Estate taxes are the way to deal with that. Otherwise you potentially get massive distortionary effects from people trying to dump all their ownership into liquid assets right before they die, assuming that's what you meant by wealth. It also gets odder when you no longer have a single owner. Jeff Bezos is fabulously wealthy and holds lots of stock in Amazon, but he does not own Amazon outright. You could say that when he dies, his stock goes to the workers. Okay, what about stock held by funds like Vanguard or pension funds? What does death even mean then? It's a whole mess, or you could go with the simpler estate tax.