The billionaire backlash

0:00Billionaires are everywhere. Just this week, The Guardian reported that Gen Z's hottest job is nannying for billionaires. President Trump pardoned a British billionaire who was convicted of fraud so he can visit his grandbabies in America. A billionaire investor threatened on CNBC to leave New York because housing is too expensive. It's super expensive. Because of the unions. Other developers have tried to cut deals with the unions, but they rule New York. Then he said, Mamdani's going to turn New York into Mumbai. These stories are annoying. We are annoyed with billionaires, but we can't escape them.

0:40Or can we? Coming up on Today Explained, the movement to abolish billionaires. No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties. Love you guys. Thank you so much. You're going to f***. You're going to f***. You're going to f***. You're going to f***. You're going to f***. Everybody gets a f***. You know, Mr. Burns, you're the richest guy I know. Oh, yes, but I'd trade it all for a little more. Today Explained. All right, so 67 % of Americans say billionaires are making society less fair, according to some brand new survey data. That's up eight points from a year ago. And so we called Evan Osnos.

1:21He's a staff writer at The New Yorker. He wrote a book about the Three Comma Club called The Haves and Have Yachts. That's a little New Yorker humor. Evan, what are the best and worst parts of hanging out with billionaires? Well, unfortunately, the best part is that it is awfully tempting. You begin to realize just how delicious the fresh squeezed juice really is. The worst part is that you also begin to wonder about some big questions about the democratic health, small d democratic health of the country. So it sends you back into history in ways that can be both kind of funny and thrilling and also quite disconcerting at times.

2:03So if you say billionaire to me, I think Oprah. Like that is where my mind goes. But Oprah would not be a typical billionaire. Demographically, she's simply not. She's an older black woman. Is there a typical person who sort of represents what a billionaire is? the median billionaire in a sense the one that the statistics would generate if we were trying to imagine everything we know about who they are and where they come from they would look a lot like elon musk this is the chainsaw for bureaucracy which is to say he is a man in his mid-50s who made his money, in his case, on a combination of technology, inheritance, and the sheer accumulation of giant numbers.

2:5410 years ago, nobody in the world had$100 billion. But today, there are more than a dozen people like that. I mean, Elon Musk, for instance, 10 years ago, he didn't have more than$20 billion. And today, he has around$400 billion. So the numbers have gone through the roof. Right now, worldwide, there are more than 3 ,000 billionaires. And you see the growth most sharply in the United States. I mean, in 1990, there were about 66 billionaires in this country. Today, there are close to 1 ,000. So it's grown by 10 or 15 times what it was just a generation ago. I think that really even more astonishing than that simple number is that the share of wealth that's controlled by billionaires has also soared.

3:47It used to be that the 0.1 percent of Americans controlled about 7 percent of all the wealth in the country. But today it's gone up to 18 percent. And why? The answer, as you can imagine, has a lot of factors. But the key one, really, at the heart of it, is that we've changed the rules over the last century to make it much easier for big fortunes to grow, mostly by reducing the taxes that would chip away at them over time. So by one measure, the average tax rate for the top, let's say, 400 richest Americans is now about half of what it was 50 years ago. While the tax rates for the bottom 90 % of Americans had really not budged much at all.

4:36Why is that? The answer is that wealth, as we all know, can buy you political access. And political access means that you're able to then influence, compel, maybe even coerce political decision makers, people in Congress, people elsewhere in the government who have tremendous power to make the rules better for you. So I'll give you an example. I mean, take something like the estate tax, which used to apply to a huge number of Americans. It meant that at the time that you died, you were not able to pass along all of your inheritance to your kids without them paying a lot of it in taxes. But over the course of the last generation or two, we've systematically pared back the estate tax to the point that a relatively small number of Americans now pay it.

5:28Meaning, as one of the advisors to Donald Trump in his first administration, Gary Cohn, he was quoted as telling a member of Congress, quote, only morons pay the estate tax. What he meant was they've created so many loopholes now that it's very easy by moving your money to one place or another to avoid paying the kinds of taxes that were intended to make sure that it didn't just concentrate over time in the hands of a very small number of people but was in fact available for public usage so that you can build roads and schools and other public purposes. And so there's become a kind of arms race among wealthy Americans and tax advisors about how to figure out all of the possible ways of avoiding taxes.

6:19And so it's produced a toolbox that is, frankly, available to people who have the money to spend on the most advanced esoteric tax advice. All right. So you make the money or you inherit the money and then the tax code benefits you in a lot of ways. And so you keep the money. How do you spend the money? What are billionaires buying? Well, it's become much more visible in our lives. It used to be that there was an expression that went around among the very wealthiest advisors to the rich, which was that the whale that never surfaces doesn't get harpooned. In other words, if you keep yourself out of sight, then you stand less chance of attracting public outrage or attracting the taxman.

