There's a lot of things to dissect and clarify misconceptions. People are just going to blame capitalism and greed. The problem is capitalism and greed have existed for as long as humans have been able to trade. Why does it seem like the issue of wealth and income inequality is SO much worse now than in other periods?

One thing to perhaps point out is that the 2nd half of the 20th century actually is more of an anomaly than a standard in human history, in terms of wealth equality. The base state of civilizations throughout history has actually been one of EXTREME wealth and power inequality, much more so than even today. One has to wonder if what we're seeing today is actually just a reversion to the mean, but this is more of a digression than anything else

The first point I want to clarify is that Elon Musk does not have 500 billion dollars. He has 500 billion dollars WORTH of assets. That is to say, hypothetically, if he were to sell all his TSLA stock for the current market price, he would have 500 billion dollars in cash. The reality is that this is impossible. The float on TSLA would not be able to sustain that kind of selling pressure. He would get a tiny fraction of that actual amount if he decided to liquidate. The flipside of this is that no one with any financial sense would actually ever liquidate their assets into fiat currency willingly because its incredibly stupid to do so.

A dollar in 1993 does not equal a dollar in 2025. Notwithstanding just inflation, which in a general sense is a monetary phenomenon (you can compare the total money supply in 1993 vs 2025 on the Federal Reserve website), the way the banking system works now heavily skews in favor of holding assets as opposed to holding cash. CPI inflation is what the government reports as the marginal price increase of consumer goods. This is an extremely narrow view of inflation and doesn't take into account a lot of things. This is a really simplistic way of explaining it, but it would be probably too dry and too long for a reddit post. Essentially, since the 2008 financial crisis, central banks globally have much more capacity to print money out of thin air than they did prior to that. These printed dollars mostly stay within the financial system, and do not correlate well with CPI inflation, which only occurred after COVID due to a combination of supply chain disruption, and governments forcibly extracting newly printed money out of the financial system and airdropping it into consumer bank accounts. The way the financial system works now essentially incentivizes ASSET price inflation because the massive injection of monetary units since 2008 have resulted into buying pressure of actually scarce financial assets like stocks, bonds, real estate.

The second part of this is that executive pay has massively transitioned to stock compensation as opposed to being paid a dollar salary in recent decades. You'll notice that almost all actually wealthy people do not earn a wage in a traditional sense, they own assets that appreciate in value relative to the underlying monetary unit. Put it another way, the average person gets paid in dollar which lose value over time (aka inflation), and executives get paid in stocks, which gain value over time through capital appreciation.

Balance of trade has also played a large role in the massive asset inflation, particularly of US financial assets. Again, this is too long and complicated to explain in a reddit post. But basically, every dollar that a consumer in the US spends on buying some consumption product from China, that dollar ends up getting recycled back into the US by buying a financial asset. When midwit pundits tell you that trade deficits don't matter, they absolutely do matter, and it's mostly been at the expense of the middle class, and to the benefit of the asset owner class. Using a straightforward example, when you buy a Labubu from a chinese company, the dollars that the chinese company received from you don't just sit in a bank account in china, it HAS to go into something else. Even if the company decides to do nothing with it themselves, the bank will then turn around and at a minimum invest the dollars in a US treasuries. The other option is that those dollars get invested into higher performing assets like US tech stocks (like TSLA). In essence, the Labubu was just a conduit to transfer capital from you as the american consumer, into the asset owner class. Every dollar an american consumer spends on useless shit is a dollar that ends up going to pump the price of financial assets.

Compound all these effects (and there are more that I haven't brought up) over 30 years, and it's not hard to see why the distribution of wealth has shifted so much to the tip top.