A couple weeks back when the stock market minted the world's first trillionaire.

I knew exactly who I wanted to speak with.

Paul, welcome to the show.

Hi, good to be on.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been writing about the very rich and the problems they create for as long as I can remember.

I wrote about rising inequality, though, was mostly focused on income back in 1989 when I wrote my first public book.

So I've been on this for ages.

At the time, lots of people were saying, why are you doing this?

Nobody cares.

But at this point, obviously, we all care.

And the wealth side of it is relatively, I only really began focusing heavily on wealth more recently because it's become really conspicuous now that wealth is where the action is.

By wealth, Paul means exactly what happened with Elon, the accumulation not of income generated by

nine to five work, but assets that a person owns. Think stock or property. And sure,

Elon Musk is not quite a paper trillioner anymore, but man is he rich. And he is part of a very

small elite.

What's happened now is that the amount of wealth that's being held by a really tiny number of people has drastically increased.

That's where the real action is. The 1%. I might start talking about the 1%, but that's way too bigger category. A lot of the wealth is in the hands of 150 people. So instead of on 100th, it's 1 millionth

of the total population, and quite a lot is in the hands of just 15 men, and it is all men, who are up there

with enough money to, you know, have enormous power aside from everything else. And even

10 years ago, we weren't that concentrated. Yeah, I mean, part of what I like about your work is that you've

been covering it so long that you've been able to see the way dramatic wealth reshapes public

conversation. Like, one of the places I saw you writing about wealth and the world was back

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