Aspen Anti-Billionaire Society

Our position is a strong but simple one: we firmly believe that our entire economic system, and the world along with it, are doomed to fail if we dont move the money that billionaires have been squatting on. A vast majority of the exploitation and poverty that exists in the world can be tied to billionaires parking money that should be moving through the hands of Americans and out to the rest of the world. We believe that this isn’t just a problem that negatively effects the average American worker, or those less fortunate around the world, but that negatively effects all people; including you multi-millionaires out there fretting about the masses clamoring for equality.

As a working-class resident of one of the richest tiny towns on the planet, I’ve gotten plenty of insight into the lives of the 1%. While I at first resented the money that flows through this town, Ive come to realize they are hardly part of the problem. For any of the 1% out there that end up reading this imagining “theyre thinking about taking my money away again”, Im gonna say something you probably rarely ever get the pleasure of hearing: you’re too poor for us to be talking about you. And more importantly, youre just as screwed over in this as we are.

The idea for an organization came to me when I recently started looking into just where all the money went. If families back in the day could live off of one man’s income alone, where the hell did it go? Although we all know the answer inherently, moreso I have been trying to acutely visualize the problem. So lets look at some simple facts:

The median income today is roughly equivalent to the median income of 1958, so if you are just looking at raw inflation you might think people are paid on par with the value of money in 1958. The reality is that inflation does a piss poor job of showing you the whole story.

In 1958 the median household could afford everything that was needed for a family of four and then some. The 2% richest income bracket in 1958 made only $15k or more, equating to an income of around $170k today. There was only 1 billionaire at the time, J Paul Getty, who was the richest man in the world and worth the equivalent of $12B today.

Flash forward to now, the median is at a nearly inflationary equivalent point, but appx. $75k a year is hardly enough for 1 individual to live comfortably, let alone an entire family of four. This means that 50% of all households are well below what it costs for one person to have healthy finances in 2025. It also means that the majority of the richest 2% of households in 1958 would not be able to afford a comfortable cost of living of a family of four in 2025 (about $170k at its cheapest, and nearly $300k at the high end)

If that isnt a ridiculous enough statistic to show you how viciously American wages have stagnated in favor of making the rich even richer, then consider this: In 1958 child laborers were paid $1 per hour, the minimum wage at the time. Assuming that child worked 40 hours in a week, they would have made a little over $2k in the year. Relative to the GDP of the united states at the time (about $480B) that would equate to making over $1M per year today. Therefore, everyone currently making less than $1M per year (pretty much everybody) has less buying power than the average 10 year old child laborer in 1958.

With this in mind, its easier to see how inflation doesnt tell the whole story. That $1 minimum wage might equate to $12 today, which is higher than the federal minimum wage and the state minimum in about 25 states. But even if the minimum wage were brought on par with that base metric (which again was considered the appropriate wage for literal children), a person making $12/hr would have absolutely no buying power relative to a minimum wage earner back then. To be precise, it would be less than 2.5% of it.

To put it further in perspective, a household earning the median income of $5k back in the day would be the GDP-relative equivalent of making over $40M per year in 2025, even though it would be the inflationary equivalent of earning less than $75k a year.

Now, Im not an economist whatsoever. Im just a guy. And im sure there are some methodological issues with looking at wage strength relative to GDP for serious purposes. But I think doing so makes it pretty clear that we have hardly a fraction of the buying power of the average American back then. Where did all that money go? Into the bank accounts of billionaires.

Getty, the first billionaire, would have had the equivalent of an unfathomable $12B today. Elon Musk has $433B just himself, along with 249 other billionaires worldwide that can count themselves as having over $12B. Musk alone is 36x richer than how rich Getty ever was.

In total, the US today has 812 more billionaires than we had in 1958. If we capped all wealth at $12B, or the equivalent of Getty’s wealth back then, then every billionaire in the US would still have $1B-$12B, and we could immediately move the excess $5T that they have collectively been sitting on. US worker wages could be raised to a point which meets actual cost of living. Wages around the world could finally rise in step, ending crushing poverty that plagues the globe.

Even if we pegged modern billionaires to the same level of wealth relative to GDP as Getty, who was 1/481B, then no one would be allowed to be worth over $62B today.

The wool has been pulled over our eyes for decades. We have been pushed to accept the bare minimum that they could get away with, while they stuff their pockets for no functional reason. A game of numbers that creates limitless suffering around the world for the benefit of no one. All so they can feel good looking at their estimated worth in Forbes magazine. We dont deserve this, the people of the world dont deserve this. And the whole world is gonna go tits up if we dont fix it. The existence of the 0.01% comes at the cost of the rest of humanity.

While we may be able to do a lot in pointing out the problem, few of us have the means to do anything about it. We need more than just the collective action of everyday people. We need the 1% who arent billionaires on our side. We need them to see that Americans not being able to afford to live is a direct threat to their wealth. We need them to help us fight for the end of the billionaire class, whos existence only holds them back as much as it does the rest of us.

As someone already located in this town, I hope to use my position to garner the attention of the 1% visitors here, and draw it squarely on that issue. I dont know exactly what that will look like yet, and I seek the assistance of everyone who cares about this issue to help. I believe if we make these simple facts known to people they will see how unsustainable our economic system is, and just how much theyve been screwed by it. Its literally 8 Billion of us versus 250 people, or 3k people if the poor billionaires take offense. There is almost no one who shouldnt want to see this change