Right after Trump was reelected, the top 10 richest people in the United States had their networth rise 64 billion dollars cumulatively. Elon Musk single handedly had his net worth rise $26.5 billion after the election. Elon Musk is notably one of Trump’s biggest supporters, “the world’s richest person and one of Trump’s most outspoken and dedicated supporters” (Jordan Valinsky, 2024), which brings into question how much of an influence Elon Musk has on the public’s opinion. Being the world’s richest person, Elon Musk would have some bias about which candidate would help his business’s grow. He has a net worth of $315 billion, which is more than the wealth of the entire country of Ethiopia, which only has $300 Billion.

The 2024 election was a close call with the popular vote being 50.2% for Trump and 48.2% for Harris. Because this was such a close race, important people such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos could easily affect this result by filtering out or promoting political propaganda on websites such as X. After Trump’s reelection, the stock market reacted well and stocks soared in value, “Bloomberg notes it’s the biggest daily increase of wealth it’s seen since the index began in 2012” (Jordan Valinsky, 2024). Collectively, the top 10 richest people in America gained 64 billion dollars and to put that into perspective, to end hunger in the USA it would cost about $25 billion dollars.

This could be troubling for some people because some people believe the election was rigged and that the other party should have won. Half the country is glad that Trump won, while the other half is upset that Harris didn’t win. While the extremely wealthy became richer, this just created a larger wealth gap between the poor and the super wealthy. With the ever growing wealth gap and the created tensions from the close election, some people are unhappy with the direction this country is going.