Billionaires and military defence contractors and executives have surprisingly many things in common. They are, to the man, all white and all male and have a great deal more money than any of the other citizens on the planet put together many times over. And yet the billionaires, in turn, have even more money than the military defence contractors and executives, who, within themselves, have extraordinary levels of compensation.
The top billionaires on average net worth are $700 billion dollars, and the top military defence contractors and executives receive compensation packages often exceeding $20 million annually. In contrast, for example, US average salaries reach approximately $72,700 USD, while Canadian average salaries are around CAD $63,530 ($50,348 USD).
But the implications of the similarities and differences between billionaires and military defense executives and contractors are far-reaching and reveal to us a great deal about the concerning and dangerous inequities and numerous flaws within America, Canada and other Western world countries that have poorly regulated free-market economies.
How they make their money
The military millionaires make their money through manipulative propaganda techniques whereas billionaires make their money through aggressive business practices that are enabled by PR marketing techniques and, as well, they are often “born into money.” The resulting inequities in how their money is made leads to a breakdown in social cohesion. Thus, relationships are based on manipulation and exploitation and not on trust and fairness.
Billionaire wealth globally reached a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, with their collective wealth growing by $3.5 trillion in one year, an amount nearly equivalent to the wealth held by the bottom 50 per cent of humanity. Since 1995, the wealth of the richest individuals has grown at six-to-nine per cent per year, while average global wealth grew at only 3.2 per cent.
Billionaire wealth has surged, growing three times faster than inflation in some regions. The wealth of the top one per cent has skyrocketed due to corporate monopoly power, rising tech valuations, and policy choices that favor the wealthy. In terms of fossil fuel sales, they showed massive increases in income related to growing scarcity of supply as well as effective marketing of their product because “oil sells itself”. This has resulted in an increase in accumulation of exponential growth of the level of wealth of a newly created social class, the “ultra ultra billionaires.”
Inequality is driven by stagnant wages, the privatization of public sectors, and tax systems that benefit only the rich, allowing billionaires to accumulate massive fortunes even, while in contrast many people struggle with the cost of living. In 2025, the world’s richest individual’s net worth surpassed half a trillion dollars.
Because of these factors, our present world is fracturing into dog-eat-dog societies where ultra billionaires and military millionaires are clear evidence of our growing failures to create adequate levels of equity within our economies. This leads to a breakdown of social cohesion within our societies. The development of social cohesion is an essential responsibility of all governments to foster if we are to live within socially healthy groups.
Income tax, one of modern life’s unavoidable scrouges, was initially claimed to be put in on a temporary basis to fund the then existing wars. In the United States, income tax laws were put in to help fund the American Civil War.
The first U.S. income tax legislation was established in 1862. In Canada, the Income War Tax Act of 1917 was put in place to help fund Canada’s war efforts in the so-called Great or First World War. What was presented to the citizens of the day as temporary has, in fact, not unsurprisingly, proven to be totally permanent in the world today. The governments in power at that time claimed it was a temporary measure. They used the slogan “Home by Xmas”, a typical piece of war propaganda coming out of World War I, to knowingly and greatly under-estimate the length of battle so as not to preclude high levels of recruitment.
The legislators of these laws, at that time, had absolutely no idea that they were in fact giving birth to what would eventually be called the military-industrial complex by the then departing American president Dwight Eisenhower at the end of the 1950s. The military-industrial complex refers to the development of very strong economic symbiotic relationships between the military, the government, industry and academia in the service of generating vast profits for all parties involved in their endless sales of armaments.
They were unknowingly giving birth to America’s enduring favourite past time – war.
The increase in wealth of military executives is due to developments in the increasing effectiveness in military/defense marketing strategies and the military executive’s active promotion of increasing the number of violent conflicts on several fronts in the world, particularly through NATO. Due to this, top executives and owners of major military defense contractors are experiencing record-high compensation.
Data from 2025 shows a significant, ongoing, and in many cases unprecedented surge in financial performance for the defense industry. Global military spending reached a record $2.7 trillion in 2024, with revenues for the top 100 global defense companies reaching a record $679 billion in 2024 and increasing their arms revenues by nearly six per cent year-over-year.
The United States by far holds the world’s highest military budget, with 2024 spending reaching approximately $997 billion. This a great source of pride but also, at the same time, annoyance for President Trump who frequently brags about America’s leading the world in military/defence spending but in the next breath complains that America is footing the military/defense bill for the whole Western world.
Top executive compensation in 2024 showed that the median CEO pay at 10 of the largest publicly traded defense contractors was $19 million. The top five U.S. defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman) received $771 billion in contract awards between 2020 and 2024. Executives at these firms saw total compensation often exceeding $18–$23 million annually.
Defense contractors are also heavily rewarding shareholders through high dividend payouts and share buybacks.
In Canada, under Prime Minister Carney, massive increases in military spending will force ordinary Canadians to pay considerably higher income taxes to fund this gift to the American and Canadian weapons dealers.
Carey has obediently agreed to NATO’s massive five per cent of GDP increase in military spending from two per cent GDP. This increase is solely based on Trump’s flippant demand to NATO that they arbitrarily increase military spending.
NATO is the largest, most heavily armed imperialist military alliance to ever exist in the military history of the world. It was given birth to as a relic of the Second World war, despite having no discernable purpose at any point in time other than its own constant attempts to justify its own existence. It is testament to the American military-industrial complex’s ability to outlive World War II.
Despite Carey’s raising Canadian defence spending by this exorbitant amount, in large part in his initial efforts to curry favour with the mercurial Trump, Trump has failed to respond to Carney’s pathetic attempts to woo him. Trump has not at all been deterred from continuing his disrespectful public bullying of Carey or decreasing his punitive tariffs on Canada. When you see the two men together in public, it is like watching a vaudevillian comedy team with the comical dynamic of the bully and the bullied.
The opposition in Canada to this unprecedented increase in military spending has been effectively muted, both in terms of media and political response. Both the Liberal and the Conservative parties and the Bloc Quebecois support the NATO five per cent increase in GDP. The Green party does not support an increase in NATO or Canadian military spending but the only leader of a major Canadian federal political party to call for an actual major cut in Canadian military spending is Avi Lewis. Avi’s plan is, instead, to return the massive savings incurred by these cuts to the citizens of Canada.
In addition to his massive increases in Canada’s military spending, Carney has gutted Canada’s reduction in fossil fuel programs with the help from amongst others the notorious Premier Danielle Smith of Alberta. Carney’s routine with fossil fuel projects is to do some cosmetic fussing about climate change but the reality is that Carney, in the end, refuses to leave the oil in the ground, in defiance of the dire warnings of the Nobel Prize winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is even though he was an U.N. Climate Change envoy himself. Clearly, what he is doing in his failure to leave the oil in the ground is unconscionable, especially in the face of him well knowing the dire consequences of his actions.
Despite Carey’s so-called much heritable brave speech in Davos about “the end of the rules-based international order”, he has never ever spoken up and directly and publicly and clearly condemned Trump for his outrageous multiple illegal invasions and murders of citizens of many other countries. When it comes to Trump, Carney is an unprincipled coward. As Groucho Marx, the brilliant American satiric vaudevillian comedian said, “If you don’t like these principles, I have others.”
To help facilitate Carney’s massive increase in Canadian military spending and consistent with Canada’s faithful obedience to NATO and Carney’s efforts to try and appease Trump, the Canadian government is now in love with courting NATO’s Defense, Security, and Resilience Bank (DSRB), praying that it ends up in Toronto under the Royal Bank of Canada’s purview.
The Royal Bank of Canada will work alongside some of the world’s biggest lenders to help create a new defence bank that could help Canada meet elevated military spending targets required by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The proposed bank is a deeply concerning intertwining of arms dealers and major investment banks and government funds to finance NATO’s and Carney’s exorbitant whims in increased military spending.
As well, Carney, the forever unrequited lover, has also signed on to, at Trump’s pleasure, and without a moment of public debate, Trump’s delusional Golden Dome missile defence scheme. This scheme, which has already cost American taxpayers trillions upon trillions of dollars since it was first sold to the already dementing U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s by Edward Teller, the very ambitious nuclear weapons scientist whose gift to the world was the H-bomb.
