Not All Billionaires Detest Taxation

In recent decades, while the wealth of the super-rich kept rising, wealth-based taxation declined and super-rich tax avoidance flourished. Since the global financial crisis, international tax cooperation, information exchange and data leaks have compromised tax avoidance, and taxing the super-rich has again gained salience in political debates. Some billionaires have themselves become prominent in the public debate. When France considered implementing a wealth tax in 2025 for instance, much media attention was devoted to Bernard Arnault’s ferocious attacks on the proposal. Yet in research on the problem of taxing wealth, the views of the super-rich themselves have been curiously absent. Not all of the super-rich use their discursive power, and discursive responses may be hypocritical, or ‘cheap talk’. But even if they do not reveal the super-rich individual’s inner thoughts, such public statements are informative because they reflect what the super-rich deem socially appropriate, and/or politically opportune to say about taxation. Tax speech by the super-rich is also consequential. Their words carry weight. As Hägel (2020) shows for Bill Gates and George Soros, and as Elon Musk’s followers on X (229 million at the time of writing) attest, those who are perceived as successful entrepreneurs can amplify their voices. Much of the academic literature assumes that the preferences of the super-rich are known, universal, and constant: to resist taxation as much as possible, by any means possible. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests more variation. Hundreds of the world’s super-rich now publicly advocate for higher wealth-based taxes, organised in initiatives such as Millionaires for Humanity, Patriotic Millionaires, and Tax Me Now. Two of the planet’s richest billionaires, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, have been making such arguments for over a decade. How exceptional are these vocal individuals? And how many of the super-rich remain silent, neither advocating for nor deploying their resources against wealth-based taxation? This paper considers the discursive responses of billionaires to personal taxation, and asks what drives variation between them. It is based on a new dataset on the tax speech acts of the hundred richest billionaires in democracies over the past three decades, drawn from business journalism, investigative journalism, and other open sources. Using inferential statistics and qualitative study of the biographies of specific billionaires, we consider variation in their stated views on personal taxation based on world region, age, sector of the economy, and whether billionaires are self-made, wealth-increasers, or heirs. The most virulent opponents of personal taxation, our preliminary findings suggest, are the ‘wealth-increasers’. We also find that US billionaires are more likely to remain silent, whereas Europeans are more likely to make defensive or anti-tax statements. Older generations of billionaires are both more talkative and more pro-tax than younger ones. The same holds true for billionaires whose source of wealth is finance or technology, whereas billionaires whose wealth derives from commodities are most silent.