Workers Over Billionaires: Why we will strike on May 1
Extreme wealth inequality is incompatible with democracy.
As of January 2026, the United States had around 934 billionaires, the most of any country in the world. (China is second with a paltry 450.) They include Elon Musk (net worth $778 billion), Jeff Bezos of Amazon ($268 billion), Mark Zuckerberg of Meta ($230 billion), and Larry Ellison of Oracle ($210 billion). (The World’s Real-Time Billionaires from Forbes)
Here they are at Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025, along with some other obscenely wealthy people:
How is it that these very wealthy people got front row seats at the inauguration of an American president? They threw some money Trump’s way, of course. And when billionaires “donate” money, they aren’t necessarily being charitable; they are making investments that they expect will make them richer, more powerful, and more influential.
For example:
Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to the Inauguration Fund, so I guess he expected a pretty good seat (and he got one). He also got a 3.5% federal tax rate for Meta from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, paying $13.7 billion LESS than he would have under what is supposed to be a 21% corporate tax rate.
Jeff Bezos donated $1 million to the Inauguration Fund and paid $40 million to license the streaming rights for the documentary about Melania Trump. Purely by coincidence, he got an 87% drop in Amazon’s tax bill courtesy of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Political Action Committee (PAC) associated with Elon Musk’s SpaceX donated $276,275,595 (more than one quarter of a BILLION dollars) to Trump’s presidential campaign, and Musk was permitted to run amok through our government for several months in 2025; the damage he and his DOGE Bros did will take years, maybe decades to undo.
Larry Ellison and his son David have their fingers in so many Trump-adjacent pies that there is not room to list them all here, but it’s worth noting that in November 2020 Larry Ellison sat in on a conference call to strategize about how to contest the results of the 2020 presidential election. His family is also building a Trump-friendly media empire, and Ellison is a 15% owner of TikTok which maybe doesn’t sound like that much until you realize the access he will have to user data, which is priceless.
Donald Trump is a president for billionaires, and has himself added more than $4 billion to his net worth since becoming president. (That’s as of Jan. 2026. It is probably more by now.)
Check this out —> What does one billion dollars look like.com
Meanwhile the wealth gap between the richest people in America and the rest of us schmucks continues to widen, with the wealthiest 1% holding assets equivalent to those held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.
If this were illustrated by representing the U.S. population as a group of 100 people and the total wealth as approximately 100 chairs:
1 person would sit on 32 chairs.
The next 9 people would share 29 chairs.
The remaining 90 people would have to squeeze onto the last 31 chairs.
And among those 90 people, the poorest 50 would likely be fighting over just 5 chairs. (Disclosure: Gemini AI helped me with this thought experiment.)
But we the people are not powerless, and a very good way to assert the power of the people is to withhold our labor and our spending.
Obviously a one-day strike is not going to bring down the billionaire class or the Trump regime overnight, but a strike of any duration is flexing the muscle that we are going to have to continue to strengthen. So on May 1, 2026, join with many others across the nation and pledge not to work, to attend school, or to shop. And it will be a start.
And please join us on May 1 for a film about wealth inequality, and what we can do about it. Admission is free!
This short video presented by Robert Reich describes how economic populism could be the way to rebalance the economy to work for the many, not the few.
For fun (kind of), here is another way to think about billions and trillions:
Imagine that you are paid $1 per second, and you work 24/7.
It would take you 11.5 days to earn a million dollars.
It would take 31.7 years to earn a billion.
To earn a trillion dollars, you would have to work 24/7 for 31,688 YEARS.
—> The cost of the war on Iran at day 12 (mid-March) was $16.5 billion, equivalent to the labor of someone working for $1 per second for 522 years and 311 days.
—> Elon Musk’s wealth is equivalent to someone working for $1 per second 24/7 for 24,653 years and 121 days.
—> The U.S. national debt is $38.9 trillion. Our 24/7 $1 per second laborer would have to work for 1,233,480 years to pay that off.
Prefer to make a one-time contribution?
where is PAY PAL option ?