‘Should you exist?’ Billionaires face rising criticism alongside rising power.

The United States was at the precipice of a financial crisis – and the wealthy and well-connected worked out a plan to avert disaster.

That was the narrative in 1907, as Joseph Pierpont Morgan brought fellow financiers into a room and coaxed them to prop up a tottering banking system. Their action eased a potentially devastating financial panic. But it also troubled many Americans by revealing how, even within an already mighty nation, a relative few wielded extraordinary power.

Today, those concerns still resonate. They punctuated the 2016 presidential race when candidate Donald Trump poured $66 million into his campaign and went on to become the first billionaire president in the United States. Last week they became especially pointed in a Democratic presidential debate, as a billionaire candidate on stage confronted another candidate’s assertion that “billionaires should not exist.”

“We’re in this populist moment, and the populist sentiments are playing out in different ways,” says David Callahan, editor of Inside Philanthropy. Where President Trump has tapped into anger at the media and coastal elites – even while being a person of big wealth himself – on the left “Bernie Sanders is really tapping into anger at the billionaires and wealth inequality, also taking on his party establishment.”