While Irish rebels were setting up shop in Dublin’s GPO in 1916, American John D. Rockefeller saw his oil monopoly grow to make him the first billionaire in history.
One billion dollars in 1916 would be worth close to thirty billion today when adjusted for inflation.
The average Irish worker’s weekly earnings increased 3.1% to more than €1,011 in the last three months of 2025, according to data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
If this worker was to work non-stop, every week, it would take roughly 989,122 weeks, or 19,022 years, before they would reach billionaire status.
Rockefeller’s economic control at the time could not be overstated. Worth an estimated $1.5 billion at his death in 1937, Rockefeller held power over 1.5% of America’s total economic output.
Today, the world’s richest man who holds far greater power, with Forbes listing his current net worth at around $835 billion, is Elon Musk.
Ireland’s GDP is estimated to grow to approximately $750 billion in 2026, still $85 billion short of Musk’s.
The existence of such vast personal fortunes raises an uncomfortable question: can wealth on this scale ever truly be ethical? And do the personal ethics of the individual holding that wealth even matter?
On Friday 28 February, Elon Musk reposted on X, formerly Twitter, a harshly worded post alleging that migrants accused of sexual offences against minors are fined rather than deported, an assertion presented without context or verification.
Elon reposted with the words, “This is actually what is happening in Europe. Unconscionable evil.”
But not all billionaires are made equal.
While Elon Musk was launching into political tirades and committing labour violations, Mackenzie Scott was promising away her billions with little conditions.
Mackenzie Scott is a philanthropist, author, and ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. The two set-up Amazon in 1994 after Bezos saw that internet usage was growing at a rate of 2,300% a year. They both left their jobs and founded Amazon, with Bezos leading while Scott acted as an accountant, business lead, and key advisor.
Scott and Bezos divorced in 2019 following 25 years of marriage. Scott received 25% of the couple’s shares in Amazon, worth $35.6 billion at the time. Scott was briefly the world’s richest woman in 2020, as her stocks worth soared to $62 billion in 2020 following the pandemic surge in business for Amazon. As of February 2026, Mackenzie Scott’s net worth is valued at about $28.6 billion.
In May 2019, Mackenzie Scott signed the Giving Pledge. This charitable campaign was set up by Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Melinda French Gate in 2010, and signatories commit to giving away the majority of their wealth to charitable causes.
Since the year 2020, Scott has made donations of over 26 billion dollars in more than 2,700 grants through her charity, Yield Giving.
In just 2025, Scott donated over $7.2 billion to more than 180 charitable causes. According to Forbes, this is the most money gifted by a person in a single year since they began records in 2012.
Reflective essays announcing Scott’s activities are posted on occasion on the Yield Giving site.
In her December 2025 essay, she wrote, “The peace-fostering byproducts of one unexpected act of kindness toward a stranger of different background or beliefs might inspire a beneficial chain reaction that goes on for years […] It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible.”
Scott’s sheer number of donations has placed her third on Forbes’ list of America’s most generous givers.
A three-year study published by the Centre for Effective Philanthropy in February 2025 indicated that Scott has given more than $19 billion to more than 2,000 organizations between 2019 and 2025.
“It could take decades to truly understand the effects these gifts have had on nonprofits and the sector at large,” the report reads. “However, after five years of giving, the reported effects of her gifts on recipient organizations … remain overwhelmingly positive.”
In Jeff Bezos’ entire life, he has donated approximately $4.7 billion in total. Bezos is currently the world’s fourth richest person, while Scott is 68th.
Elon Musk is estimated to have donated only $7 billion to date, despite having also signed the Giving Pledge.
In contrast, Mackenzie Scott donates and doesn’t ask any questions, simply offering guidance and support when needed. Scott and Yield Giving offer a unique style of philanthropy, with donations ranging in the millions given with no strings attached.
Mackenzie Scott’s philanthropy makes her perhaps the closest example of an ethical billionaire today, but can anyone who accumulates wealth on such an immense scale ever truly do so in an ethical way? And do their actions with this money, no matter how beneficial and positive, excuse the damage they cause to get there?
To analyse this question in relation to Mackenzie Scott, we must acknowledge the fact that she, among an increasing number of new billionaires, gained her true wealth from divorce.
To examine the ethics of Scott’s wealth, we really must look at Jeff Bezos and the ethics of Amazon, and how much did Scott know and do to influence these events.
Even though Mackenzie Scott was there by Jeff Bezos side while he sketched out the first business plan for Amazon on a cross-country road trip, Scott quickly stepped back from the company to focus on raising their family.
While Mackenzie Scott initially helped with business administration and accounting while Bezos got on his feet, following her step back, Scott never held a senior management or strategic position in Amazon.
The Ethical Consumer Research Association was established in England in 1998 to analyse companies and inform consumers on their ethical behaviours. The association now scores companies out of a hundred based on their ethical performance.
