Musk could be paid $1tn. Nvidia’s worth $5tn. Yet America’s poor are struggling to eat

‘No one should be fooled when Trump claims that prices are down and that he’s fighting hard for affordability.’ Photograph: Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

It seems like an understatement to call this the New Gilded Age. Perhaps we should instead call it the Obscenely Over-the-Top Gilded Age, considering that Tesla shareholders just approved a $1tn pay package for Elon Musk and the market value of the chipmaker Nvidia has rocketed above $5tn.

Not only that, the 10 richest billionaires in the US saw their collective wealth soar by $698bn over the past year, while Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, reportedly paid $110m for a 123-room mansion in Los Angeles to host events. And then there’s our billionaire president, who – when his family isn’t raking in tens of millions of dollars through crypto – is obsessed with building a $300m, gilded-to-the-hilt ballroom, funded by fellow billionaires.