I have some tremendous news to share: we've just won a decisive victory against Mark Zuckerberg and the Silicon Valley billionaires 🧵 Together with my colleague Emmanuel Saez, we’ve spent years working alongside California's civil society to make the 200 Silicon Valley billionaires—including Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel—pay their fair share.

Today, they have just lost a crucial battle.

J’ai une immense bonne nouvelle à vous annoncer: nous venons de remporter une victoire décisive face à Mark Zuckerberg et aux milliardaires de la Silicon Valley 🧵 Avec mon collègue Emmanuel Saez, cela fait des années que nous travaillons avec la société civile californienne pour imposer les 200 milliardaires de la Silicon Valley comme Mark Zuckerberg ou Peter Thiel.

Aujourd’hui, ils viennent de perdre une manche cruciale.

Alors que les canicules s’intensifient, pourquoi le gouvernement a-t-il divisé par trois le Fonds vert destiné à l’adaptation des territoires au changement climatique ? 🧵 Pour le comprendre, il faut se plonger dans le budget de la France.

Objectiver les choix structurants qui ont été réalisés et qui nous conduisent à cette situation édifiante.

Thank you SO MUCH for making my new book a UK bestseller.

Leaders in the UK and around the world can no longer ignore extreme wealth and the danger it poses to our democracies. 🧵 The explosion of billionaire wealth has been one of the defining features of our time.

Globally, billionaires used to own wealth equivalent to 3% of world GDP in the 1980s.

Today: 17% of world GDP.

And the upsurge is accelerating.

Those who celebrate @elonmusk's $1 trillion fortune need to be reminded of a simple and vital truth:

That there is a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy. Extreme wealth is always an extreme power:

The power to stifle competition.

The power to shape public discourse.

The power to influence policymaking.

The power to buy elections.

New research: we have studied the wealth of the 200 Californian billionaires and what they effectively pay in tax.

From Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) to Sergei Brin and Larry Page (Alphabet), the results are edifying. 🧵

nytimes.com/interactive/20… Since 1982, the wealth of California’s billionaire class – the top 0.0002% – has been multiplied by 30.

It has grown by 144% between 2023 and 2025 only.

California’s billionaires now own $2.3 trillion in wealth, equivalent to 50% of California’s GDP and about 10% of California’s total wealth.

Hello @JeffBezos, since you question the results of our studies on the unfairness of the US tax system, please allow me to remind you of the main conclusions of our work, the most comprehensive research to date on this issue.

https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/2057148900763385950

Your claim that the top 1% pays 40% of taxes and the bottom 50% only 3% is misleading:

It captures just one tax – the federal income tax – and ignores all the rest: payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise duties, etc., many of which are regressive.

Une très bonne nouvelle nous vient de Barcelone :

L’alliance internationale contre les forces oligarchiques se renforce.🧵

J’ai eu l’honneur de rencontrer ce week-end à Barcelone une douzaine de chefs d’Etat, réunis à l’initiative de Pedro Sanchez pour un sommet de défense de la démocratie :

Lula, Cyril Ramaphosa, Claudia Sheinbaum, Sanchez et de nombreux autres.

With global oligarchy on the rise, we need a new cross-border alliance to defend democracy.

Thanks @NYCMayor for joining the international push for a 2% minimum tax on billionaires! 🧵
As I explained in New York yesterday, we need to forge an international coalition to develop and implement the new rules – like this unavoidable minimum tax on the ultra-rich – that will allow democratic forces to win out over oligarchic ones.

Bonjour @PPouyanne, j’ai été très surpris par ce communiqué qui affirme que TotalEnergies ne délocalise pas ses profits dans des paradis fiscaux.

Dans ce moment grave, les citoyens méritent de la clarté : qui profite de la guerre ? Et en utilisant quels mécanismes ? 🧵

https://twitter.com/TotalEnergiesPR/status/2041510290773115058

Pour y voir plus clair, je me suis plongé dans votre comptabilité.

Depuis 2022 vous publiez une ventilation de vos activités et de vos impôts pays par pays.

Mais c’est un travail de détective qu’il faut effectuer, car votre utilisation des paradis fiscaux y est doctement escamotée.

Regardons tout cela ensemble.

Forbes just released its latest annual ranking of global billionaires.

The pace at which extreme wealth is rising is simply staggering:

The wealth of global billionaires now reaches the equivalent of 17% of world GDP. 🧵 What this means is that if billionaires (about 3.000 households) spent all their wealth, they could buy 17% of everything that is produced in a given year globally.