They currently give Amazon a score of 17 out of 100, and label it a company to avoid, blaming “its shameless tax avoidance, workers’ rights abuses, environmental impacts and much more” for the low score.
Together with Google, Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services (AWS) signed a $1.22 billion deal with the Israeli government in 2021. Known as Project Nimbus, it offered the Government, the Security Services and other entities enormous amounts of cloud storage, analytics, and AI tools.
Critics argue that Israel’s attacks on Gaza rely heavily on Nimbus. Although Amazon has officially described Nimbus as a civilian project, Israeli officials have acknowledged that the technology has given the military additional tools for bombing.
Mackenzie Scott was never involved in these business decisions, but the wealth she holds came from every single one of them. Her own increase in wealth seen from her divorce till after the pandemic was entirely reliant on Amazon’s success.
Is it ethical to donate a million dollars to a homeless charity which will transform thousands of lives, even if that million was made on the backs of abused and overworked workers, or even the murder of innocent civilians in Gaza?
Billionaires, at the end of the day, are human. That means, that like any human, they are all made differently. The ethics, donations, and actions of billionaires vary greatly. The source of their wealth is never the same.
Yet the argument that some are, in fact, ethical relies heavily on what they choose to do with their wealth for charity. It largely ignores the fact that it would be nearly impossible not to impart some sort of difference on this world when you control tens, or even hundreds, of billions.
The disparity in the one percent’s wealth versus the average person guarantees that even a fraction of their money would change our lives. The real ethical question is not about what good these billionaires should aim to use their wealth for, but whether the accumulation of wealth so large it can reshape society is even ethically defensible.
A recent study by Oxfam shows that Ireland’s 11 billionaires are wealthier than 66% of the Irish population, or more than 3.4 million people. The report also stated that the combined wealth of billionaires globally is $2.5 trillion.
Ireland relies mainly on income taxes to recoup money from billionaires. Ireland currently has no wealth tax, but recent calls from American Senator Bernie Sanders in Vermont to introduce an annual 5% wealth tax on American billionaires may inspire a change back here.
Oxfam Ireland has commissioned a new report ‘Confronting Wealth Inequality in Ireland’ which sets out a 1% tax on the net wealth of the top 1% in Ireland. This would raise an estimated €1 billion every year for the Irish exchequer.
Other models include a wealth tax of an additional 2% on net wealth above €4.67m ($5m), an additional 3% on net wealth over €46.7m ($50m) and an additional 5% on net wealth over €934.7 million ($1bn).
Ireland’s wealth inequality is lower than the European average. This is largely due to the increase in property values in the country in recent years raising the average household’s net worth.
Millionaires were once viewed with the same suspicion as billionaires today. In modern Ireland however, thanks to inflation and rising house prices, many ordinary homeowners are considered millionaires on paper. Millionaires are no longer the far-off upper class who live the plush life, but rather our neighbours and friends.
As typical wealth is reshaped by inflation and time, society’s perception of extreme wealth skews with it.
There are now close to 55,000 millionaires in this country, more than two-and-a-half times higher than during the Celtic Tiger boom of the late 2000s, according to research from Capgemini.
The nature of wealth has changed over time too. A billion dollars in Rockefeller’s era meant he controlled the future of America, almost exclusively through industry and business. Today, the likes of popstars, fashion designers, social media owners, and gaming icons can accumulate wealth previously reserved for business tycoons to reach billionaire status.
As we grow accustomed to numerical wealth rising while buying power remains low, will we eventually see billionaires become as ordinary as millionaires are today?
We already saw that to have the power and influence of Rockefeller with his billion today, it would take the equivalent of Elon Musk and his $800 billion.
If wealth continues to grow at this pace, today’s argument against the existence of billionaires may soon turn to arguing against trillionaires.
But the argument remains the same.
The generosity of billionaires may benefit society and improve lives, but it does little to dismantle the unequal systems which let them grow their wealth on the backs of exploited workers coupled with tax evasion.
No matter how ethical a billionaire is, it doesn’t remove the fact that they hold the power, alone and unelected, on how billions of dollars that could transform society are utilised.
And so, the question still stands: can there ever be a truly ethical billionaire?
In my opinion, like most human issues, it’s complicated but no, not really. There are most definitely billionaires out there who are committing to living a more ethical life, and to donate their money to ethical causes.
However, for one person to amass this amount of wealth, they inevitably benefit, whether intentionally or not, from the exploitation of others.
Billions are not made in isolation, but built from labour, markets, and capital that stretch far beyond a single individual.
In that sense, the ethical question may not be about the character of billionaires at all. It may instead be about whether a society that allows fortunes so immense that they rival national economies can ever truly call itself equal.
Rather than asking whether a billionaire is ethical, perhaps we should look at ourselves and Ireland and ask a more important question:
How did we build a society that allows wealth to reach such extremes in the first place?
