Is billionaire wealth becoming more legitimate? | The Economist

So there is clearly a very big surge in anti-billionaire sentiment. >> I don't think that we should have billionaires. It is so much money in a moment of such inequality.

>> We need a tax system that truly accounts for the fact that there are people who have amassed huge wealth.

>> But what we have found is that there's a growing number of billionaires that are deriving their wealth mainly by providing genuinely useful goods and services or employing millions of people rather than by taking advantage of the system.

>> So there's a lot of anti-billionaire sentiment, but not all of it's warranted. How did you reach that conclusion?

>> The first thing to say is this bit of research was not about whether billionaires are good or bad. We're just looking at whether they're getting better or getting worse over time. And to do that, we look at where billionaires' wealth comes from. And broadly speaking, we divide the source

of their wealth into the sort of worst kind and the better kind. Now the worst kind is when someone's made a lot of money from, say for example, being in the mining industry or being in natural resources, being in casinos, that kind of thing. The kind of industry where you need political favors to get stuff done.

And we also in that bucket, we include people who've inherited um all of their or the or most of their wealth.

Then in the other bucket, we have the kind of good the good or the better billionaires. And now these are the billionaires who have made their money by creating goods and services and companies that people genuinely like and do kind of deliver some some good to the world. You can think of it as um on the

one hand, uncompetitive wealth, the heirs. And then on the other hand, the competitive billionaire wealth. So people like Taylor Swift, Lionel Messi, the founder of Uniqlo. And basically what we find is that the competitive sector is becoming more and more important over time, and the

uncompetitive sector is becoming less important over the >> So these competitive billionaires, those who have made the money for themselves, hopefully without ties or gaming the system, where have they made their money from?

>> So, it's a bunch of different sectors. You might think it was all to do with tech. Um and yes, there are a lot of um people in tech who've made billions of dollars. I mean, Elon Musk being obviously the most obvious example, but there's loads of them. But, what I found quite surprising is that actually um

the tech share of billionaire wealth is not at an all-time high. It's actually slightly lower today than it was in the early 2000s.