What Elon Musk reaching trillionaire status says about America
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What does Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire reveal about American opportunity?
Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire is the kind of milestone that says something about making it in America. After all, this is a country that's long celebrated outsized success, but it's impossible to ignore that this moment arrives when many working Americans say simply affording a home feels out of reach. What happens when the promise of opportunity becomes less certain in a country built on the idea of opportunity? Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, July 24th, 2026. For a look at what happens to faith in democratic institutions as unprecedented wealth becomes more concentrated, I'm joined by Susan Stokes, the Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy.
So good to have you here, Susan. Thank you. It's lovely to be here, Dana. The trillionaire headline is striking, but is the bigger story about the reality of staggering economic success challenging the legitimacy of democracy? At what point does extraordinary wealth become a political issue rather than just an economic one?
So there's a phenomenon around the world, which we call democratic erosion or democratic backsliding, where people elect a prime minister or a president who then undermines their own democracies, badmouthing the press, undermining the independence of the courts, and undermining confidence in elections and so on. And those kinds of leaders are more prone to be elected, more prone to be in power in democracies where income is very, very polarized, very unequal.
The scale of private power is off the charts. When private fortunes become large enough to shape markets and public policy, how should democracies think about accountability?
It's hard to have accountability when there are, in reality, people whose wealth is so vast that they can protect themselves from accountability. Of course, if they commit crimes, it's always the possibility that they will be prosecuted and so forth. But the reality is that Great wealth tends to translate into protection, a lack of accountability. 20 or 25 of the most wealthy individuals have the wealth at the equivalent of half of the American population. So that's an enormous level of income inequality. The level of income inequality in the United States today makes us look much more like Brazil than France.
I want to stick with that. I think it's important that we don't start and stop with Elon Musk and looking at what the current distribution of wealth in America actually looks like and just how wide is the gap, not only between the wealthy and the rest of us, but the wealthy, the middle class, and then those struggling to get by.
Those gaps are wide and they've become wider. And again, this is not just the U.S., the wealth gaps. which we generally measure with something called the Gini Index, those wealth gaps have grown since about the 1980s in many advanced industrial countries. But the gaps have become more gaping in the U.S. than in many other countries because, in part, we do less to use our tax system and social policy to close those gaps. So it's harder and harder for people to see their way A lot of Americans just barely getting by to even a sort of stable middle class existence, much less thinking about moving from the middle class to a kind of affluent class. And unfortunately, the impact of the very wealthy on democratic politics, it goes in different directions.
But many of the very wealthy are somewhat hostile toward inclusion, toward participation, people who they view as much less confident than themselves and are sometimes openly hostile toward democracy itself.
Susan, when distinguishing between inequality backed by data and people's perceptions of fairness, how important is it that we believe the system gives ordinary people an honest chance at getting ahead?
It's very important. And of course, those two things sort of go together. That is, if you live in a place where the gaps are really, really large and you're sort of on the bottom of...
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