Evan Osnos

Yeah.

Well, unfortunately, the best part is that it is awfully tempting.

You begin to realize just how delicious the fresh squeezed juice really is.

The worst part is that you also begin to wonder about some big questions about the democratic health, small d democratic health of the country.

So it sends you back into history in ways that can be both kind of funny and thrilling and also quite disconcerting at times.

The median billionaire, in a sense, the one that the statistics would generate if we were trying to imagine everything we know about who they are and where they come from, they would look a lot like Elon Musk.

Which is to say, he is a man in his mid-50s who made his money, in his case, on a combination of technology, inheritance,

And the sheer accumulation of giant numbers.

10 years ago, nobody in the world had $100 billion.

But today, there are more than a dozen people like that.

I mean, Elon Musk, for instance, 10 years ago, he didn't have more than $20 billion.

And today, he has around $400 billion.

So the numbers have gone through the roof.

Right now, worldwide, there are more than 3,000 billionaires.

And you see the growth most sharply in the United States.

I mean, in 1990, there were about 66 billionaires in this country.

Today, there are close to 1,000.

So it's grown by 10 or 15 times what it was just a generation ago.

I think that really even more astonishing than that simple number is that the share of wealth that's controlled by billionaires has also soared.

It used to be that the 0.1% of Americans controlled about 7% of all the wealth in the country, but today it's gone up to 18%.