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 in which 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. A stock market rally would soon push him back over the top and bring his cohort up with him.
The rise in Musk’s extraordinary wealth – up from about $28bn in 2020 to now close to $1tn – was cemented by SpaceX’s stock market listing. More millionaires and billionaires will be minted in the coming months as SpaceX’s share sale is followed by offerings from AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.
The US is home to 989 billionaires. They owned more than $9.2tn in wealth in 2026, up 31.8% since 2025, according to a report by Americans for Tax Fairness.
And as the billionaires’ wealth has soared, workers in the US are falling behind.
In 2025, US workers took their smallest share of gross domestic product on record since 1947, falling to 53.8% of GDP in the third quarter.
The US inflation rate hit 4.2% in May 2026, wiping out 3.4% in wage growth for the past year.
About 45% of all workers in the US, 66 million, make less than $25 an hour, while a living wage required to support oneself, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, for a single individual adult with no dependents, exceeds $25 an hour in most of the largest metro areas.
As wages have lagged behind inflation and productivity, workers have turned to debt to try to fill the gap; US credit card debt hit a record high in the fourth quarter of 2025 at $1.277tn, a 63% increase since the first quarter of 2021.
Rubio, who has worked as a security officer in the San Francisco area for the past four years, has consistently had to work as many as three jobs simultaneously and lived out of his car due to high housing costs.
“I haven’t been able to get ahead working one job,” said Rubio. “Your life is working and we don’t have anything to show for it. There’s no savings, there’s no retirement plan. I can’t even afford to buy a house.
“I don’t think [Musk] hitting that milestone really affected anybody in a positive way, other than himself,” Rubio said. “I don’t think that he’s really looking at the little people and seeing what the little people that are helping him get to these levels are going through financially.”
Though he makes $25 an hour, he hasn’t received a raise in years, and his salary is still far below the living wage for a single adult with no dependents in the San Francisco area, of more than $30 an hour.
“I’ve actually had to live in my car just to be able to get by and pay bills,” he added. He has an apartment now, but added: “I’m never home. If I am home, it’s two hours just to get a change of clothes, shower and get back on the road.”
Ordeñana, the Manhattan bartender, makes a little more than $11 an hour plus tips, but she notes the tips fluctuate greatly and are unreliable, so she often takes on temporary jobs on the side to compensate for the lulls in gratuities she receives.
“I can’t afford air conditioning, so this will be my second summer without AC,” said Ordeñana. “I’m 43 now, so I’ve been working full-time since I was 15, and I just don’t see our economy getting any better.”
‘We’re not making enough to pay rent’
The sight of Musk and other mega-wealthy individuals getting ever richer is concerning for her future, she said.
“The fact that the rich keep getting richer for no good reason is really, really, really disgusting to me. It worries me a lot. I don’t even know if I’m going to have social security to retire,” she said. “We all need an affordable life. We all need to be able to invest, to save, to have money for our family, to have time for our families, to be able to take off a day or two.”
The ascent of the super-wealthy is facing backlash. Alongside the California vote, worker advocates see opportunities for change as public sentiment sours on AI and the plutocrats.
Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, a national group that advocates for increasing wages for restaurant and service workers, said the surge in wealth inequality has resulted in a surge in the work around increasing minimum wages.
“I’ve never experienced this kind of explosive campaign growth over the last year as I have in 20 years, 25 years of organizing,” said Jayaraman. She said support for wage rises was crossing party lines. “We are feeling real urgency to have a bold, inspiring vision around affordability, around wages in particular, and then to deliver on it.”
Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkley, said it was unclear when or if a tipping point is reached at which democracy becomes oligarchy.
“Is it when the wealth of the ultrarich exceeds 50% of GDP, as in the US today? 100%? 200%? When they own not 80% of privately held media, but 100%?” he said. “Nobody knows the exact concentration of wealth at which the kinds of plutocratic collapse we have seen in history becomes inevitable. The best we can do is study history and keep a close eye on developments around the globe in order to form an opinion.”
For Cienna Pangan, a barista and shift supervisor for four years at a Starbucks in Chicago, the tension between average workers’ wages and the super-rich is not just about plutocratic tech lords.
Pangan points out there is a stark contrast between the struggle many workers experience and CEO pay. The median pay for a Starbucks worker in 2024 was $14,674, compared with CEO Brian Niccol’s compensation of $97.8m the same year.
CEO pay grew 20 times faster than the average worker’s pay in 2025, according to an analysis from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation,
“We aren’t making enough to pay for groceries, we’re not making enough to pay rent,” said Pangan, whose Starbucks store recently unionized, joining more than 700 locations that have won union elections. “I think it’s really disgusting to see the huge disparity.
“It’s been really hard to see myself and my co-workers struggle just to get by,” Pangan added. “Meanwhile, Brian Niccol commutes to work with the company’s private jet, and I know Starbucks isn’t alone in that – that’s happening everywhere around the country with all these corporations.”
For Daniel Mandell, emeritus professor of history at Truman State University, the national debate over tech plutocrats’ wealth could signal change and is a reminder of the US’s founding principles.
“Will the current awareness of the dangers of this yawning economic chasm, spotlighted by the outrageous behavior of ‘tech bros’ like Elon Musk with his $1tn, lead to policy changes? I hope so,” said Mandell. “The US’s foundational democratic ideal included the warning that great wealth, especially in politics, was toxic for the republic, and that one of the duties of our government is to prevent that evil.”
Starbucks and SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
