‘The Haves and Have-Yachts' mingles with the new aristocracy

Washington Post

18-06-2025

In 1989, when the hotel tycoon Leona Helmsley was on trial for tax evasion, her former housekeeper testified that she'd once sneered: 'We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.' Unsurprisingly, Helmsley was convicted; perhaps equally unsurprisingly, at least to those of us incensed by the injustices that regularly attend stark wealth inequality, she served less than half of her four-year sentence, spending a few months under house arrest (not exactly a crucible for someone who passed the time in a posh hotel) after just 18 months in prison.
Helmsley features only in a parenthetical aside in 'The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich,' the latest book by veteran New Yorker reporter and National Book Award winner Evan Osnos, but her debacle is emblematic of the collection's broader concerns. In 10 nimbly reported essays, all of which originally appeared in the New Yorker between 2017 and 2024, Osnos investigates the privileges and pretensions — and often, the crimes — of the outrageously affluent. Topics include the polite 'Country Club Republicans' of Greenwich, Connecticut, and their embrace of the gaucheries of Trumpism; gigayachts, or yachts that exceed 295 feet in length and are, per Osnos, 'the most expensive item that our species has figured out how to own'; and the entire industry designed to support rich people in their elaborate efforts to avoid paying taxes without technically breaking the law. (Of course, rich people with few qualms about breaking the law are well represented here, too.) It emerges that Helmsley's attitude is unfortunately characteristic.
I am generally skeptical of books like 'The Haves and Have-Yachts.' Speaking of wealth and extravagance, there is no justification for charging people $30 for work that is already widely available, and collections made up entirely of previously published essays are rarely cohesive, even when the individual pieces are excellent. The only part of Osnos's book that has not been published before is an introduction that is not even 10 pages long, which feels a bit like cheating.
Still, I grudgingly concede that this is about as good as a work of this sort could be. Osnos's essays fit unusually well together, his reporting is sharp, and his prose is charming. He has an especially keen eye for redolent detail: In 'The Floating World,' his dispatch from the rarefied air of the Palm Beach International Boat Show in 2022, he writes that yachts have 'grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don't barge into the wrong stateroom.'
And his topic is regrettably timely. As its title suggests, there is little in 'The Haves and Have-Yachts' about the victims of wealth inequality. The book is a repository of noxious have-yachts and envious haves who fret about their comparatively small boats and modest mansions. Aside from a brief foray into the money struggles of average musicians — who often feel financially compelled to perform at rich people's parties — genuine have-nots are conspicuously absent. But Osnos's emphasis is understandable: The bizarre spectacles and amoral contortions of what he calls our 'new aristocracy' matter more than ever.
'Since 1990,' Osnos writes, 'the United States' supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than eight hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only 20 percent.' Indeed, as of 2019, 'America's four hundred richest individuals owned about $3 trillion in wealth — more than all Black households and a quarter of all Latino households combined.' Are these rare individuals subject to more regulations or constraints? On the contrary, 'the average tax rate on the top 0.01 percent has fallen by more than half,' prompting financial advisers to 'describe the current era as a golden age of tax avoidance.'
There is every reason, then, to care about the contradictions at the heart of the ultrarich worldview. The book's theoretical centerpiece, 'Ruling-Class Rules,' delves into one of the most vexed of these: the extent to which prominent members of the MAGA coalition strive to position themselves as both elites par excellence and unassuming men of the people. There's Sen. Josh Hawley, son of a bank president and graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School; Stephen K. Bannon, distinguished alumnus of Harvard Business School and erstwhile Goldman Sachs employee; and Tucker Carlson, graduate of an elite prep school. But as Osnos observes, 'Nobody in American public life has a more unsettled relationship to status than Donald Trump.' As the president 'elbowed his way into Manhattan and Palm Beach, he touted the exclusivity of his golf course ('the most elite in the country') and hotels ('the city's most elite property'),' but he also insisted on his populist bona fides throughout his campaigns.
The ultra-wealthy's ambivalence about their own advantage manifests in other ways, too. In many arenas, they seek both conspicuous opulence and total privacy. The people who hire famous musicians to play at their children's birthday parties for incredible sums want to impress their friends — but as an entertainment lawyer explained to Osnos, 'They don't want anybody to know how much they paid the artist' or 'the details of the party.'
Yachts are the ultimate embodiments of the conflicting impulses to show off and to retreat. Of late, rich people have outfitted their boats with flashy amenities like 'IMAX theaters, hospital equipment that tests for dozens of pathogens, and ski rooms where guests can suit up for a helicopter trip to a mountaintop,' yet all of these offerings are sequestered at sea. As Osnos puts it, these 'shrines to excess capital operate, as vast fortunes do, on a principle of controlled visibility — radiant to the right audience, but veiled from the wider world.' In the end, what yachts really offer is 'seclusion as the ultimate luxury.'
What are rich people hiding from when they take to the ocean? The answer can be found in 'Survival of the Richest,' Osnos's essay from 2017 about wealthy 'preppers' who purchase luxury bunkers in case of apocalypse. In part, rich preppers fear the usual gamut of wars and environmental disasters. But they are also seeking protection from the ire that their very existence provokes. 'The tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world's wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves,' Osnos writes. One rich prepper told him, 'Anyone who's in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution.' Still, many of the ultrarich would rather weather the end of the world in a bunker than take any steps toward ameliorating the conditions that might induce it. Better total societal collapse than even the mildest checks on corporate or individual greed.
No wonder Marie Antoinette gets mentioned in 'The Haves and Have-Yachts.' The billionaire David Sacks was dismayed when the theme of his 40th birthday party leaked to the press in 2012: It was, naturally, 'Let Him Eat Cake.' As venture capitalist and yacht enthusiast Bill Duker once joked, 'If the rest of the world learns what it's like to live on a yacht like this, they're gonna bring back the guillotine.'
Well, Mr. Duker, we live in hope.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of 'All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.'
Dispatches on the Ultrarich
By Evan Osnos.
Scribner. 278 pp. $30