In 2026 – up until July – Elon Musk’s estimated wealth was growing by somewhere between $30 million and $100 million an hour, making him, at least briefly, the world's first trillionaire. By comparison, the typical American worker earns between $23 and $56 an hour.

While Musk’s wealth, even in the face of recent losses, is extreme, dramatic disparities have become commonplace. As of 2026, America had nearly 1,000 billionaires, whereas, according to the most recent federal data available, in 2024 roughly 10.6% of the population – or 35.9 million people – lived below the poverty line. The poverty line is the minimum level of income a person or family needs to be able to cover basic living needs, such as food, clothing and shelter.

Given the prevalence of such stark inequality, it would be easy to assume that most people accept it as fair – but they don’t. As a psychologist who studies how people navigate moral problems, I suspect that one major challenge to effectively reining in extreme wealth is that doing so forces people to navigate between opposing moral demands.

In 2014, researchers used survey data from more than 55,000 people across 40 countries, asking what top executives and unskilled workers earn, and what they should earn. In the U.S. the average respondent – across income levels, education and political divides – said the ideal pay ratio would be about 7-to-1. At the time it was closer to 350-to-1, meaning that on average a CEO earned 350 times more.

In other words, Americans reported that the ideal was something far more equal. Yet they have generally been unlikely to support high taxation on wealth, redistribution or limits on wealth accumulation – though recent poll data suggests this may be changing.

Scholars have offered different explanations for this disconnect between what people say they want and what they are willing to do about it.

Some argue that people chronically underestimate the scale of inequality – in the 2014 study, Americans underestimated the actual pay ratio at the time as being only 30-to-1. Others argue that the........

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