“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” So said Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko in the hit 1987 movie “Wall Street.” The film (a December release) deftly articulated the materialistic ethos rampant in the financial world of the rough-and-tumble 1980s.
What’s Douglas up to these days? Well, still acting, but some of his recent comments to the press could give his turn as Gekko a run for its money in capturing the moment: “Right now, our country is flirting with autocracy [… .] The disappointing thing is that politics now seems to be for profit.”
Although perhaps the 2025 comments aren’t quite as lyrical, Douglas has a point. When it comes to rapacious capitalism, 2025 makes 1987 look like a child’s lemonade stand. Let’s peruse a few of the ways in which this year was unprecedented when it comes to greed.
Elon Musk Becomes Richest Person In History With Record-Setting Net Worth
This December, Elon Musk became the first person ever worth at least $600 billion. Just four days later, Musk became the first person worth more than $700 billion. No other person has ever been worth even a paltry $500 billion.
Forbes most recently pegged Musk’s net worth at $749 billion, and I’m too disgusted to look again to see if that rises any higher before my deadline. Musk is well on his way to becoming history’s first trillionaire.
Donald Trump Monetizes The Presidency Like Never Before
Though historically many former presidents had trouble with it, in modern times it is de rigueur for American heads of state to feather their own nests. Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, gave 729 paid speeches from February 2001 to May 2016 in return for an average payout of $210,795 per address, earning a total of more than $153 million.
That is not exactly demonstrating the restraint of Mother Teresa. Still, most presidents wait until after their final term to really cash in, and a haul in the low nine figures is almost quaint by 2025 standards.
A number of experts, using a variety of methodologies, have calculated how much Donald Trump has profited off the presidency. The calculations with any credibility put the figure well into the billions of dollars, a substantial portion attributable to the president’s various familial cryptocurrency schemes.
One very thorough analysis found that Trump and his immediate family had pocketed $3.4 billion during his entire time in the White House as of August. Another report, released in October, found that President Trump, Melania Trump, and Trump’s two oldest sons amassed more than $1.8 billion “from selling the presidency” since his 2024 reelection alone.
World’s Largest Country Likely Surpasses 1 Million Casualties In Quest To Steal Even More Land
Russia is by far the largest country in the world. It’s almost twice the size of the second-largest country, Canada.
Russia also has a very low population density. It does not need any more land. Yet, that hasn’t stopped Russia from instigating and continuing the largest war in Europe since World War II, simply in order to steal land from its smaller neighbor, Ukraine.
Unfortunately, wars of territorial expansion are common throughout history. That being said, Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine is unique in modernity, and this year it likely reached a bloody milestone.
We don’t know for sure how many casualties Russia has suffered so far in the war, because Russia lies constantly about anything that might make it look bad. Western estimates can also be all over the map (for instance, Trump put the number of Russian servicemen killed or injured during the war at 600,000 in December 2024 before saying Russia had lost 1 million troops during the war just one month later).
With 2025 starting out on pace to be the war’s deadliest year, more credible sources indicate that Russia’s casualty count may have surpassed 1 million this year, with Ukraine’s estimated casualties thus far in the war at a bit less than half of that. It’s a terrible loss of human life, especially in pursuit of something that the aggressor already has more of than it could ever realistically put to use.
More To Come?
While these are a few of the most poignant examples of how 2025 was particularly greedy, they are far from the only ones I could have chosen. To bastardize a Churchill quote, “Never have so few taken so much from so many.” If you care about the obscenely wealthy getting even more rich off the backs of everyone else, 2025 was rough.
As for 2026? I don’t have a crystal ball. But there sure doesn’t seem to be anything standing on the horizon to prevent more of the same.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post Merry Christmas: 2025 Was A Record-Breaking Year For Greed appeared first on Above the Law.