Grown adults with regular jobs spend their free time online defending ultra rich sociopaths who would not pull over to help them change a flat tire in a rainstorm. Forty hours a week, screaming that these guys earned every penny through hard work, while ignoring tax loopholes, public subsidies, inherited fortunes, and the thousands of employees who actually keep the lights on. Nobody earns a hundred billion dollars through personal grit unless they are working twenty thousand hours a day for ten thousand years.

I understand the appeal. It is more comfortable to believe the system is a ladder than to accept that it is a lottery somebody else already rigged. If the rich earned it, then your struggle is a personal failure you can fix by waking up earlier. If they did not, you have to look at something much bigger and much less flattering.

It is more comfortable to believe the system is a ladder than to accept that it is a lottery somebody else already rigged.

Oxfam’s January 2026 report: billionaire wealth reached 18.3 trillion dollars, up sixteen percent in a single year, roughly three times the pace of the previous five year average. There are now more than three thousand billionaires. Their wealth grew by 2.5 trillion dollars in 2025 alone, which is close to what the poorest half of humanity, 4.1 billion people, owns in total.

Elon Musk became the first person to pass five hundred billion. In November his shareholders approved a pay package that could eventually reach one trillion dollars, with more than 75 percent voting in favour.

Oxfam also found that billionaires are about four thousand times more likely than the rest of us to hold political office, and that they own more than half of the world’s largest media companies. This is the part people miss when they wave it off as envy. It stopped being about consumption a long time ago. It is about who owns the microphone and who writes the rules.

It stopped being about consumption a long time ago. It is about who owns the microphone and who writes the rules.

Canada has at least 89 billionaires. The 40 richest Canadians grew their wealth by more than twenty percent last year, to roughly 550 billion dollars, which is more than the entire GDP of Finland. The wealthiest one percent of Canadians, meaning households worth about seven million dollars or more, hold roughly 1.25 trillion, close to what the bottom eighty percent of the country holds combined.

Canadians for Tax Fairness put it even more plainly. Eighty six billionaire families hold as much wealth as the 6.2 million least wealthy families in this country. A typical family in the top 0.01 percent holds about 4,041 times the wealth of a typical family in the bottom half. The Thomson family, richest in 1999 and still richest today, has roughly quintupled its fortune since 2012.

Then there is what we pay the people running the show. Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs averaged 16.2 million dollars in 2024, which is 248 times the average worker’s 65,548. By 9:23 on the morning of January 2nd, they had already earned what you will earn all year. Since 2020, CEO pay is up 49 percent. Worker pay is up 15.

And we are still the only G7 country with no inheritance tax. Preferential treatment of capital gains costs the federal government roughly 30 billion dollars a year. A modest wealth tax on fortunes above ten million could raise something like 39 billion annually. None of that is an accident or an act of God. Somebody chose it, and somebody keeps choosing it.

None of that is an accident or an act of God. Somebody chose it, and somebody keeps choosing it.

In March 2025 there were about 2.2 million visits to Canadian food banks in a single month. The highest on record. Roughly double what it was in 2019. Nineteen percent of those clients have jobs, up from twelve percent before the pandemic, which means you can work full time in this country and still need help eating. One third of the people walking through those doors are children, close to 712,000 visits by kids in one month.

Meanwhile Loblaw and George Weston agreed to pay 500 million dollars to settle claims over an industry wide bread price fixing arrangement, a settlement an Ontario judge approved last year. Bread. Not yachts. Bread.

Bread. Not yachts. Bread.

Look at what happens when a person has unlimited money and zero accountability. Reporting on Neuralink describes test monkeys dying following brain implant surgeries. There are company towns in Texas where your housing sits on your employer’s land. Business Insider reported a 250 thousand dollar settlement over a flight attendant’s harassment claim. The Wall Street Journal reported on a man recruiting women online to build what he called a legion of children, as though human genetics were a fantasy draft.

None of this is normal behaviour. We have simply agreed to call it eccentric because the person doing it is rich.

We have simply agreed to call it eccentric because the person doing it is rich.

Then the Economist interview lands. Told that a great many people loathe him, Musk snaps back that a quarter billion people follow him on X, the platform he bought for 44 billion dollars and then had rewired so his own posts get pushed into everyone’s feed. He says money will not matter by 2036 because AI and robots will make everything, and that the Treasury should, in his words, just simply issue people checks.

Sit with the gap there. A man who cannot tolerate a stranger unfollowing him is describing a future in which he decides what abundance looks like for the rest of us. They want to be seen as saviours of consciousness. They get rattled by a bad reply.

They want to be seen as saviours of consciousness. They get rattled by a bad reply.

Here is the part worth holding onto. Every number above came out of a policy decision. The inheritance tax we do not have. The capital gains treatment we do. The enforcement budget of a tax agency. The price of bread when a handful of companies control the shelf. These are choices, made by people who can be replaced.

Class solidarity cannot come soon enough. The day working people stop defending insecure oligarchs and start counting our own numbers instead of theirs will be the best day in human history.

These are choices, made by people who can be replaced.

• Oxfam International, Resisting the Rule of the Rich (January 2026)
• Oxfam Canada wealth inequality report, via BNN Bloomberg
• Canadians for Tax Fairness, The New Robber Barons
• Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives CEO pay report, via BNN Bloomberg
• Food Banks Canada, HungerCount findings
• CBC News, judge approves $500M Loblaw bread price fixing settlement
• CNN Business, Tesla shareholders approve $1 trillion pay package
• Gizmodo, coverage of the Economist interview
• CNN Business, Neuralink confirms monkey deaths in testing
• Forbes, SpaceX reportedly paid $250,000 to settle harassment claim