839 billion is about $42 billion, or $115 million a day, so a million dollars comes back in about twelve and a half minutes. For the actual growth, Forbes put Musk at $342 billion on its April 2025 list and at $839 billion on March 1, 2026: a gain of about $497 billion in roughly a year, or about $1.4 billion a day, roughly $16,000 a second. At that rate, the median family's $192,900 (from the Fed's 2022 survey) goes by in about twelve seconds. These are paper gains, in shares that can fall as fast as they rose, and a bad year could take back a few hundred billion dollars, which would leave him the richest person on Earth. ↩
Nor would I want anyone to leave thinking Rome invented progressive taxation. The stadium with the insurance company's name on it is a distant descendant. But at least the fountain dispensed water. ↩
The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1913. The Revenue Act of 1913, signed October 3, taxed personal income above $3,000 at 1 percent, with surtaxes that reached a top rate of 7 percent on income above $500,000, a threshold Rockefeller could clear before breakfast. The New York legislature chartered the Rockefeller Foundation on May 14, after Rockefeller's people had spent three years failing to get a federal charter out of Congress. I'm only comparing the calendar here. A foundation is a long way from a fountain, and 7 percent is a long way from anything on today's tax tables. ↩
IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, sections 4.01 and 4.14. For a single filer in 2026: 10 percent through $12,400 of taxable income, 12 percent through $50,400, 22 percent through $105,700, 24 percent through $201,775, 32 percent through $256,225, 35 percent through $640,600, and 37 percent on everything above that. Each rate applies only to the slice of income inside its band, so crossing into a higher bracket leaves the income below it exactly where it was, however much office conversation has been devoted to this imaginary financial disaster. A related trap: ProPublica found that the federal income taxes of the twenty-five wealthiest Americans came to 3.4 percent of their wealth growth over 2014–2018 (methodology). That percentage is measured against wealth growth, much of it never sold, so setting it beside a wage earner's bracket compares two fractions that happen to share a percent sign. ↩
The IRS explains capital gains, the net investment income tax, inherited-property basis, and the estate tax at whatever length you can stand. The short version: what a sale owes depends on the asset, how long you held it, and what you paid. A loan has to be paid back, so the IRS doesn't count it as income, and interest plus a falling stock price can turn the strategy from clever to ruinous fairly quickly. Most inherited assets get their basis reset, with exceptions, and a large enough estate can still owe estate tax, since the step-up forgives the capital gain and leaves that bill in place. For people who die in 2026, the IRS's filing threshold is $15 million; below it, an estate doesn't have to file an estate tax return. Death also does very little to improve the bank's willingness to forget a loan. ↩
The later, compulsory version is summarized in Wikipedia's entry on the curiales. From 284 on, "when the empire's finances demanded more draconian tax collection measures," the council seat "became an unwanted civil service position," and its holders were "expected to make up any shortfall in the local tax collection out of their own pockets." "Many curiales tried to escape by enrolling in the army, the Imperial government, or the Church," and those caught leaving could face "forfeiture of their property or even execution." Joining the clergy to get out of the town's bills is the kind of tax planning that has gone out of style. Borrowing against your shares is more comfortable. ↩
From the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's data spotlight on the paycheck advance market (July 2024). The bureau estimates that 7.2 million workers used employer-partnered products like these in 2022, drawing about $22 billion that was repaid by payroll deduction. In its sample, the average worker made 27 transactions a year at about $106 each and paid about $69 a year in fees, charged for receiving money they had already earned. The 110 percent is the bureau's illustration for a typical transaction; I should add that the real rate on any one advance depends on its fee and how many days early it comes. ↩
