A million millions
Perspectives on Immensity and Scarcity
At night, the buildings in central New York City shimmer like sunlight on the river. Likewise, for the people filling greater Downtown Detroit for the International Fireworks back in the day, or filling Constitutional Mall for Obama’s inauguration when I attended in 2009. There are one million buildings in New York City, one million attendees for the old fireworks and nearly two for Obama’s first inauguration.
How hard it is for a human being to fully, viscerally comprehend immensity. We are built to take one step at a time, during one conversation at a time. It is a thrill to connect with a single person. If we live to 100, we will only have seen 36,500 days. One million is overwhelming - exhilarating in the orderly disorder of public spaces, but beyond comprehension.
If imagining one million is hard, now try to imagine one million millions, or one trillion. That’s how many dollars America’s three wealthiest men controlled on the day of the Presidential inauguration (just eight despairingly intense, excruciatingly long, existentially bleak weeks ago). Three names pound in our skulls like gold-plated jackhammers: Musk ($434B); Bezos ($240B); Zuckerberg ($212B). You actually need to throw in France’s luxury goods king Bernard Arnault ($180B) to get to a trillion American dollars, but you get fully $66B past it - and close to one-fifth of the entirety of federal government’s annual expenditures - as of January 2025. We can’t comprehend their fortunes any better than we understand all that the federal government does for 330 million Americans and billions more people on earth.
At the end of 2024, Forbes detailed the accelerating fortunes of America’s richest men. What a rollercoaster ride they are on, but the rails under that ride are the backs of tens of millions of human beings from whom they extract blood, sweat and tears. I mean that indirectly, in terms of the public policies they reshape around their own interests, including the American political system itself at this point. But I also mean that directly in terms of lost income, health care and public services for those of us in the respective marketplaces of these billionaire behemoths.
Consider the hundreds of billions of profits that the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic added to their respective fortunes. This came at the expense of small businesses as well as governmental relief expenditures. Only four of the top 30 wealthiest on the Forbes list ranked high on Forbes’ philanthropy scale. 26 of America’s richest persons (- I think there was a woman in there, offered because I’m confused about when misgendering is now illegal and when it’s now mandated -) do not think about the world they live in beyond extracting wealth from it. They sit atop the commons, not within it.
You would need to build the U.S.’ entire world class interstate highway system twenty times to reach one million miles, but the Empire State Building itself contains ten million bricks. We drive highways one mile at a time, so the system seems an incredibly vast place to get lost in, thinking of my empty thousand-mile drive from the Badlands of North Dakota to Detroit when I took my niece out west for her graduation. Because we experience the skyscraper’s bricks as one transcendent icon of hope and will, the component bricks actually disappear from our view. This is the case for the hundreds of thousands of laborers, masons, welders and other tradespersons who risked their lives building each of the skyscrapers that make Manhattan so mesmerizing across the entire globe.
The Bloomberg Billionaire Index recorded Musk at the highest ever valuation, $486B, on December 17. Half of a trillion dollars, under the thumb of one human being - or at least, one person. Does he work one million times harder than those of us affluent people who are worth only $486,000? Is he one million times smarter? I won’t even ask the ratio of his needs to our’s, because human need apparently matters nothing in legitimacy debates anymore.
If we divided the wealth of these few richest men evenly, we could have one million additional people each holding $1 million in wealth. Every state in what used to be a union could have an average of 20,000 more millionaires than it has right now (- I say average, meaning weighted per population; no electoral college injustices here).
Those 20,000 millionaires could be hiring 20,000 teams of home improvement contractors or small business employees or charitable service workers, based on their respective investments in their respective home communities. They could be supporting 20,000 ecosystems of people who are then supporting a multiplier of that in households. All of those people could afford to pay taxes without spurring a subset of people to decry that penniless people aren’t paying their “fair share.”
The economic impact of an additional one million people deploying their reasonable sums of wealth for life experiences would be visible, impactful, and not off-shored in neighborhood sized yachts. The great cities’ history of concentrated “Robber Baron” wealth mirrors this: Henry Ford in Detroit, Carnegie in Homestead / Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt in New York, and Rockefeller in Cleveland, all left vast impoverishment and toxic land in their wake. Then, Carnegie funded 2500 libraries (1600 in the U.S.). The health of our communities, which is the nucleus of our national culture, depends on the distribution of the wealth we all generated.
As a little girl, I watched the Beverly Hillbillies ride their Texas Tea all the way to Beverly Hills and answered the proverbial “If I had a million $” with the idea of buying homes there for my neighbors. I assumed based on how the affluent treated the hillbillies in the show that all affluent enclaves were full of racist people who needed a dose of humanity that eastside Detroiters would provide. I also assumed that the upper crust would actually interact with next door neighbors, and have the opportunity to grow, which may be the more dubious of the ideas.
Even then I understood the atomization caused by concentrated wealth. My city gave its rivers and land completely to big business, only to be abandoned to ruins for greener “greenfield” pastures. I know that today’s billionaires are built on collectivism in the pooling of societal resources for their easy extraction. Walmart drives suppliers to cut their own wages just the way Musk is now eliminating his own regulators in his siege through the federal government. But it’s a fluke if a billionaire happens to have a concept of a greater good.
So isn’t it the billionaires who are the problem now? We have to overcome our awe of their immense fortunes in order to deal with this.
America’s 330 million people overwhelm the riverfront, New York cityscape and national Constitutional Mall in an existential way. We are each human beings trying to find opportunities to become our best selves in this limited time on earth. We are seeking one million moments of bliss and offering one billion acts of duty and kindness in return. We are the reason all of it matters.