This is why a politics aimed only at billionaires will miss the mark. I support wealth taxes, and I hope Proposition 40 passes. Yet wealth taxes only claw back winnings after the fact. This year’s Forbes’ Billionaires list added 390 newcomers. Taxing Musk, Bezos, and other billionaires does not touch the executives, boards, investment funds, and political machines that keep minting new ones.
What would it mean to take aim at the root cause of inequality instead? First, we must recognize that the shareholder-primacy firm is a policy choice—the product of lobbying and lawmaking since the 1970s—and policy choices can be remade by rebuilding labor power through labor-law reform and sectoral bargaining, reviving antitrust, and getting corporate money out of politics. Early American corporate charters, after all, were granted for limited public purposes and could be revoked when abused.
It also means redesigning ownership itself. In my research on alternative corporate models, I have studied companies that are deliberately structured so that no one can extract a dynastic fortune, because the equity is legally locked to purpose. When Patagonia’s founder moved the company into a purpose trust in 2022, such extraction became impossible by design; Bosch has been majority-owned by a foundation for decades and competes ferociously. Steward ownership, employee ownership, and benefit corporations are working alternatives operating in thousands of companies around the world and address wealth concentration at its source.