The rich are already adding to their wealth after Donald Trump’s election.
According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, the world’s 10 richest people got even richer on Wednesday, collectively adding $64 billion to their coffers on the day Trump captured the presidency for the second time. It’s the biggest one-day increase since Bloomberg set up the index in 2012.
The increase came from a big day on the stock market, which rallied in the hopes that Trump will decrease regulations and lower taxes. The S&P 500 had a 2.5 percent increase, the best-ever performance following an election, and the U.S. dollar also went up. The world’s richest man, Trump supporter Elon Musk, saw his net worth go up by a whopping $26.5 billion, helped by a big jump in Tesla’s stock price.
Behind Musk, Jeff Bezos’s net worth went up by $7.14 billion. Bezos infamously decided that his newspaper, The Washington Post, should refrain from making a presidential endorsement this election, and he congratulated Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” in an X post soon after the news of Trump’s win broke.
The Republican Party has always counted business leaders and executives among its main backers, and that hasn’t changed with the rise of Trump. Trump, as a business executive himself, shares their aims of fewer taxes and regulations. Naturally, this means that these executives and their companies see a chance for more profits with a new Trump administration.
Many of these plutocrats made their money from tech companies and Silicon Valley, where executives like Musk think of themselves as exceptional and see Trump as someone who will protect their wealth and status. They’ll see their gains from the past day as proof that they made the right decision, even if they foresee a future financial crisis from Trump’s agenda.
Trump’s flawed plans to institute tariffs also promise to make the rich even richer, despite the fact that prices will go up for many goods and services. However, economic metrics show that those tariffs would destroy the economy and send inflation skyrocketing. So while many billionaires today are toasting their immediate gains, tomorrow they may be lamenting what Trump has done. Historically, when business leaders have backed a fascist autocrat, it has ended up backfiring on them.