It is widely agreed amongst most knowledge respected weapons scientists that the Golden Dome and other related types of missile defense schemes exist more in the realm of fantasy than reality. Not one of these schemes will be ever capable of providing the 100 per cent protection from enemy incoming missiles that these schemes falsely claim they can achieve. Nonetheless, our prime minister has pledged $61 billion USD of Canadian taxpayer dollars in one more failed attempt at wooing Trump.
Carney, consistent with his strong support for the RBC Defense, Security, and Resilience Bank, plans to also militarize the Canadian economy by putting public money and Canadian private investment into Canadian owned defense companies.
Military history has proven over the long test of time unequivocally that more weapons make the world more dangerous, not less. This is now a well proven and unquestionable fact which should determine all public policy regarding human security.
Predictably, this incredible increase in Canadian military spending is already leading to enormous government spending cuts that will impoverish the government’s capacity to administer Canada’s many public social programs as well as its capacity to fund the government’s environmental and climate change programs.
Trump’s inauguration was attended by many oil billionaires. Because of Trump’s avid promotion of fossil fuels, the wealth of the oil barons has increased beyond their wildest dreams. Many of these same oil billionaires also have military/defence holdings. Prominent amongst these military oil barons are the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers have been notorious for using their fortunes to fund libertarian/conservative causes, specifically pushing for deregulation, anti-tax policies, and gutting environmental policies.
High military defense spending in every country where it has been a part of public policy has always led to uncontrolled debt, siphoned off money from social programs and the ability to build and maintain required infrastructure.
Thus war, having originated in the survival instincts of the chimpanzees, has now evolved in its human form as one of the largest and most profitable businesses on the planet. It is this profitability that is the main motivation for its existence, not security.
Demographics
Billionaires and military/defence executives and contractors are exclusively white males. This is consistent with the dominant roles white males have held throughout history in several areas within global societies.
The white phenotype is a confluence of cultural factors as opposed to the strong evidence for a biological evolutionary predisposition in the human male towards aggression, violence and war. Human males have 98 per cent identical DNA to their cousins, the chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have high levels of territoriality, aggression and will kill other members of chimpanzees’ species when they intrude on their territory.
White males have held most of the political and economic colonial power throughout colonial history. This has led to the white male colonist’s narcissistic self-image. For instance, the British colonists rationalized that their empire was a gift in helping to civilize an uncivilized savage world. In Canada, the Christian churches, which had originated in England, created the reviled residential school system for Indigenous children. Whites have a personal need and an inherent facility to dominate other races through cultural factors such as legacy wealth from past white owners of colonial properties and holdings.
Military/defence executives and contractors are from primarily military backgrounds. The male biological evolutionary predisposition to aggression, violence, and war attracts men who come from families with a tradition of military services to seek their employment in the military defence industry.
This is as opposed to the billionaires’ who come from a wider range of backgrounds and often from wealthy families with high levels of inherited wealth.
‘Ultra ultra billionaires’ have led to the creation of an entirely new unprecedented social class. In the meantime, military/defence executives and contractors, because of the unprecedented high levels of global spending on armaments, have never seen such high levels of corporate renumeration and influence and power in conducting world affairs.
The ideology of the white dominance by the white race was embraced and grotesquely distorted by the Nazi’s in their fanatical and homicidal movement towards their determined goal of conquering the world for the white man.
The role of the American military-industrial complex and the related role of white dominance have reached its fullest expression to date in the Trump presidency. White dominance, often operating through white identity politics, voter turnout patterns, and appeals to racial anxiety, played a significant role in electing Donald Trump president.
Trump has discriminated against Blacks ever since, as a young businessman he was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for refusing to rent to Blacks. Throughout his career he has supported white dominance groups and denigrated Black rights groups such as Black Lives Matter. His discrimination against non-white people has reached new heights of violence in his employment of ICE agents to torment those people who are from non-white communities. And this is not to mention Trump’s current outrageous multiple invasions of non-white countries. Yet Trump was voted in as president of the United States on two occasions by half of the citizens of the United States despite his overt behaviour as being a white supremacist.
