Gabriel Zucman

As CEO of Amazon, he didn't pay himself any wage.

As the controlling shareholder of Amazon, he instructed the company not to distribute any data

dividends, and so he didn't have any dividend income.

And then he didn't sell shares in Amazon, so he didn't realize any capital gains.

And so his taxable income was really low, even though his true economic income, his share of Amazon's profit or his wealth was really large.

So his ability to pay taxes is really large.

And so the fact that the billionaires

kind of live in their own parallel society tax-free.

Makes their wealth grow faster than the wealth of everybody else.

If he wants to spend some money, he can borrow some money at the bank.

There's a whole industry, a whole part of the financial industry that provides liquidity

to the super rich.

Well, you have to pay interest, but that's really negligible relative to whatever his true income is or what he would have to pay in tax if there was a wealth tax, for instance.

The key point is that when you're extremely rich, it's true you need a little bit of money for your own personal consumption expenditures, but your personal consumption is always only a very small fraction of your true income.

If your income is like £1 billion...

You know, maybe you can consume 10 million and that's already quite an achievement, but it's only 1% of your true income.

at least they've been very effective at preventing the necessary changes, meaning the changes to the tax system that would just make sure that they pay taxes like you and me.

And so the fact that they have no personal income tax to pay means their wealth has been growing like 10% per year on average over the last four decades, when the wealth of the average person in the world has been growing about 4% per year

on average, and why?

Because for regular people, they earn wages, they earn pension income, and they have to pay taxes on that.