Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become. — Arthur Schopenhauer
In the final days of the Roman Empire the elite dined in excess, feasting on delicacies while the streets outside filled with the hungry and desperate. The empire was crumbling, but within the palace walls the illusion of invincibility remained intact. The rulers believed they had outsmarted history—that they could hoard, extract, and exploit indefinitely without consequence.
Sound familiar?
Flash forward to a cold January morning in Washington, D.C., during the second inauguration of President Donald Trump. A photograph circulates online: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X), standing together—titans of industry, rulers of the digital age. The caption under the viral photo reads: “We need to change what we teach in business schools.”
The implication? That we’ve trained a generation of business leaders to prioritize profit over people, and personal accumulation over impact.
But here’s the twist: These men aren’t products of business school.
Zuckerberg studied psychology and computer science before dropping out of Harvard.
Bezos studied electrical engineering and computer science.
Musk has degrees in physics and economics.
Only Sundar Pichai holds an MBA.
So if business schools aren’t to blame, what is?
It’s our culture.
We celebrate billionaires like athletes, track their wealth like a scoreboard, and treat exponential accumulation as the ultimate marker of success. We’ve built a system that rewards hoarding—one that lionizes those who amass wealth while treating those who demand fair wages as naïve or entitled.
And what does that system look like in numbers?
As of 2025, the combined net worth of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Musk was more than $890 billion—this number exceeds the annual GDP of 179 individual countries. That means only 16 nations on Earth generate more economic output in an entire year than these four individuals have amassed in personal wealth.
If that doesn’t make you pause, consider this: In 1965, the average CEO made 20 times more than their lowest-paid employee. By 2021, that gap had exploded to 399-to-1.
To put it another way, before the CEO has finished their morning coffee, they have already made a frontline worker’s annual salary.
If this feels unsustainable, that’s because it is.
What If We Did Things Differently?
Dr. Bronner’s, the family-owned soap company, took a radically different approach. Instead of funneling millions into executive compensation, they set a strict 5-to-1 pay ratio—meaning the highest-paid executive could never make more than five times the lowest-paid full-time worker.
That means if the lowest-paid employee earns $40,000 a year, the CEO earns no more than $200,000. Compare that to the 264-to-1 average in the S&P 500 where there is no cap on executive pay—because the people setting the salaries are also the ones benefiting from them.
At Dr. Bronner’s, that difference—millions of dollars that would have gone to executives—is instead funneled into making the world better.
They invest in fair wages.
They fund climate justice initiatives.
They actively contribute to causes that matter to their employees and consumers.
And guess what? They’re thriving. Their ethical business model has created an army of loyal customers who trust them—not just for their products, but for their principles.
The justification for extreme wealth accumulation hinges on one powerful myth: scarcity.
There isn’t enough to go around.
If wages increase, businesses will collapse.
If we tax billionaires, innovation will die.
If we don’t reward CEOs with record salaries, the best talent will go elsewhere.
But is that really true?
The world’s total wealth is $454.4 trillion. The top 1% controls nearly half of it—$208.3 trillion—while the bottom 52.5% holds just 1.2% ($5.3 trillion).
The money exists. The resources exist. But the system is designed to keep them concentrated at the top. And the percentage given to the top keeps expanding.
The truth is, when companies claim they can’t afford to pay fair wages or invest in sustainability, it’s not a matter of money—it’s a matter of priorities.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that when inequality reaches a breaking point, change becomes inevitable.
So the real question isn’t if the system will change, but who will have the courage to change it, and what’s stopping us from building something better right now?
