Can a wealth tax actually solve our political and fiscal problems? The math says no.

Forbes recently dropped its 2026 Forbes 400 list: The 400 richest Americans today are worth a combined $8 trillion.

Elon Musk, at the tip-top of the list, is worth an estimated $908 billion. If you spend your life thinking about taxes, as I do, a list like this naturally raises the wealth-tax question.

One might think such a list would make an argument in favor of wealth taxation. If you think hard about the numbers, however, it actually shows how bad some arguments are in its favor.

Two arguments for wealth taxes come up again and again. One is political power: Enormous fortunes can translate into enormous influence over elections and public policy. Defunding billionaires might eliminate their ability to bankroll politicians. The other argument is revenue: If the federal government is running huge deficits while private fortunes are huge, why not tax some of those fortunes?

Examining new data helps rebut both arguments. I took wealth estimates from Forbes’s 2016 and 2026 lists, calculated the annualized growth in those fortunes, and asked what would have happened if a 10 percent wealth tax had been imposed every year starting in 2016 while the underlying pre-tax growth path stayed the same. Ten percent is deliberately extreme, much more than most U.S. wealth-tax proposals. Think of it as a wealth stress test — would the political power of the very wealthy withstand taxes at rates even higher than normally proposed?

Take Musk. In my hypothetical example, his 2026 fortune falls from $908 billion reported by Forbes to about $317 billion in my counterfactual 10 percent wealth tax example (again, assuming his wealth over the past 10 years grew smoothly). That is an enormous reduction. Yet, he is still left with an enormous fortune.

Under the same exercise, he would still have had plenty of financial capacity to complete the $44 billion purchase of Twitter , as he did, and to spend more than $259 million supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 election effort, as he did. Vast political influence does not require $908 billion, or even $317 billion. A 10 percent tax over the past decade would have changed little.

The same pattern shows up across the top of the list. After 10 years of a 10 percent annual tax, Jeff Bezos still ends up around $132 billion, Larry Page around $97 billion, and Michael Dell around $92 billion. These are dramatically smaller fortunes, but they remain fortunes on a scale that allows for vast political power. Incredible influence can be bought for just a few tens of millions of dollars, and members of the Forbes 400 would still easily retain tens of millions of dollars even after the levels of wealth taxation that have been proposed.

Then there is the revenue argument. The entire Forbes 400 is worth about $8 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office currently estimates the fiscal 2026 federal deficit at about $2.1 trillion .

Even confiscating 100 percent of every Forbes 400 fortune would equal only about 3.8 years of deficits at that annual rate. After that, the stock of wealth is gone, while the annual budget gap remains indefinitely. And no one is proposing 100 percent wealth taxation.

A recurring wealth tax would, of course, raise recurring revenue rather than literally confiscate all wealth at once. But the comparison is useful because it lays bare the scale of the problem. The Forbes 400 are astonishingly rich, but the federal government’s fiscal problem is even bigger. We cannot solve our budgetary problems only on the backs of billionaires.

Even a tax large enough to cut top fortunes dramatically can leave the richest Americans with vast financial capacity, enough to buy incredible power. And the combined wealth of the Forbes 400, enormous as it is, comes only to a few years’ worth of federal deficits at today’s pace.

The Forbes 400 list does show an incredible amount of wealth in the hands of a select few Americans. But taxing that wealth will not solve our country’s problems.

Jeff Hoopes is a professor at the University of North Carolina and the research director of the UNC Tax Center. He co-hosts a podcast called “Tax Chats,” is on the Advisory Council of The Tax Foundation and is a co-founder of the Tax Research Network.