Callum Williams

speaker

79 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Callum Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · For bucks’ sake: the rise of self-made billionaires · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

What you can see is that there's a bunch of people who founded tech companies in like the 80s or 90s or 2000s who were billionaires back then, but have become way richer in recent years because the value of their company has just gone up a lot.

So that's another thing that's going on.

And then the other thing I think is mobile-first internet.

What you can see in our data is that the competitive share of billionaire wealth starts to really inflect upwards from the middle of the 2010s.

And that, perhaps not by coincidence, is the time when global phone usage really took off.

And what phones basically allowed people and businesses to do was to scale an idea incredibly fast.

So you think of companies like ByteDance in China or Spotify or Stripe.

These are companies that went from zero to 100 very, very fast.

So that's another reason why we have so many self-made billionaires coming to the market.

So I say a few things.

One is, if you look at the most egregious forms of billionaire accumulation, those clearly are becoming less powerful.

So for example, if you consider billionaires in post-Soviet Russia,

they are perhaps 20% less wealthy than they were at their peak in the late 2000s.

We have clear progress.

There's still a huge amount of wealth that's been accumulated illegitimately, but it is less than it was.

Then there's the question of, are people taking advantage of poor competition policy or screwing over their suppliers or whatever?

And that is really a question that pertains to the economy at large rather than just the billionaires.

I think the evidence is unclear as to whether the global economy has become meaningfully less competitive over the past 20 years.

And then you have the question of taxes, which again is a subject of a lot of debate.

My read of the evidence, at least in the US, which has the best data on this, is that billionaires do pay a large share of their income

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