Earlier this spring, I finally got around to reading Wealth and Democracy, the seminal history of the American aristocracy by the author Kevin Phillips. The book traces the contours of our economic divide, from the rise of John Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt at the dawn of the first Gilded Age to the expansion of the wealth chasm under their successors over the next century. But Phillips sent it to the printers prematurely: He published in 2002. I closed the book wanting to belt out some Hamilton: Just you wait, just you wait.

I’ve been talking to sources a lot recently about the looming impact of our own generation of Rockefellers: How people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk could transform America, both in their lives through their work and in their deaths through their wills. And I keep coming back to this statistic: Eight tech billionaires today control more than $1 trillion in assets—roughly equivalent to the market cap of Bitcoin, or about one-third the wealth of the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined.