In Plato’s Laws, he suggests that no citizen of a well-governed city should be able to acquire more than four times as much wealth as any other. When such extremes of inequality are allowed, he thought, communal bonds suffer. Eventually, it would start to feel like there were two cities — one for the rich and another for the poor.

I thought about that when I saw the news last week that the initial public offering (IPO) for Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, has officially made Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

To update an example I used in a Jacobin article three years ago to illustrate how absurd it is that we even have billionaires, imagine a vampire who came to the New World with Christopher Columbus in 1492. Every day from the moment he landed on Hispaniola to the present, the vampire somehow managed to earn or steal the equivalent of one million 2026 American dollars. The vampire just stacks the money in coffins, so he isn’t earning any interest and none of it ever gets spent. In this example, the vampire would become a billionaire in 1495 — just three years. But it would take him almost 2,740 years to become a trillionaire. That would happen sometime in the forty-third century. In 2026, he wouldn’t even be a fifth of the way there.