In December, I argued that calls to “tax the billionaires” stop well short of the real problem. The billionaire is not a moral aberration or a failure of regulation. The billionaire is the logical outcome of capitalism itself. That argument dealt with redistribution and its limits. This article follows directly from it, because even where people accept that inequality has gone too far, a deeper myth still goes largely unchallenged: the idea that billionaires are wealth creators, that their fortunes are justified because without them there would be no jobs, no innovation, no prosperity.
This belief is not just misleading. It is ideological.
Billionaires do not create wealth. They hoard it. More precisely, they appropriate it. Their fortunes are built on the systematic transfer of value from those who work to those who own. They do not generate prosperity for society; they capture a growing share of what society already produces. In material terms, they are not wealth creators at all. They are poverty creators.
Ireland offers a clear example. According to Oxfam, just eleven billionaires now own as much wealth as the poorest eighty-five per cent of adults in the state. In a small country, this is not a marginal statistic. It tells us something fundamental about how the economy is structured. No serious person can believe that eleven individuals have personally contributed more labour, skill, or social usefulness than millions of others combined. That explanation collapses the moment it is stated plainly.
Wealth at this scale is not earned. It cannot be. Even on generous assumptions, a worker on a median income would need tens of thousands of years to accumulate a billion euro, and that assumes they never pay rent, never raise children, never live. In reality, it would take hundreds of thousands of years. Billionaire wealth is therefore not income from work. It is income from ownership. It is the legal right to claim a share of what others produce, year after year, without doing the work themselves.
This is not a distortion of capitalism. It is capitalism functioning as it is supposed to function.
Under capitalism, production is social. Workers collectively create value across workplaces, sectors, and global supply chains. But ownership is private. Those who own firms, land, financial assets, and intellectual property control the surplus created by others. The more ownership concentrates, the more extreme this transfer becomes. Wealth accumulates at the top, while insecurity spreads below. This is not an accident or a policy error. It is the normal outcome of a system organised around private accumulation.
At this point, defenders of the system usually retreat to familiar claims. We are told billionaires create jobs. But jobs exist because society needs goods and services, because workers apply their labour using shared infrastructure, skills, and technology. Capital hires labour when it is profitable to do so, not because owners are benevolent or socially minded. When profits fall, jobs disappear, regardless of how necessary the work is. The power to create or destroy jobs is not evidence of contribution. It is evidence of control.
We are told billionaires take risks. But risk in capitalism is not evenly distributed. Workers risk their livelihoods, their health, their housing, and their futures. Capital risks money it can afford to lose, often insulated by state support, legal protections, and public bailouts. When firms fail, workers pay first. When profits flow, owners take the surplus. Risk is socialised downward, while reward is captured upward.
We are told billionaires drive innovation. But innovation is overwhelmingly social. It depends on publicly funded education, publicly funded research, state infrastructure, and generations of accumulated knowledge. Even the most celebrated private technologies rely on state investment at every stage of development. Private ownership does not create innovation. It encloses it, monetises it, and restricts it to what is profitable rather than what is socially useful.
Once this is understood, the relationship between extreme wealth and poverty becomes clearer. Billionaire fortunes grow through low wages, high rents, privatised services, monopolies, financial speculation, and global supply chains built on cheap labour. Every increase at the top corresponds to pressure elsewhere in the system: longer hours, higher bills, weaker services, greater insecurity. This is not coincidence. It is how accumulation works.
Exploitation today does not stop at the workplace. It extends into housing, energy, transport, healthcare, and communications. When essential services are privatised, people pay not just for the service itself but for profit margins, dividends, and executive pay. This is rent extraction, not wealth creation. It is wealth transferred from society to owners simply because they control access to what people need to live.
This is why taxation alone cannot solve the problem. Wealth taxes may claw back a portion of accumulated assets, but they leave ownership intact. Ownership is power. It determines what is produced, where investment flows, which jobs exist, and whose needs matter. As long as ownership remains private, inequality will regenerate, no matter how often it is trimmed back.
In Ireland, this limit is particularly stark. The state’s economic model depends on accommodating capital, not disciplining it. Profits are protected because they underpin the system itself. Any serious challenge to accumulation runs into the realities of dependency, capital mobility, and political resistance from those who benefit most. This is why reform repeatedly stalls. The structure reasserts itself.
The billionaire, then, is not an exception to capitalism. They are its most concentrated expression. Their wealth does not arise from extraordinary personal effort or social usefulness, but from their position within a system that separates those who work from those who own. Capitalism grants control over production, investment, and resources to a minority, and it is that control which allows wealth to accumulate at one pole while insecurity spreads at the other. What appears as individual success is, in reality, the outcome of a social relation that channels the product of collective labour into private hands.
To celebrate billionaires as role models is therefore to accept the rules of that system. It is to accept that millions must depend on wages, debt, and rising costs, while a tiny minority command assets, income streams, and political influence far beyond any democratic accountability. Inequality does not emerge here by accident or excess. It deepens because the system is organised to produce it.
The problem facing society is not a shortage of wealth. It is that wealth is produced socially but claimed privately. Workers create value together, using shared infrastructure, shared knowledge, and shared natural resources. Yet ownership of the results is restricted to those who control capital. As long as that arrangement remains intact, extreme wealth will continue to concentrate, and poverty will continue to expand alongside it.
In this sense, capitalism is not broken. It is operating according to its own logic. The growth of billionaire fortunes is not evidence of success, innovation, or efficiency. It is evidence that the system is functioning exactly as designed.
The real question is not whether we can tolerate this outcome, but how long we are expected to treat it as natural, inevitable, or worthy of admiration.
