As billionaires’ wealth soars, US workers struggle: ‘The rich keep getting richer for no good reason’

The day that Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire , Gilberto Rubio, a security officer in the San Francisco area, said he was thinking about how to cut back on meals to save money. Jessica Ordeñana, a bartender in midtown Manhattan, was worrying about air conditioning ahead of a heatwave because she can’t afford her soaring electricity bills. Ordeñana and Rubio are just two of the millions of workers in the US struggling to make ends meet in an economy where inflation has wiped out recent gains in wage growth and consumer confidence is at an all-time low, even as wealth has surged for the ultrarich. On Thursday, California’s controversial billionaire tax measure officially made it to the ballot after an expensive and hard-fought campaign that saw some of the world’s richest people pour millions into efforts to derail the effort. That fight will now continue until November’s general election, with Silicon Valley expected to spend even more money to prevent the measure from passing. The wealthiest 0.00001%, about 20 individuals, hold wealth equal to 12% of the US’s gross domestic output, according to data compiled by the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, about four times greater than levels seen during the gilded age. Musk lost his trillionaire status on Wednesday. It dipped below the threshold as investors soured on AI. But he has still added $327bn to his fortune in the last 12 months alone. …