April 1, 2026                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

The world’s richest man just happened to pop up on a call the other day between the leaders of the United States and India.  

The White House isn’t saying why Elon Musk dialed in to the Trump-Modi convo on Iran. But with the world’s richest billionaire aiming to expand operations in India, it’s hardly surprising that he’d try to grease the wheels by horning in on this high-level tête-à-tête. 

Rich men certainly do have a knack for turning war to their advantage. 

Look at billionaire Jared Kushner. His father-in-law made him a Mideast envoy, and, ever since, he’s been busily using that gig to hit up Arab leaders for private equity investments. And military contractor CEOs are pocketing even fatter paychecks, thanks to our bloated Pentagon budget. 

Meanwhile, with the Iran conflict death tolls climbing, the war’s sky-high economic costs are slamming ordinary Americans.

Our colleague Chisom Okorafor points out that Gen Zers like her were already less financially secure than previous generations. Now the Iran “excursion” is making a tough job market even more brutal. You can read Chisom’s commentary and related Institute for Policy Studies analysis in our new Iran Reader. 

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team

Naming and Shaming America’s Food Barons with Austin Frerick

Inequality.org spoke with researcher and author Austin Frerick earlier this week about Barons, his 2024 book that documents eight cases of extreme corporate consolidation across the American food industry. Below: a portion of our conversation. Click the link below to read the rest.

Corporations are buying up more and more of America’s food supply chain. How is this affecting how much money American families are spending on food and the quality of that food?

Frerick: They’re paying more for lower quality food. To me, the best silver lining for hope here is that everyone is seeing that the system does not work. There’s even the cliche of the yuppie that lives in Manhattan who visits Europe and comes back saying that the food just tastes better and is cheaper.

My first few times talking about this book I could see people agreeing with me, but then, in the back of their minds, thinking I was asking them to pay more for their food. So now one of the first things I show — and this is something I added in the paperback version — is how much more average Americans spend on groceries than their western peers.

Concentrated markets price gauge. I want people to understand that they’re paying more for lower quality.

Make America Healthy Again? Start by Breaking Up Big Ag

Despite Donald Trump’s promises on the campaign trail, he has done little to help Americans get healthier. In fact, he has sided with factory farms and pesticide producers at every turn. Through steady corporate consolidation, Big Ag continues to poison Americas farms and produce while driving up profit margins.

If Trump — and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — really wanted to take making our country healthy again seriously, they would be moving to break the stranglehold that corporate titans hold over food production. They would directly confront power, writes food researcher Amanda Claire Starbuck, and diminish Big Ag’s power to dodge regulations and evade culpability for making us all sick.

At least 16 U.S. billionaires owe their wealth to one of America’s 20 largest low-wage employers — corporations where a significant share of workers earn so little they have to rely on public assistance. Eight of these billionaires owe their good fortune to Walmart. Amazon and Tyson Foods have two members in this elite club, while Home Depot, Best Buy, Starbucks, and Chipotle each have one.

Median worker pay at these firms ranges from $14,674 at Starbucks to $43,417 for Tysons meat processors. Learn more in the article below by our Inequality.org co-editors Sarah Anderson and Reyanna James. 

This CEO Had a Shot at Justifying His Corporate Value — and Blew It

This week’s dour deep pocket: Mark Zuckerberg, the chief exec of Meta, the home of Facebook and Instagram, two of the world’s three biggest social media apps, with over six billion active users.

What has Zuckerberg sour: his sinking personal fortune and his abject failure — at a just-concluded landmark courtroom trial — to turn that sinking around.

The verdict in that trial came last week. A Los Angeles jury found in favor of a now 20-year-old woman, known by the initials KGM, who charged that Meta had deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to hook kids as young as six into using the apps compulsively. In her own case, that compulsive use ranged up to 16 hours in a single day and led to depression and self-harm.

At one point in the six-week trial, KGM’s attorneys revealed a Zuckerberg memo that openly encouraged his execs to make increasing the time teens spend on the company’s apps a top priority.

Zuckerberg testified last month — unconvincingly — in his own company’s defense. Young people, he insisted, spend time on Meta apps because they appreciate the value the apps offer: “If people feel like they’re not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?”

The last word: Zuckerberg’s personal fortune peaked at $264 billion last October and then began dropping. Last week ended with his net worth down to $187 billion. KGM’s victory over Meta, analysts note, “will almost certainly open the floodgates” to more litigation — and sink his wealth even further.

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