In 2026 – up until July – Elon Musk’s estimated wealth was growing by somewhere between US$30 million and $100 million an hour, making him, at least briefly, the worlds’ first trillionaire. By comparison, the typical American worker earns between $23 and $56 an hour.
While Musk’s wealth, even in the face of recent losses, is extreme, dramatic disparities have become commonplace. As of 2026, America had nearly 1,000 billionaires, whereas, according to the most recent federal data available, in 2024 roughly 10.6% of the population – or 35.9 million people – lived below the poverty line. The poverty line is the minimum level of income a person or family needs to be able to cover basic living needs, such as food, clothing and shelter.
Given the prevalence of such stark inequality, it would be easy to assume that most people accept it as fair – but they don’t. As a psychologist who studies how people navigate moral problems, I suspect that one major challenge to effectively reining in extreme wealth is that doing so forces people to navigate between opposing moral demands.
The disconnect
In 2014, researchers used survey data from more than 55,000 people across 40 countries, asking what top executives and unskilled workers earn, and what they should earn. In the U.S. the average respondent – across income levels, education and political divides – said the ideal pay ratio would be about 7-to-1. At the time it was closer to 350-to-1, meaning that on average a CEO earned 350 times more.
In other words, Americans reported that the ideal was something far more equal. Yet they have generally been unlikely to support high taxation on wealth, redistribution or limits on wealth accumulation – though recent poll data suggests this may be changing.
Scholars have offered different explanations for this disconnect between what people say they want and what they are willing to do about it.
Some argue that people chronically underestimate the scale of inequality – in the 2014 study, Americans underestimated the actual pay ratio at the time as being only 30-to-1. Others argue that the primary driver of the disconnect is people’s unwillingness to abandon their beliefs in merit – that wealth is the product of hard work, talent and risk.
Some also point to the fact that people can feel compelled to defend systems as essentially good, even when those systems produce harmful outcomes – a phenomenon known as “system justification.” This is in part because of the psychological need to believe in a just world, where good people are rewarded and bad people are punished.
My own research on how people navigate competing moral demands suggests that one potential explanation lies in a critical tension that is generated by morality itself.
Morality’s balancing act
Morality is always balancing between two things that pull against each other.
On one side, morality is supposed to protect people from harm. When a community comes to see something as unreasonably harmful – drunken driving, child labor, smoking indoors – it moves collectively to prevent that harm, typically by regulating or forbidding the behavior and punishing those who do it.
On the other side, morality is supposed to protect people’s personal autonomy and freedom, even when others in their community dislike or disagree with their choices. People have a moral right to make certain decisions for themselves, whether that is choosing a flavor of ice cream or deciding whether to have children.
On any contested issue, these moral demands pull in opposite directions.
People must collectively decide whether the harm caused by an action justifies limiting individual freedom – for example, making it illegal to drive a car while impaired by alcohol. At other times, restricting choice might itself do greater harm, such as banning controversial books, rather than leaving people to choose what to read for themselves.
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Consider libertarian morality, which leans heavily in the direction of protecting the space of freedom and individual rights. Libertarians defend their right to free choice with the same conviction other groups bring to preventing harm by restricting those choices. Both are responding to the same moral tension, but they resolve it in different ways.
For example, libertarians generally argue that owning guns, using illicit drugs and refusing vaccinations are individual rights that must be protected from the harm of infringement via regulation. There are others, however, who disagree – arguing that the harms caused by gun deaths, drug abuse and overdose, and the spread of preventable disease require regulation that constrains or prohibits completely people’s freedom to choose.
At their core, these are disputes about where the line falls between a harm serious enough to warrant control and a freedom too important to override.
Navigating the balance
And this is where the issue of extreme wealth is located – sitting precisely on this moral fault line.
On one side, there is a moral claim that arguably lies at the heart of the “American Dream”: People have the right to keep and enjoy what their own efforts, talent and willingness to take risks produces. They also have a right to make their own way in the world, without undue interference, based on their own abilities to do so. They should be free to decide what to do with the wealth they have earned, including leaving it to current and future family members after death.
On the other side, there are serious moral harms to be prevented. Past a certain point, wealth stops being only money and becomes a detrimental form of power over others: People like Elon Musk have the capacity to shape markets such as the SpaceX IPO, influence politics by donating hundreds of millions to campaigns, and control major platforms where public debate happens, such as Twitter, now X.
The gap that extreme wealth creates does not just mean some people have far more; it means a minority have the power to ensure that the majority has far less. And this is a significant harm that cannot go unaddressed.
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While it is helpful to recognize the problem of extreme wealth as a potential imbalance between two equally important moral demands, that by itself does not tell us what the correct balance is or how to achieve it.
This dilemma is made more difficult by the fact that we experience and respond to certain kinds of moral threats more strongly than others. For example, imagining losing what belongs to you, what you have earned, is what researchers call “affectively immediate”: It triggers strong negative emotions and a powerful sense of moral injustice. In turn, the experience of moral injustice heightens people’s perception of risk, making it feel more serious. This combination captures people’s moral attention and spurs them to action.
The harms of unfettered wealth accumulation, on the other hand, are difficult to experience in the same emotionally potent way. Just like people can directly experience the negative consequences of specific extreme weather events, but not of climate change, the dangers of extreme wealth itself cannot be directly experienced, though some of its consequences can be.
And while researchers have found that thinking about abstract moral harms such as climate change and extreme wealth can activate people’s moral principles and orient them toward the larger social good, this by itself is typically not enough to motivate sustained action, especially when pitted against the sheer magnitude of the problem, which dampens our capacity to respond emotionally.
The challenge, then, is not to feel less protective of what people earn and their right to earn it. Rather, it is to actively promote public discussion that is grounded in an accurate understanding of how extreme wealth, while benefiting a few, can substantively harm everyone else.
If people can keep in mind that, despite our differences, we generally want a more equal society, then I believe perhaps it will be possible to strike a moral balance that better protects all of us from harm.
