Great Wealth Doesn’t Need To Lead to Great Inequality
And history proves it not always did
Somewhere in Hawaii, there’s a cow enjoying macadamia nuts and organically brewed beer right now.
That cow and the rest of its herd belong to the billionaire CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg’s Ko’olau ranch, one of several projects he started after acquiring 1,600 acres of the Hawaiian island Kauai. Even the macadamia nuts the cattle are fed are grown on the island, too. ‘Each cow eats 5,000–10,000 pounds of food each year, so that’s a lot of acres of macadamia trees,’ Zuckerberg (or one of his assistants) writes.
In recent years, building gigantic compounds on large swathes of remote land or privately owned islands — and not just in Hawaii — has become something of a new status symbol among the uber-wealthy elites.
In the meantime, though, global wealth inequality only keeps rising.
Since 2020, the world’s five wealthiest men — including Zuckerberg — have more than doubled their fortunes to £688 billion ($869 billion), while the world’s poorest 60% — nearly 5 billion people — have gotten poorer. The latest global estimates also suggest that almost 10% of the world’s population lives on less than $2.15 a day, which is the extreme poverty line.