In 1987 – the first year of the Forbes billionaire list – this number was 3%.

Affaire Epstein :

Comme souvent quand il s’agit des ultra-riches contemporains, les sociétés écran sont au coeur da la toile tissée par l’Américain

Pourquoi ? Quelles fonctions ces entités remplissent-elles véritablement ? 🧵 Un example pour commencer :

Selon les documents consultés par Mediapart, la fille de l’ancien ministre Jack Lang a fondé une société offshore domiciliée dans les îles vierges avec Epstein

Ayant passé de longues années à étudier ces entités, laissez moi vous expliquer leur rôle

"The US is strong, Europe is weak"

You hear it everywhere: in the US national defense strategy, in speeches by Trump, Bessent, Lutnick, etc., in Davos this week.

You hear it everywhere but it's a myth.

The US has not grown faster than Europe since 2010, not by one iota. 🧵 In a previous thread I focused on US growth

Growth has slowed down a lot since 1980 & even more so since 2010

GDP is rising, but that's largely because the US population is growing:

National income per adult has increased only 1.1% a year since 2010

https://x.com/gabriel_zucman/status/2013715708471812561

We hear it all the time:

Since the turn of the 2010s, thanks to the rise of tech, the US has pulled ahead economically.

This idea is everywhere from Washington to Davos—and it's paralyzing Europe

But it's simply not true!

Let's look at what's really happening, with charts🧵 I’m going to focus on the most basic macroeconomic statistics of the US.

The numbers are taken from the official national accounts of the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Everything is in the open for everyone to see, and straightforward to compute.

In 1910, the richest 0.00001% households in the U.S. owned wealth equivalent to 4% of U.S. national income.

Today: 12%.

The wealth and power of the super-rich now far exceeds its Gilded Age peak

gzucman.substack.com/p/standing-up-… These series update and extend those presented in Figure 3 of this paper:


And express the wealth of the top 0.00001% as a fraction of total US national income (as opposed to total US household wealth)gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2021J…

When the EU caved in to Trump on trade in July, many of us warned that this type of extorsion never stops

Now Trump threatens 10% (25% in June) tariffs on 8 European countries opposing a US takeover of Greenland

It is time to unleash a radical response:

Tariffs for oligarchs🧵 The European response to Trump so far – sending ~10 soldiers to Greenland – has been pitiful.

Any serious response has to be in the economic sphere, where the EU has a lot of power: a market of 450 million consumers.

It’s official and it’s shameful:

US multinationals will be exempt from the global minimum tax 🧵 In 2021, more than 130 countries agreed to tax large corporations at a minimum rate of 15%.

Even though the rate was very low, it was a step forward, because this agreement carried with it a sense of hope.

You cannot make sense of Nicolás Maduro’s removal without grasping the enormous financial interests involved with regime change in Caracas — and the long history of staggering cross-border wealth extraction from Venezuela to the US🧵 Maduro was of course a brutal and corrupt autocrat.

But Trump has never had any trouble working with brutal and corrupt autocrats.

Such traits rarely trouble him.

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US

This view is wrong

A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵 A lot of the “eurosclerosis” discourse is based on comparing GDP in nominal US$ in Europe vs US

Yesterday, the US ambassador to the EU compared Europe’s GDP per capita to that of Mississippi

This makes little sense, because it ignores the higher cost of living in the US

Bernard Arnault paye proportionnellement moins d’impôt sur le revenu qu’un salarié au SMIC :

Sur les 3,2 milliards de dividendes LVMH qu’il a encaissés en 2023, il s’est acquitté de moins de 2 % d’impôt

Combien de temps allons nous encore accepter cette aberration ? 🧵 Les révélations de Cash Investigation viennent confirmer ce que les travaux universitaires, portant sur l’ensemble des milliardaires, ont établi :

Les ultra-riches ne paient pas d’impôt sur le revenu ou presque, en raison du recours systématique aux sociétés holding

C’est une des tendances les plus frappantes de l’économie française, que l’Insee vient de confirmer : l’explosion du revenu des ultra-riches.

Quatre leçons des chiffres révélés cette semaine par notre institut de la statistique publique 🧵 Premier constat : la prospérité des 0,1% les plus riches

Ce groupe comprend 40.000 foyers environ, dont le revenu annuel moyen dépasse désormais €1 million

Leur revenu nominal a été multiplié par 2,2 entre 2003 et 2022