7:09But these days, the style has changed. The mores have changed. You see the kind of wedding that Jeff Bezos is having in Venice, which is kind of visible for the whole world to see. Well, it's being described as one of the most lavish wedding extravaganzas of all time. Spotted today, Bill Gates, the Kardashians, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Brady, even Usher has arrived in the Lagoon City along with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The event's reported to have cost around$46 million. It was relocated from the city center after protests from Venetians. Or take, for example, the world of the super yacht.

7:50These are machines that are, in a sense, the most expensive objects that humans have ever figured out how to own. These are the giant super yachts that cost about a half a billion dollars in some cases. And I think there are also ways that people are figuring out how to spend their money that simply were not possible a generation ago. It used to be if you had a huge amount of money and you wanted to see your favorite artist, you might buy a front row ticket at the arena or maybe a skybox. Now people have so much money, as one musician put it to me, he said, now people can afford to have the Foo Fighters come to their backyard on a Thursday.

8:28And we see that.

8:33And you see pop stars are now available for hire, whether it's the biggest names in the world, like Beyonce. I just might be a Black Bill Gates and I'm making it. Or the Rolling Stones.

8:48or just about anybody you want. One thing that's very clear now is that the numbers have gotten so big that people are actually struggling to figure out how to spend it. I spoke to a consultant who works in the yacht industry who caters to what he himself calls the bored billionaires. And he said, look, I can come up with ways of people spending their money that they didn't know was possible. So he'll build a restaurant, for instance, on a sandbar in the Maldives, and it'll be made out of 3D printers, and they'll have dinner together, and then it'll be washed away, and nobody will ever be able to eat in that particular place in that way again.

9:29That, he said, is the kind of thing that you eventually end up spending your money on once you've bought everything else. You spent a decade reporting on billionaires. I wonder what you found about what non-billionaires think of billionaires. What are our overarching attitudes toward these people? Well, historically, Americans have actually been more permissive, more accommodating of inequality than other countries. Compared to Europeans, for instance, we tend to be more willing to believe that inequality is the natural outgrowth of capitalism. But that number is changing, and it's changing in important ways.

10:14What you notice is that today there's an almost equal number of Americans, according to polls, who will tell you that billionaires are, as they say, bad for society. They create unfairness. And the same number of Americans who want to become billionaires themselves. But what's notable is that these numbers are different among younger people. So Gen Z, for instance, has a lower tolerance for dramatic inequality and for the very visible effects of these giant fortunes than their parents and grandparents did. The billionaire companies who are paying less in taxes than me in Arkansas, that's the problem.

10:54You don't make a billion dollars through hard work. You make a billion dollars through exploitation. When people say eat the rich, they are not talking about your uncle who has a lakefront property and a golden doodle. OK, we are talking about people who could single handedly end world hunger and yet they choose not to. And this is a reflection of exactly the changes over the last generation that we've been talking about.

11:24Evan Osnos of The New Yorker coming up. The proletariat sharpens its pitchforks and Evan's coming back.

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15:23This is Today Explained. Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, good day to you. Recently, as a result of, I don't know, I'm just going to pick a name out of a hat, Zoran Mamdadi, we have all been starting to hear about a sort of anti-billionaire sentiment that goes something like this to keep it short. Abolish billionaires. There shouldn't be billionaires. Talk to me about where this abolish billionaires push comes from and where it begins. Well, as a general idea, this has been around since the Russian Revolution in 1917. But in recent years, it's become much more explicit. It was really around 2019 that we began to hear that idea.

16:12This was in the latter moments of the first Trump administration. and Bernie Sanders was running for president. And he was talking about the idea that, as he said at the time, very clearly in his mind, billionaires shouldn't exist. We cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working families of this country for 45 years. And then you had Elizabeth Warren talking about a policy platform that would involve a wealth tax. Taxing income is not going to get you where you need to be the way taxing wealth does. The rich are not like you and me. The really, really billionaires are making their money off their accumulated wealth, and it just keeps growing.

16:59So you follow that up to the present, and the idea has become now much more broadly felt in progressive policy circles that, to borrow a phrase, every billionaire is a policy failure. That is where it's come. And Zoran Mamdani's campaign was, in a sense, the most dramatic example of that because it was, after all, unfolding right there in the financial capital of the United States, New York City. Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist? I don't think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality. And ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city.

17:45Yes, you're right. It happening in New York City in the way that it was made it feel very mainstream. Not long ago, the singer Billie Eilish got an award from the Wall Street Journal of all publications. And she stood up and she said, Love you all, but there's a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. And if you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? And no hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties. Love you guys. Thank you so much. And it made me wonder whether we're seeing more of this kind of conversation in 2025 or whether it's happening in different quarters or whether this is just sort of a continuation of the last, I don't know, 5, 10 years.

18:31I think it's pretty clear that it's actually now in a crescendo. It's becoming much more a part of everyday conversation. The example you gave of Billie Eilish talking about this coming from a pop culture perspective is really noticeable. And it's for a few reasons. One, I think we're living through a time now where the fusion of economic power and political power has never been as obvious. We all saw that scene on January 20th, the inauguration of the second Trump presidency, in which the crowd was full of billionaires. Front and center at President Trump's inauguration, a lineup of billionaire tech titans.

