Take my job, please 💼
  Tonight: Updates from the world of the uber-rich and infamous. Plus: Once again, people are quitting crappy jobs for better jobs. Let's get into it. 💰 RICH GUYS  It's time for yet another Capitalism Is Broken segment here on Nightcap. So here we go, breaking news: For the gazillionth year in a row, 2021 was a very good time to be rich.
The world's wealthiest people, whose fortunes already strained comprehension, collectively gained $1 trillion last year, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
Our old buddy Elon Musk, the world's richest person, alone gained nearly $118 billion in just the last 12 months. I repeat: that's how much he gained, not his total net worth (a figure that now stands at over $300 billion).
It's hard to overstate how bonkers even one billion dollars is. Consider this: Counting to 1 million would take about 11 days if you don't eat or sleep along the way. Counting to 1 billion, with a B, would take about 30 years.
As much as 2021 may be remembered as the year of the worker, thanks to rising wages and renewed unionization efforts, it was also the year of the uber-billionaire. The astronomical gains by the world's 0.001% underscore the vastness of the wealth gap between workers and the executives and shareholders whom they serve.
Other big gainers in the billionaire bunch: Luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault (up $62.7 billion) and Google pals Larry Page and Sergey Brin (up $47 billion and $45 billion, respectively). Mark Zuckerberg's year was the stuff of tech titan nightmares, but he's still about $25 billion richer for it.
Meanwhile, the United Nations estimated 150 million people fell into poverty in 2021.
How'd the billionaires get so much extra wealth? For one, the stock market. The uber-rich owe a big hat tip to the Federal Reserve, which plowed tens of billions of dollars into financial markets every month while keeping interest rates near zero — an ultra-loose monetary policy designed to keep cash moving in financial markets as the pandemic jolted the global economy in 2020. That stimulus effort fueled a stock bonanza in 2020 and 2021 (though the Fed gravy train is going away in the first half of this year).
MY TWO CENTS Since the start of the pandemic, America's wealthiest have seen their collective fortunes soar more than 70% to more than $5 trillion. If the government taxed just the gains accrued in the last two years — which, again, were made possible by the Fed — the rich would remain thoroughly rich and the country could fund a more robust social safety net.
That was the Democrats' plan this fall. But, rather unsurprisingly, the so-called billionaire tax faced resistance from – wait for it – billionaires. (Musk, who in recent years has paid little or no income tax and whose now-trillion-dollar car company Tesla was partly built on government aid, has been especially vocal in his opposition.)
Then millionaire Senator Joe Manchin torpedoed not only the billionaire tax, but also, potentially, the entirety of President Biden's social infrastructure agenda. Manchin's pushback won him praise from billionaires such as Ken Langone, who told CNBC in November: "I'm going to have one of the biggest fundraisers I've ever had for him. He's special. He's precious. He's a great American."
Getting rich used to put you in a better ZIP code. These days, getting uber-rich puts you in a whole different reality. #️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY 4.5 million A record 4.5 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in November, pushing the quits rate up to 3%. The departures came largely from the hospitality and health care industries — lower-wage sectors directly hit by the pandemic.
The big question for 2022 is whether this dynamic will persist, and how the spread of the Omicron variant, which isn't reflected in the November data, will affect hiring. My colleague Anneken Tappe has more.
🚗 WATCH THE THRONE  American carmakers have officially lost the lead on their home turf.
For the first time ever, Toyota outsold General Motors in the United States in 2021. Both Toyota and GM reported year-end sales Tuesday, with GM falling 114,000 vehicles behind its Japanese rival.
What happened? For nearly a century, GM was the best-selling car brand in America, followed by Ford, Chrysler (now owned by European brand Stellantis) and Toyota.
But when the pandemic hit in 2020, a perfect storm of unexpectedly high demand and an acute shortage of vital computer chips wreaked havoc on the global auto industry that it has yet to fully recover from.
The impact of that chip shortage and various delivery headaches hasn't been evenly distributed among car makers, though. Toyota's US sales rose 10% compared with 2020, while GM's fell 13%.
Big picture: Ultimately, the horse race among carmakers hardly matters to customers, and experts told my colleague Chris Isidore that Toyota's lead may be short-lived. But the shift underscores just how vulnerable America's industrial giants have become to supply chain snags, having moved the vast majority of their chip-making operations overseas.
One expert told Chris that although GM's in a bit of a funk, its outlook is bright. The company is betting big on an all-electric future, while Toyota is playing catch-up with its own EV plans.
WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON? 💸 Wall Street is having a topsy-turvy moment: Long-term Treasury yields have shot up dramatically, and investors in stocks are cheering the bond market's big moves. That happens... almost never.
🇨🇳 Authorities in Hainan province, a tropical resort island off the coast of southern China, ordered the heavily indebted developer Evergrande to demolish 39 buildings, saying that the building permits had been illegally obtained.
🎶 Warner Music Group's publishing unit bought David Bowie's entire catalog spanning six decades.
⚾ Trading card giant Topps — just a few months after losing out on a major licensing deal to Fanatics — is being bought by ... Fanatics. TWEET OF THE DAY 
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