Why are we not focusing as much attention on the Billionaires in our own back yard as we are on Musk and Bezos?

Ever since the January 20th, when Trump reclaimed the White House, there has been a great deal of attention given to Elon Musk’s role in that administration, and rightfully so.

I would encourage people to read the following two articles, both of which provide a substantive critique of Elon Musk and the DOGE. First, is an article entitled, Elon Musk Didn’t Start Flouting The Law With DOGE, which provides solid historical analysis of Musk’s criminal practices. The second article is entitled, The DOGE Charade, which deconstructs what the Musk-led project is actually doing, instead of what he and Trump are claiming.

We should all have nothing but contempt for people who are part of the growing billionaire class. They extract from people and from the earth with the goal of expanding their wealth, regardless of the consequences. I get that people want to focus on Musk and Bezos, but we have Billionaires right here in our community.

There are 11 Billionaires in Michigan and two Billionaire families right here in Grand Rapids…..the Meijer and DeVos families. According to the most recent Forbes Real Time Billionaire page, the Meijer brothers – Doug, Hank and Mark, are all listed as being worth $7.4 billion each. In a recent report, the group Americans for Tax Fairness puts the DeVos family wealth at $5,4 billion collectively. Personally, I think that the DeVos family’s collective wealth is higher than that, but it is so difficult to find hard data, as they, like most members of the Capitalist Class, don’t believe in transparency. 

I have written extensively about the DeVos family for more than 30 years, which you can see in my A DeVos Family Reader, entitled, We’re Rich and We Do What We Want. More recently, I wrote a piece, Why are we not more pissed off with the DeVos family regarding the shit show that is the Trump Administration? In that article I provide details on how much money the DeVos family spent in the 2024 election, at the local, state and federal level. 

Now, over the past few years, GRIID has been tracking the wealth of the Meijer family, like when we noted that, during the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic, the wealth of Doug & Hank Meijer had grown by $6.7 Billion. We noted that this increased wealth was taking place when so many people were without work and experiencing food insecurity.

Another way that we have looked at the wealth of the Meijer family in recent years is to re-imagine how just the amount of increased wealth they made during the early part of the pandemic could benefit their employees. We noted that if Meijer paid their employees $40 an hour for a 40 hour work week, that would result in a $90,000 annual salary. If Meijer decided to pay their employees such a wage, they would still be worth BILLIONS, meaning their lives would be ridiculously comfortable. The difference is that their employees would now have a less stressful life and be able to have opportunities they didn’t have before.

In another examination of the Meijer family wealth, we wrote in August of 2021:

For the rest of us, we should be marching on the Meijer corporate headquarters at 2929 Walker Ave NW, Grand Rapids, making other demands about wealth redistribution. Imagine what $900 million could do to relieve the harm that thousands of families are currently experiencing in the Greater Grand Rapids area. $900 million would eliminate poverty, homelessness, food insecurity and provide plenty of health care funding. Demanding that the Meijer family give $900 million to be distributed to the thousands of families in this area who are experiencing poverty, systemic racism and other forms of structural violence would still leave Hank & Doug Meijer with $12.6 billion, which I’m sure they could still support their families on.

Considering the fact that the DeVos family is number 49 of the 150 families from the Capitalist Class in the US that contributed over $7 million to the GOP in the 2024 election cycle, it would be safe to say that they are the member of the Billionaire Class in Grand Rapids that is most responsible for the new Trump Administration locally.

If we acknowledge this fact, then why are there no protests and no rage being directed at the DeVos family? Why are we not organizing a campaign to expose them and to undermine their comfort? What is it going to take before we take action action the people who have imposed upon us this nightmare reality we find ourselves in?

Taxing the rich is a nice sentiment, but that is really low hanging fruit. We need to make members of the Billionaire Class, like the DeVos family, feel uncomfortable and let them know that we will not tolerate their efforts to expand their wealth while so many in this community are just trying to survive. 

The DeVos family directly contributed to making sure that Donald Trump became President again. Why are we not more pissed off about this family? Like the Meijer family, the DeVos headquarters is located in this city, at the corner of Lyon and Monroe. They have business offices, their investment firm and all of their foundations are housed in one building. Why are we not organizing actions there?