Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

I wrote my first post for Inequality.org, Our First Trillionaire: Only a Matter of Time, over twelve years ago. I hoped, at the time, that the post would age poorly. After all, the presence of a trillionaire on American soil would certify that we had unquestionably reached an oligarchic concentration of our nation’s wealth.

Unfortunately, that post has aged remarkably well. If anything, I now see my forecasting as too timid.

Elon Musk’s personal wealth now sits at about $750 billion. That total represents an annual average increase of 23 percent over the $60 billion Bill Gates fortune of 2013. At that rate of increase, America will boast its first trillionaire at least a decade before 2039, the year I gave CNBC writer Eric Rosenbaum in 2014 as the date our nation would most likely see its first trillionaire.

Back in 2013, I worried mightily that the absence of a reliable mechanism in America’s tax system to limit the growth rate of extreme fortunes would cause the wealth share of the richest Americans to rise to ever-higher levels. Wealth at America’s economic summit, I noted, was growing at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth, and that rapid growth was bringing a disturbing arithmetic into play.

“If the wealth of one group within a nation grows at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth,” I pointed out, “that group’s share of the aggregate wealth must increase over time. That’s a mathematical certainty. And the level of subsequent wealth concentration has no limit.”

Our country’s wealth concentration story has played out exactly that way over the past dozen........

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