“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” – Lord Acton

In August 1971, in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology department, 24 college students agreed to take part in what they were told would be a two-week study of prison life. Half were randomly assigned to play the role of guards, the other half as prisoners. The guards were given uniforms, mirrored sunglasses, batons, and instructions to maintain order. The prisoners were dressed in smocks, assigned numbers instead of names, and placed in cells. From the outset, the experiment’s creator, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, framed it as an authentic simulation. The “prison” had rules, routines, and a chain of command—with Zimbardo himself serving as prison superintendent.

What happened over the next six days would become one of the most famous, and controversial, episodes in social psychology. Guards quickly began enforcing arbitrary and degrading punishments, from forcing prisoners to do push-ups to depriving them of food, sleep, and even access to the toilet. Prisoners showed signs of severe stress and emotional breakdowns, while Zimbardo and his team hesitated to intervene. The original plan to run the experiment for two weeks was abandoned after an outside observer, graduate student Christina Maslach, objected to the abuse she witnessed. The experiment ended after just six days.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is often cited as evidence that ordinary people can commit extraordinary cruelty when placed in positions of unchecked authority. The guards were not drawn from a population of known sadists; they were average young men. Yet once given power, and placed in a structure that legitimized that power, they rapidly adapted to the role in ways that diminished empathy and normalized harm.

Half a century later, in a different arena entirely, the billionaire class operates under strikingly similar psychological and structural conditions—though the setting is corporate boardrooms and global markets rather than a basement prison, and the tools of control are financial systems rather than batons and handcuffs. While the SPE was halted within a week, the real-world experiment of concentrated global wealth has been running for decades without an ethics committee capable of calling it off.

The parallels begin with the architecture of authority. In the SPE, the guards’ power over prisoners was absolute: they decided when and if prisoners could eat, sleep, or speak. In the modern global economy, billionaires exert comparable dominance over the economic environment. They influence wages, working conditions, and entire industry trajectories. Their decisions can determine the closure of a factory, the automation of a workforce, or the relocation of an industry across continents. Like the guards, billionaires are insulated from those most affected by their choices. In the prison, the guards’ control was reinforced by locked doors and institutional rules. In the economy, billionaire control is reinforced by legal protections, intellectual property regimes, and political influence.

The imbalance of dependency is central in both systems. In the SPE, prisoners depended on guards for food, water, and freedom of movement. In the global economy, millions depend on billionaire-led corporations for their livelihoods, access to goods, and in some cases even the infrastructure of daily life—utilities, communication networks, and digital platforms. Dependency fosters compliance, and compliance makes it easier for those in power to shape reality according to their priorities.

Role internalization was one of the most chilling aspects of the SPE. Guards began with tentative enforcement of rules, but by the second day some were creating punishments that served no security purpose—ordering prisoners to scrub toilets with bare hands or stand for hours in stress positions. Zimbardo later observed that the role seemed to subsume the individual’s previous identity. Billionaires, too, often absorb the worldview that comes with their role. Even if they began their careers with ideals of fairness or social responsibility, the demands of protecting and expanding wealth can become central to their identity. The role rewards those who prioritize capital preservation and growth over empathy or broader societal well-being. Decisions such as mass layoffs, union suppression, or squeezing suppliers are framed as “fiduciary duty” rather than moral choices.

In both cases, the role brings with it a logic that normalizes harm. For guards, humiliation became “maintaining order.” For billionaires, wage suppression or environmental exploitation becomes “market efficiency.” Over time, moral discomfort diminishes, replaced by a professional language that sanitizes the underlying reality.

The lack of accountability was a key factor in the SPE’s rapid descent. Guards were not punished for abusive behavior; in fact, the experiment’s design subtly encouraged it by giving them broad discretionary power. Zimbardo, playing the role of superintendent, was more interested in observing the behavior than curbing it. Billionaires also operate in a largely consequence-free environment. Legal systems often contain loopholes tailored to their interests. Regulatory agencies can be underfunded or politically compromised. Campaign contributions and lobbying ensure that laws evolve in ways that protect rather than restrain wealth concentration. Even public opinion can be managed through media ownership, advertising, and carefully curated public relations campaigns.

