A hundred million sounds ok as a start. Not the top 5 people, far more would need to be brought back down to earth.

You might say “how would that allow investment in large projects?”

To which I would say that would mean one would have to include more people in the initial ownership/investment of a large project, which would be better than incentivizing lone lunatics with god complexes creating little empires.

Also, police don’t have to come to their door, the IRS can just take the excess money like they garnish the wages of regular folk. They could easily do that with stocks or other placeholders for capital if we empowered and funded them to do so.

And if a US citizen decides to expatriate rather than pay back the system that facilitated their success to begin with, we can put them on a list and deny them access to our markets. Good riddance to proven bad actors.

We could fund investigation and oversight, we just dont. We could make a leaps and bounds more equitable system that doesn’t leave our worst off out in the cold as we do by design as a threat to the peasants. It’s disingenuous though to claim in a world where thousandths of a penny are tracked globally in capital markets to claim that we can’t, we just won’t.

But OMG, capping net worth at 100 mill and tying it to inflation? No one will want to work or invent or excel with only the potential to earn 99.9 million dollars in their life! No one would get out of bed amirite?

Literally any game with an economy, especially with other players, has to add drains to the economy, or it would break the game. The US even used to have something closer to that prior to Reagan giving the store away to his rich buddies when he wasn’t shaming poor mothers and incarcerating people suffering addiction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_tax_cuts