That's not how any of this works. "Too big to fail" can be applied to companies, but I don't know of any examples of it being applied to people.
Piketty’s central argument is that when the rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g), wealth concentrates over time into fewer and fewer hands. This is his now-famous r > g inequality.
The implication is that capitalism, left to its own devices, doesn’t naturally spread wealth around. It does the opposite. The relatively egalitarian period of the mid-20th century (roughly 1930s-1970s) was the historical exception, driven by two world wars, the Great Depression, and deliberate policy choices like progressive taxation. The longer historical pattern, which Piketty traces with extensive data going back to the 18th century, is one of increasing concentration.
His practical prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth (not just income) to counteract this tendency. He acknowledges this is politically difficult but argues it’s the most straightforward mechanism to prevent a return to the kind of patrimonial capitalism that defined the Gilded Age and the Belle Époque, where inherited wealth dominated and social mobility was minimal.
The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work. Piketty and his collaborators assembled an unprecedented dataset on wealth and income distribution across multiple countries and centuries, which gave the argument a weight that prior discussions lacked.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-billionaires-went-broke-15...
These are the kind of criminals where the judges will let them stay under home arrest in their twenty-bedroom mansion, have their chauffeur drive them around in a car worth more than my entire life savings, etc... because it would be "unconscionable" for them to lose the life that they're accustomed to. I.e.: Affluenza.
Just look at Prince Andrew or whatever he's called now. He raped children and his rightful punishment would be to sit in a jail cell with no access to anything even resembling his lavish digs, instead he's luxuriating in a lifestyle you and I would envy.
I can list far, far more examples of billionaires or mere hundred-millionaires living luxuriously after committing capital crimes or "going bankrupt" than not.
Find me an ex-billionaire living out of a motor home, then I'll cede your point.
Another egregious example of this sort of thing:
> Robert H. Richards IV was convicted of rape, the wealthy heir to the Du Pont family fortune […] received an eight-year prison sentence in 2009 for raping his toddler daughter, but the sentencing order signed by a Delaware judge said “defendant will not fare well” in prison and the eight years were suspended.
— https://www.cnn.com/2014/04/02/justice/delaware-du-pont-rape...
Talk about a two-tier justice system.
1. Against rich/powerful people
I don't even know thr point you're arguing as the intro to the listicle concurs with my main argument:
>> It is very rare for a person to achieve the status of billionaire and then lose it.
Empirical work... like conveniently ignoring the fact that there's far less old money billionaires than we'd expect?
>For these lucky people, the experience of the Vanderbilts and their contemporaries offers a cautionary tale. At the turn of the 20th century, America’s census recorded about 4,000 millionaires, note Victor Haghani and James White, two wealth managers, in their book, “The Missing Billionaires”. Suppose a quarter of them had at least $5m (the richest had hundreds) and had invested it in America’s stockmarket. Had they then procreated at the average rate, paid their taxes and spent 2% of their capital each year, their descendants today would include nearly 16,000 old-money billionaires. In reality, it is a struggle to find a single one who traces their fortune back to the first Gilded Age.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/12/h...
This is a good point because there are no oil billionaires and things like trusts, family offices, offshoring etc. actually pose no challenge to accurately numerating and identifying people that ‘have’ or effectively control over a billion dollars at their discretion because they all just sign up for the list.
Of course there’s the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers but that doesn
So far the only individual that has been meaningfully punished has been Ghislaine Maxwell.
This seems like a prime example of being too big to fail. The FBI puts on kid gloves whenever a rich person is accused of wrong doing.
>So far the only individual that has been meaningfully punished has been Ghislaine Maxwell.
That factoid is meaningless without the rate of prosecutions/convictions for people that FBI "had tabs on".
With J6, in the matter of 2 or so years the FBI has secured over 1000 convictions.
When it wants to, the FBI can move very quickly.
Speaking of which, the previous conviction, the super sweet deal Acosta gave to Epstein before is also an example of elite unaccountability.
FBI and friends protected Epstein until it became impossible.
Again, large numbers, but no context. How many people did you think were at the riots? 10k? 50k?
Moreover, Jan 6th was an event that definitely happened. The same can't be said for whatever happened at Epstein's island. The island exists, Epstein's a convicted sex offender, and people flew there, but associating with sex offenders isn't a crime, no matter how despicable it might seem.
Epstein died in his cell. If Maxwell preferred death to punishment she could've also killed herself. Also it's well documented that women receive less harsh punishment in court vs men for the same crimes, so yeah, it's sexism but not in the way you insinuate.
> Epstein himself is probably still alive in Tel Aviv anyway.
Yes, and it's Maxwell's lookalike that's serving the sentence, while she's enjoying herself in Argentina. See how quickly you can derails discussion with such absurd claims without any substance?
It isn't that they get bailed out by the government (like the banks in 2008), it is that at the scale of their wealth there is no realistic way to lose it fast enough to make any significant negative difference when the neutral state of wealth at that scale is to snowball ever larger (mostly because we refuse to tax it appropriately).
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-billionaires-went-broke-15...