19:18of the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, who's there, as well as Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and Elon Musk from X. Many of his biggest political supporters were the richest people in the country and the richest people in the world. In fact, so many were on that stage beside him that there wasn't even room for the leaders of Congress who were relegated to the audience. That was a new thing. We hadn't seen that before. Trump went on to then staff his administration with at least a dozen billionaires. President-elect Donald Trump assembling now what could be the wealthiest administration in history.

19:59So that includes billionaires Howard Lutnick, his choice to be Commerce Secretary, Linda McMahon as Education Secretary, and Scott Vessant as Treasury Secretary. The billionaires on the official cabinet will have a combined net worth of over$13 billion. Now, that is not including, of course, Elon Musk or Trump's new billionaire ambassadors. We've never had a moment in which the actual levers of government have been handed over to some of the richest people in the world. This is not an abstraction. It's just a literal fact. And you see that then reflected across the decisions that the government makes.

20:37So, for instance, the big fiscal bill that passed earlier in the year, known as the one big beautiful bill, was often characterized and calculated to be the single largest transfer of wealth ever in American history simply by the way that it closed off avenues for subsidies and support for poorer Americans by, in fact, creating opportunities for the wealthiest Americans to hold on to more of their money. So that fact is it's just no longer an abstraction in the background. It feels to people like it's right there front and center on stage, for lack of a better term. For a long time, politicians would try not to look like they were too wealthy.

21:22Trump obviously goes in completely the other direction. He luxuriates in the idea that he is surrounded by money. You look at the fact that he threw a Great Gatsby party at a time when a lot of Americans were struggling with the fact that SNAP benefits, nutritional assistance had been cut off because the government was shut down. Or he's posting photos on social media of renovating his bathroom in the White House or of building a giant ballroom. This is going to be probably the finest ballroom ever built. So in some ways, it feels like Trump is still reading from a cultural playbook from the 1980s in which we were all kind of cheering for these emblems of big wealth when, in fact, the public attitudes, as shown in polls, are pretty clear that people are not laughing along with him.

22:15I remember during in the years after the financial crisis, I was I was a beat reporter covering wealth and poverty. And I remember everyone said this is like 2013, 14, 15. Everyone said at some point there is going to be a class war in the United States. People are fed up and they're frustrated and it's right in our faces. And the thing that strikes me is a decade later, it is so much more right in our faces. Social media is so much more a part of people's lives, not just Twitter. But there's TikTok, there's Instagram, where you get to see people's nice stuff and nice lives. Come spend the day with me as a lazy millionaire in Los Angeles.

22:50I started off the day with a slow flow yoga class. I've made my money. I look cute. I've got my matcha. I've done my workout for the day. What do I do for the rest of my day? Money cannot buy happiness, but a lot of money can. But I do wonder where you think American attitudes on this go as we go forward into something that feels like more billionaires and more billionaire control. Well, for a long time, I think that Americans tolerated and in fact, in some cases celebrated inequality or these giant fortunes at the top because they felt like they were they were the emblems of opportunity. They kind of substantiated the myth that really is important to the American idea, the idea that you can go from the bottom to the top.

23:39You know, the kind of thing that you still do hear from cab drivers on the other side of the world when they hear that you're an American. But the numbers here at home are very different than what that myth suggests. I mean, the simple fact is if you're a person who was born in 1940 in this country, you stood a 90 percent chance of out-earning your parents. But you fast forward to today and a child who's coming of age today stands less than half that chance of out-earning their parents. And as a result, there is a feeling of hollowness and of frustration about that mythology. And so it feels as if this is no longer just a part of the usual ebb and flow of opportunity and fortune, of money concentrating into the hands of a few and then dispersing out more broadly.

24:27And the history on this suggests that at a certain point, people do get frustrated to the point where they don't accept it anymore. It can feel as if we're approaching some reckoning point. There's a great historian named Ramsey McMullen who studied the fall of Rome. And what he said was the fall of Rome took 500 years. But you could condense that history into a very concise explanation. He said, fewer had more. And in a way, I think that feeling, that recognition that we're beginning to monkey around with the very foundation of America's democratic sustainability has bled out into the broader population to such an extent that that willingness to celebrate giant fortunes as emblems of opportunity rather than as signs of distress is changing.

25:25And that pendulum, in all the ways we've talked about today, it feels as if it is beginning, perhaps, to swing in the other direction.

25:38Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. His latest book is The Haves and Have Yachts. Abishai Artsy produced today's show, Jolie Myers edited. Laura Bullard is our senior researcher, Patrick Boyd and Adrian Lilly engineered. The rest of us, the best of us, Danielle Hewitt, Hadi Muagdi, Ariana Espuru, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Ested Herndon, Amina El-Sadi, Miranda Kennedy, Miles Bryan, and Kelly Wessinger. They say daughters steal your beauty. I saw Sean this week and it checks out. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC and the show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, podcast.voxmedia.com.

26:16I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.