Barone and Mocetti, "Intergenerational mobility in the very long run: Florence 1427–2011" (2016). They match by surname, so what they find are probable descendants, with six centuries of family history unaccounted for in between. They look at wealth and at access to elite professions, both of which can travel through education and connections as easily as through a will, and the families who stayed in Florence all that time are, by definition, the ones who stayed. What persists is advantage attached to a name. The names have not supplied six hundred years of receipts. ↩
The du Pont figures are from Forbes's February 2024 ranking of America's richest families, via Business Insider. The $5 million is my own division, an average over a rough headcount, so I can't tell you how evenly it's spread. The slaveholder study is Philipp Ager, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson, "The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock" (American Economic Review, 2021); by 1940 the grandsons were ahead of comparable families in schooling and jobs. Not every dynasty lasts. When 120 of Cornelius Vanderbilt's descendants held a reunion in 1973, none of them was a millionaire (Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children). They met at Vanderbilt University, the one Vanderbilt investment that kept its value. Only 69 of the people on the first Forbes 400, in 1982, or their heirs, were still on it in 2014 (Arnott, Bernstein, and Wu). Florence measured families near the top, and a family can drop off the billionaire lists while staying there. ↩
Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen, "Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation", which links patent records to tax and school records. Their plain-language summary has the rates (8.3 inventors per 1,000 children from top-1-percent families, 0.85 per 1,000 from families below the median). It also has the evidence that exposure is what matters. Inventors tend to patent in the same narrow field as their parents, and among inventors now living in Boston, the ones who grew up in Silicon Valley tend to patent computer technology, while the ones who grew up in Minneapolis, home to many medical-device makers, tend to patent medical devices. The summary puts the whole finding more bluntly than I did: becoming an inventor in America relies on "excelling in math and science and having a rich family." By their estimate, if women, minorities, and children from low-income families invented at the same rate as white men from the richest fifth of families, the rate of innovation in America would quadruple. They call the inventors America never got "lost Einsteins." ↩
Chetty and colleagues again, "The fading American dream" (2017), comparing children's household incomes at age 30 with their parents' at the same age, adjusted for inflation. They also ran two what-ifs. If the economy had grown as fast as it did in the 1940s and '50s but kept today's lopsided distribution, about 62 percent of the 1980s children would have out-earned their parents. If today's economy had been spread more evenly across income groups, about 80 percent would have. ↩
Olympiodorus's history survives only in fragments, and Gibbon passes along his numbers in chapter 31 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: several of the richest senators drew 4,000 pounds of gold a year from their estates, and the grain and wine on top of that would have fetched about a third as much again if sold. An income of 1,000 or 1,500 pounds of gold, Gibbon adds, was "no more than adequate to the dignity of the senatorian rank," a phrase I plan to use at my next salary review. A Roman pound was about 327 grams, so 4,000 of them come to about 1.3 metric tons. Gibbon has the Vandals confiscating the senators' African estates in chapter 36. No count of Rome's people survives from these centuries, so the population figures are estimates; mine are the round numbers collected in Wikipedia's article on Rome. Gregory's question comes from his sermons on the book of Ezekiel, preached in 592 and 593 while the Lombards were besieging the city: Ubi enim senatus? ubi iam populus? The senate's last appearance, in 603, is in the register of Gregory's letters (see Wikipedia's Roman Senate). Scheidel sums up what the collapse did in a 2021 essay: "Roman power had fostered immense inequality: its collapse brought down the plutocratic ruling class, releasing the labouring masses from oppressive exploitation." ↩
Scheidel's "Inequality: Total war as a great leveller" (2019) is the short version of the argument, and it gives the Depression, the New Deal, and the reforms that kept the gaps narrow afterward their due. The big compressions of the past usually arrived with a shock attached. That is a finding about the track record; whether peaceful reform can do the same job is a separate question, and a list of catastrophes can't settle it. Wages, labor demand, taxes, public services, and who owns what all belong in the story too. ↩