Dehumanization played an essential role in enabling abuse in both systems. Guards in the SPE referred to prisoners only by their assigned numbers, stripping away personal identity and making it easier to inflict harm without feeling personal responsibility. Billionaires, especially those overseeing complex supply chains, encounter people primarily as abstract figures in reports: labor hours, production quotas, revenue per employee. A factory worker losing a job to automation is a line item in a cost-benefit analysis. A community poisoned by industrial waste becomes a liability estimate. By turning people into metrics, the moral weight of decisions is diluted.

The behavioral mechanisms align closely: authority is granted by the system, not necessarily earned; insulation from feedback shields those in power from the full impact of their decisions; advantage is quickly normalized; and competition fuels escalation. In the SPE, guards sometimes tried to outdo one another in displays of control. In the corporate world, billionaires compete through mergers, acquisitions, market domination, and aggressive lobbying, with each move raising the stakes for the next.

The SPE ended because someone outside the system intervened. Left unchecked, it is unlikely the participants would have stopped before causing lasting psychological harm. In the real economy, there is no singular external figure with the authority and power to halt billionaire excess. Governments are deeply entwined with corporate interests, global regulatory frameworks are fragmented, and public outrage, while potent in moments, is often short-lived and unfocused.

Some guards in the SPE were considered “good”—they did not personally abuse prisoners—but they rarely stepped in to stop the abuse of others. This is mirrored in the billionaire class by high-profile philanthropists whose charitable giving is widely praised yet does little to address the root causes of inequality. A grant to a museum or a hospital wing is positive, but it does not dismantle the systemic practices—tax avoidance, anti-competitive behavior, labor suppression—that made the donation possible. Philanthropy can serve as a reputational shield, much like the presence of a “kind” guard provided a thin veneer of humanity to the Stanford prison.

The key difference between the two scenarios is scale. The SPE involved 24 participants over six days. The billionaire economy affects billions of people over decades. The psychological harm inflicted by guards is measured in days or weeks; the economic and social harm caused by structural wealth concentration is measured in generations. The stakes include not only individual hardship but also the stability of democratic systems, environmental sustainability, and the distribution of global resources.

If the Stanford basement was a closed system, billionaire capitalism is an open one, but its constraints are no less real. Economic dependence is the cell, media narratives are the guard tower, and political lobbying is the warden’s office. Neither guards nor billionaires need to be inherently cruel for cruelty to emerge; the system rewards behavior that prioritizes control and efficiency over compassion. The cruelty is embedded in the incentives and in the insulation from consequence, not necessarily in personal malice.

Escaping either system is difficult. In the SPE, prisoners could theoretically leave, but doing so meant humiliation and loss of status within the prison context. In modern capitalism, opting out—by living entirely self-sufficiently, avoiding corporate supply chains, or refusing to participate in the consumer economy—is theoretically possible but practically out of reach for most people. The scale of integration between billionaire-led systems and everyday life means that true independence requires a level of resources and commitment few can sustain.

The most sobering lesson from Stanford is not that some individuals are predisposed to harm others, but that ordinary people can do so when placed in systems designed to facilitate it. Yet society continues to recreate these systems: concentrating power in the hands of a few, reducing transparency, and building structures that reward dominance over cooperation. The billionaire class is the latest iteration of this experiment, only this time the stakes are global.

The question is whether society will act like Christina Maslach, the outsider who halted the SPE, or like Zimbardo, the superintendent who watched and rationalized events until they spiraled out of control. Recognizing the structural parallels is the first step. Power in both contexts is assigned, not inherently earned. The environment encourages role adoption and moral drift. Dehumanization becomes routine. Lack of accountability allows abuses to persist. And intervention rarely originates from within the system.

The Stanford prison was dismantled after six days. The billionaire economy continues unchecked, shaping the conditions in which the rest of the world must live, work, and adapt. Power, when left unbounded, does not liberate—it confines. The choice for society is whether to keep operating inside the economic cellblock, hoping for benevolence from its guards, or to start building the keys that could open the door.