Danger to democracy: What happens when private capital is higher than the country's GDP?

With a market value crossing the trillion-dollar mark and higher than the GDP of most of the countries hosting them, tech giants are no longer playing by the rules — they are rewriting them and dictating the pace to the governments that are supposed to restrain them.

In the "trillion-dollar club" there are currently 14 international public companies, and alongside them only one person who made history and crossed the trillion-dollar mark on his own last month — Elon Musk, who has since managed to drop below it. Musk's personal net worth stood on the day of the SpaceX IPO (June 12) at about $1.2 trillion as a result of the combination of his holdings in the company alongside his holding in Tesla.

By July 1, his net worth had already dropped to about $1 trillion according to "Forbes", and by July 20, he was left with "only" about $772 billion. The first trillionaire in human history lasted a little over two weeks, mainly due to the sharp volatility in Tesla and SpaceX stocks.

Retreating from the trillion mark does not erase the fact of crossing it. The organization Oxfam, in its January 2025 report, predicted that by the middle of the decade five more new trillionaires would join Musk. The organization's latest forecast, published in Davos in January 2026 under the title "Resisting the Rule of the Rich", presents an even more extreme picture: global billionaire wealth jumped in 2025 by about 16% to an all-time high of $18.3 trillion.

According to the report, the 12 richest people in the world already hold together about $2.635 trillion — more than the aggregate wealth of half of humanity that is at the lower socio-economic level (more than 4.1 billion people).

Three times the GDP

Every additional zero on the right affects inequality, public savings, privacy, human innovation, and even the future of democracy itself. The central question is: which countries are even capable of supervising entities whose value exceeds their own GDP? Taiwan's national product is estimated by the IMF and World Bank at about $770 to $790 billion for 2026, while the value of the Taiwanese chip company TSMC stood at about $2.1 trillion — almost three times the GDP of the country in which it is located.

The Saudi oil company Aramco is worth about $1.7 trillion — about a third above the national product of all of Saudi Arabia ($1.24 to $1.29 trillion). While South Korea's product stands at about $1.93 trillion, the local electronics giant Samsung and chip manufacturer SK hynix are together worth about $2 trillion.

The ten leading public companies in the USA are collectively worth about $28 trillion — about 86% of the IMF's estimate for the American GDP for 2026 ($32.4 trillion nominal).

The Bank of England, in its financial stability report published on July 7, 2026, determined that the five leading artificial intelligence companies in the world accounted for about 15% of the volume of all new rated corporate debt issues in the USA by May 2026.

Dangerous dependence

Prof. Gabriel Zucman, director of the Stone Center for the Study of Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in the "Guardian" that "extreme concentration of wealth leads to extreme concentration of power, to the point of a real threat to the very possibility of democracy".

Advocate Yoav Mar, partner at the law firm Agmon with Tulchinsky, adds: "For these companies, the state is also a supplier, a customer, and a regulator. The connection is complex, and the state's hand is not always on top. Companies conduct negotiations with countries, threatening to close operations if governments do not cooperate."

Concentrated bet

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, cited Federal Reserve data according to which the richest 1% in the USA hold about 32% of American wealth — the largest gap since 1989.

A Goldman Sachs study from October 2024 warns that capital market concentration in a few individual companies structurally limits the chance for long-term returns for all investors, including pension funds. When five to six companies account for over a third of the S&P 500 index, every index-tracking pension portfolio effectively becomes a concentrated bet on the business health of individual tech giants.

"Musk holds about 80% of the control power in SpaceX, when in the bylaws there is no clause that allows for the termination of his employment. The public paid a lot of money, but the ability of the public to influence the direction in which SpaceX is going is minimal to non-existent," summarizes Advocate Mar.

In the coming decade, a small number of companies from the fields of defense-tech and quantum computing are expected to cross the trillion-dollar mark. In Israel, according to the "Forbes Israel" list from March 2026, there are about 52 dollar billionaires, and the highest-ranked Israeli, Eyal Ofer, is valued at about $33.6 billion.