Forty-three of the 400 richest Americans listed by Forbes in 2018 were born in 20 countries on six continents: eight from Israel, including Micky Arison, head of Miami-based Carnival Cruises and the Miami Heat; four from Hungary, including George Soros, the nemesis of conservatives; and from India and Taiwan. Two each came from Canada. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, who lived for some years in apartheid South Africa, came from Germany. Sergey Brin, a founder of Google, is from Russia. Elon Musk of Tesla fame spent his early years in South Africa also during apartheid before relocating to Canada.

One each came from Argentina: real estate magnate Jorge Perez, another Miamian. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox, is from Australia. Others came from China, Korea, Pakistan, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

But the majority of billionaires are home-grown. Eight of the 10 wealthiest Americans, according to Forbes, made their fortunes in technology: Musk, whose companies include X, the former Twitter; Brin; Jeff Bezos, of Amazon; Larry Ellison, Oracle; Larry Page, Alphabet/Google; Bill Gates, Microsoft; Mark Zuckerberg, Meta/Facebook; and Steve Balmer, Microsoft. The other two are investor Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway and entrepreneur Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg LP.

Overall, the country’s richest people are less than one percent of the population. The wealth of 10 percent of Americans averages $6.9 million and, cumulatively, they account for 67 percent of total household wealth, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis by Ana Hernandez Ken and Lowell R. Ricketts. The average wealth of 50 percent of Americans is $51,000, which accounts for only 2.5 percent of overall household wealth.

African American families own about 23 cents on the average for every $1 owned by European Americans; for Latino Americans, it is even lower, at 19 cents.

Also, there is a correlation between education and wealth. Families headed by someone with some college education but not a four-year degree have 30 cents for every $1 for families headed by a four-year college graduate. For families headed by someone with only a high school diploma, it is 22 cents; for those without a diploma, it is nine cents.

There is an inherent advantage that some of the wealthy enjoy: an economy which historically has been skewed towards European Americans. Their ancestors benefited from capitalism based on the free labor of enslaved Africans and, later, their cheap labor, and that of immigrants, especially Latinos.

And, as President Barack Obama remarked to the wealthy more than 10 years ago: “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

And while the average American has traditionally struggled to pay for groceries and the rent, billionaires’ wealth continues to expand substantially. Hugh Cameron, writing in Newsweek, cited the Bloomberg Billionaires Index to report that those in technology have seen increases totaling $730 billion. They include Musk, the world’s richest person, $222 billion for a total of $451 billion as of December 24. The others are Zuckerberg ($84 billion), Nvidia founder Jensen Huang ($77.9 billion), Bezos ($67 billion), Ellison ($67 billion), Michael Dell, Dell Technologies ($46.6 billion), Page ($46.1 billion), and Brin ($42.2 billion). The heirs to the Walmart fortunes also experienced large increases: Jim ($39.6 billion) and Alice ($39 billion).

The combination of taxpayer-subsidized infrastructure and generational capital has created a class system, although the rich tend to see it as the difference between those who generate wealth and those who seek to live off it because they are too lazy to work hard enough to become rich.

Some of the financial elites donate to charities, others pursue causes dear to them, such as support for Israel. But some splurge on super-luxury yachts and huge mansions – especially in tax-friendly Florida – and paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some billionaires have been investing in bunkers or trying to figure out how to find an alternative home world in space in anticipation of a flight from possible mass extinction through war or climate catastrophe. Douglas Rushkoff, in his book “Survival of the Richest,” an excerpt of which was published in The Guardian, called them “catastrophizing billionaires.”

According to Rushkoff, “they have succumbed to a mindset where ‘winning’ means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning enough money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust. … Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquest would be to render the word itself unlivable for everyone else.”

According to Rushkoff, “Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about one thing: escape from the rest of us.”

There is also a foreign dimension to this story, as Tim Murphy reported in a detailed Mother Jones story about Russian oligarchs and their interconnection with America’s wealthy class and the financial institutions that facilitate the sheltering of hundreds of billions of dollars from taxes and official scrutiny.

“The spoils of Russia and other countries flowed to the United States not just because of its stability but because the American political and financial system put up a big flashing sign inviting the world’s wealth hoarders to come and stay a while,” Murphy wrote. “Here, they could achieve near-total anonymity if they purchased real estate in cash or routed the transaction through a shell company or a trust—which were increasingly based in decidedly onshore US jurisdictions such as Wyoming and South Dakota. In New York and Miami, gleaming new high-rises sat empty; a penthouse, for the asset-hoarding class, was not a home but a different kind of bank. This great transnational wealth transfer was eased along by the booming, multitrillion-dollar American private-investment industry.”

Murphy noted, as Obama had done, that the barons of the “information economy” did not make their fortunes purely on technology because it, too, “is built on natural resources in the traditional sense. Track the supply chains to their end and you’ll find workers toiling in mines and power plants burning coal to keep the server farms running. Behind the rise of artificial intelligence is an underclass of ‘ghosts’ workers, filtering abusive content out of chatbots for a few bucks an hour.”

That may not be exactly the situation in the U.S. but there is exploitation here as well.

Hannah Levintova, writing in Mother Jones, cited the example of Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone. In 2021, he bought a 44,000-square-foot mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, containing 22 bedrooms and 13 full bathrooms, along with a seven-bedroom guesthouse. He also bought a nearby residence containing 15 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms and a six-car garage. The two properties together cost $43 million.

The source of Schwartzman’s wealth includes Blackstone’s practice of buying up distressed homes on the cheap and selling them at a large profit, especially during the Great Recession and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, Levintova reported. In 2021 and 2022, Blackstone bought 200,000 housing units “at bargain basement interest rates, more than doubling its rental inventory and making Blackstone the nation’s largest corporate landlord.” So, money made from buying up and re-selling distressed homes is financing a rich man’s mansion.

Such scenarios are unlikely to change soon. As the proverb highlighted in the title of Season 1, Episode 4, of “Star Trek: Discovery” points out, “The butcher’s knife cares not for the lamb’s cry.”