UBS, the giant Swiss private bank, has been tracking newcomers to the ranks of the world’s billionaire class for going on a decade now. The latest annual UBS count of the world’s new billionaires, released last November, announced a bit of history. For the first time ever, UBS noted, more people are now becoming billionaires via inheritance than through their own “entrepreneurship.”
This UBS revelation didn’t attract much public attention. But you can bet that plenty of billionaires noticed. The legitimacy of billionaire fortunes has always rested on the entrepreneurial myth our super rich invoke at every opportunity. Our brilliance, that myth goes, made us our billions. How dare any government make any move to tax away any significant chunk of our “self-made” riches!
The Biden administration has so dared, most notably by proposing a “billionaire’s tax,” a levy that would have the holders of fortunes worth over $100 million paying taxes annually on the growth in the value of their financial assets, the bedrock of billionaire wealth.
For the billionaire venture capitalist — and one-time Democrat — Marc Andreessen, that Biden tax proposal would be “the final straw.” Andreessen has since then joined the pro-Trump ranks.
But more than taxes have been driving high-tech movers and shakers to Trump. America’s tech-related fortunes all “grew to their gargantuan proportions in a remarkably permissive political environment,” notes John Naughton, a wealth analyst at the UK’s Open University.........