The tax rates come from the Tax Policy Center's table of top marginal rates. After the war the top rate dipped to between 82 and 87 percent for five years, then went back above 90 percent from 1951 through 1963. The GI Bill numbers are the VA's own, from "Born of Controversy": 7.8 million of the 16 million World War II veterans had used its education or training benefit by the time it ended in 1956, and the VA backed nearly 2.4 million home loans from 1944 to 1952. Not every veteran got those benefits. They went out through local VA offices, banks, and colleges, which often turned Black veterans away; in 1947, of more than 3,200 VA-guaranteed home loans in thirteen Mississippi cities, two went to Black borrowers (History.com). ↩
The 77 and 25 percent come from the same Tax Policy Center table. Andrew Mellon ran the Treasury from 1921 to 1932. The top 1 percent's share of income, counting capital gains, peaked at almost 24 percent in 1928; it fell through the Depression and the war, then stayed around 8 to 10 percent, depending on whether capital gains count, from the late 1950s into the 1970s (Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez's series, figure 1 here). Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo, who gave the period its name, "The Great Compression", credit the war and the War Labor Board's wage controls with part of it, and strong demand for less-skilled workers, while the supply of educated ones was growing, with much of the rest. Union membership went from under 3 million in 1933 to about 15 million by 1948, and at its 1953 peak about a third of non-farm workers belonged to a union (Leo Troy, NBER). ↩
The pension was $125 a month, counting Social Security, and GM paid half of the health insurance for workers and their families (Reuther's Treaty of Detroit). Fortune's reporter, a young Daniel Bell, figured GM "may have paid a billion for peace," but "it got a bargain." ↩
Ekofisk, the field that started it, was discovered in December 1969. Parliament passed the law creating the fund in 1990, and the first money went in in 1996 (Norges Bank Investment Management). Norway's Ministry of Finance explains the fund and the rules around it: the state's net petroleum cash flow goes into the fund, and the budget draws on it over time in line with the expected real return, currently put at three percent. The fund's manager, Norges Bank Investment Management, valued it at 22,683 billion kroner at the end of June 2026 and says it holds, on average, 1.5 percent of all listed companies. At that day's exchange rate, 9.9068 kroner to the dollar (Federal Reserve), that comes to about $2.29 trillion, 2.73 times Musk's $839 billion; spread over Norway's 5,636,904 residents at the end of June (Statistics Norway), it is about $406,000 each. The fund held about 1.14 percent of Tesla in November 2025, when it voted against Musk's trillion-dollar pay package; the package passed anyway, with about 75 percent of the vote. Norway has a small population, a great deal of oil, and a history all its own, so pasting its fund balance into an American spreadsheet would be a thrillingly brief policy exercise. ↩
Britain's oil and gas taxes went into the general budget as they came in. The Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis puts it plainly: "there is no equivalent UK sovereign wealth fund, but just a lot of UK government debt." Alaska's voters created their fund in 1976, and the first equal dividend went out in 1982; the fund was worth $91.2 billion at the end of May 2026, about a ninth of a Musk (Our Permanent Fund). This year's dividend is $1,000 plus a $200 energy relief payment, going to nearly 600,000 Alaskans (Alaska Department of Revenue); residents qualify after a full calendar year in the state. Alaska has voted Republican for president in every election since 1968. ↩
I divided the Bureau of Economic Analysis's real GDP by its population figures, both via FRED (output, population): about $8,300 a person in 1935 and $68,800 in 2024, both in 2017 dollars, a ratio of a little over eight. Social Security became law in August 1935. ↩
Pliny explains the arrangement in a letter to a friend (Letters 7.18). Cash handed to a town, he writes, might be squandered, and land might be neglected, so he signed an estate worth more than the promised 500,000 sesterces over to the town's agent and leased it back with a permanent charge of 30,000 sesterces a year. He admits the charge made the estate worth less than it had been, and he did it anyway, because he thought the town's permanent interests outranked his own. The $150 million uses the table's conversion. His paperwork is the only part of him I'd recommend: Pliny also owned slaves, and as governor of Bithynia he had Christians executed for refusing to recant (Letters 10.96). ↩