a) These people are mostly rich based on the assessed value of their business. It's not 2 trillion dollars in liquid assets, it's mostly value they can't convert to money, making the wealth assessment nearly meaningless. Articles like this exist only to piss people off, it's not an honest assessment.
It's not a dishonest assessment, either.
Jeff Bezos really is tens of billions of dollars richer and has paid (proportionally) virtually fuck all tax. That is an entirely valid perspective on the matter.
And whilst I'm well aware of the fact he can be taxed on capital gains eventually if he sells up (blah blah blah) I'm also highly aware this is so riddled with loopholes that the practical reality is that these gains, or a large part of them, potentially
will never be taxed. Or at least, not directly. It is flagrantly outrageous for the richest to go effectively untaxed whilst the likes of you and I get clobbered for 20, 30% or whatever.
If we didn't quite twig onto this, we can of course also consider inheritance tax or whatever it's called in the USA for which the limit goes up, and up, and up just to make sure that the rich are as blissfully untroubled in their ability to hand vast wealth to someone else as possible, and which the Republicans are agitating to erase in its entirety. Less government revenue that has to be made up by public service cuts (which poor-middle rely on more) or tax increases (for the poor and middle).
Much of this can be done via financial trusts. Under the hood of the US economy, US states have been busy trying to outdo each other deregulating the crap out of trusts in a massive rush to become the places where the global rich stash their money. What it means that this money starts to become untouchable - by legal proceedings (lawsuits, divorce)... and a lot of tax. Funny thing, a major part of the UK breaking the dominance of the aristocracy a few hundred years ago was shackling what could be done with trusts, because the aristocracy used them heavily to protect their interests. It says a lot about where we're going that they are being vigorously unshackled in many jurisdictions.