Latest news with #EvanOsnos
CNN
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
What the Recent Obsession with Yachts Says About Class in America - The Assignment with Audie Cornish - Podcast on CNN Podcasts
Audie Cornish 00:00:00 Welcome to The Assignment, I'm Audie Cornish. You know, yacht season is a meaningless term to me, but this year it feels like the people enjoying yacht season won't shut up about it. Bethenny Frankel 00:00:11 We're not allowed to say the word yacht, but like a yacht. Audie Cornish 00:00:13 For example, this is Bethany Bethenny Frankel, grand dame of reality TV Housewives. Listen closely and you hear something very specific in this post. She's talking about the yacht as a public milestone of aspirational success. Bethenny Frankel 00:00:30 I'm not broke anymore and I work hard and I'm getting a boat for me and the nepo baby and I am so excited. I recognize that people are not in this position, but I'm really excited. And it feels really good. I can't believe it. I can believe it like I did this. And one day you'll do it. Audie Cornish 00:00:49 'This month, the Ritz-Carlton launched a new super yacht with a literal boat full of celebrities and rich kids of Instagram. It's imagery that goes beyond paparazzi long lens shots of A-listers sunning themselves. These are daily reminders that the super rich, they're not like us. Evan Osnos 00:01:08 It's because these objects have become these symbols of the ultimate level of exclusivity, of luxury, of indulgence, of satisfaction. All of these quite abstract concepts that companies are desperate to try to be associated with have sort of settled and distilled into this one. Very distinct world of yachts that are the most expensive objects that our species has ever figured out how to own. Audie Cornish 00:01:46 'So what makes this gilded age so different from the last one? Why is extreme wealth being disguised as aspirational, yet relatable social media content? Just what is the message for all of us normies? Evan Osnos from The New Yorker, has the answer, back in a moment. Evan Osnos literally wrote the book on this stuff. It's called 'The Have and the Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich.' Full disclosure, we're friends. And so I say this lovingly, Evan is not rich, but he has this look about him, good hair and confidence probably, that allows him to, as the New York Times reviewer noted, pass as an insider among the super rich. Evan Osnos 00:02:28 Something in the culture of the yacht is the idea that you'll find yourself in unexpected proximity with people who you might not assume you would know. And this is part of the appeal. I mean, I think many of us might remember a few years ago there were images of, for instance, the Obamas and Bruce Springsteen and Oprah. This is all on one particular voyage out on a yacht owned by David Geffen, the former Hollywood tycoon. And there was something about the odd combination of people where you would say what is it that this group and it was Tom Hanks and others and so there was something that appealed to our instincts to want to have different entry points into the pop culture moment. There were different kinds of viewers who would have looked at that scene and said, oh, I'd like to know what that conversation was like around the lunch table. And later when Oprah was asked about it, she said, you know, what happens on the yacht stays on the yard. And so that maintaining some sense of the perception at least of exclusivity is essential to the stew. That's part of what makes it appealing to people on the outside. Audie Cornish 00:03:51 You know, one of the things I didn't get to hear you talk about in other interviews is below deck. Like the yachties, apparently they're called, the people who work on these ships. And every time I see a picture of a super yacht and then that weird looking boat that follows it, and you know what I mean, you got to explain to someone like, oh no, that's where literally the other half lives. Um, but tell me about the other half because I don't know what it must be like. To service this world of people enjoying this luxury. Evan Osnos 00:04:25 'So the world of the yachty is a bargain that they make, which is that in exchange for essentially round the clock labor and a posture of complete and total service, they get adventure, they get life around the world in a luxurious environment and a salary that depending on where you sit in the packing order is either decent or... Pretty grim. If you are somebody who's at the lower ranks of the hierarchy, and boats are extremely hierarchical environments. I mean, they sort of borrow that from the rest of nautical culture. And so if you're somebody whose job is to clean the guest rooms, that's not just a regular level of cleaning. I've talked to a lot of crew members who describe the experience of, I mean, quite literally using a. A Q-tip, for instance, to clean the rim of a toilet in order to achieve the most maximal conceivable level of immaculate cleanliness. Or they'll use- Audie Cornish 00:05:31 Slash humiliation Evan Osnos 00:05:33 'And yeah, that's a big piece of the operation. I think this is part of it. And, you know, honestly, what's weird about working in this environment is you're in numerical terms, you're working for what is essentially a floating corporation that has no HR department that is subject to the whims of the captain or the owner and some combination of it at the same time, though, it can be to some of them, quite a nice environment. You're- you're- almost literally insulated from the worries of life on land. And so you can kind of get lulled into this sense of, all right, today it's the Mediterranean, next week it's The Caribbean. But then you try to transition from that into the quote unquote real world. And as some former crew members have said to me, it becomes very hard to explain to anybody outside of that what you've been doing for the last. Audie Cornish 00:06:28 And not just because you're legally not allowed. Right. To face it, you have to sign an NDA. Evan Osnos 00:06:34 Yeah! Audie Cornish 00:06:34 I'm getting lulled into the conversation because the sound of your voice is very nice, but then there's lines in the book about like the petty tyranny people live under and the psychotherapist who's like made a business out of talking to the poor people who have worked in these places. Evan Osnos 00:06:51 I spoke to one therapist in particular who had been a crew member on yachts and then she got into the work of therapy. She went to school and trained and then her first cohort that she specialized in were actually incarcerated people. She, and then, she discovered that having worked with captive populations that it was quite well suited to working with crew members because there are some things in common and, you know, she saw the irony in that. And there is a... World that is, frankly, and this applies to so much about the superyacht world, that is just beyond the horizon of our awareness in regular life. It is in all kinds of ways. Unbound by the laws that we live our normal lives under. I mean, almost literally. And if you're in international waters, if you are in the waters of some small island state that has a prime minister who might be friends, let's be honest with the owner of that yacht, you can find yourself in quite perilous straights when it comes to trying to. You know, let's say you've been mistreated at work, for instance, when you're working on it. Yeah, it can be very hard to try to see. Audie Cornish 00:08:10 Like you failed to switch out the supplies of the incoming affair partner in the bedroom. Evan Osnos 00:08:17 You are a close reader of the book. Audie Cornish 00:08:21 I am a close reader, because I'm like, oh, the Coldplay situation's got nothing on this. Like, this is insane. You're getting your fancy melons helicoptered to you, and then you're getting your lover's helicopter to you. But then the whole ship, everyone is arranging the world to the way they need it to be. Right. It's like their own little Lego land. And they can move the people and move the pieces. And I know it sounds weird that I'm obsessed with this. But I feel like there is a clue in there about why the tech billionaires have suddenly gravitated to this space as well. Evan Osnos 00:09:00 You're right about that. I think that if you are somebody, for instance, let's just speak theoretically. Let's say you've invented a company as a teenager, you dropped out of college halfway through and have spent, okay, let's forget the theoretical. I'm talking about Mark Zuckerberg. You've been able to then build your world around you, literally handpicking your lieutenants, building a company that reflects your values. In Zuckerberg's case, to give you a very... Concrete example, the reason why Facebook is blue, that very distinct royal blue, is because he is red, green colorblind. And so he created a world that quite literally suits his preferences and avoids his blind spots. And I think you can take that example in the most superficial way, the design aesthetic, and you can apply it more broadly to his perception of how society functions, of what friendship means, of how people want to build connections, of what the definition of hate speech is, of how violence travels through cultures. I mean, that is what his life has been. And it shouldn't surprise us that he has also, in the last couple of years, taken ownership of a yacht. According to the yacht trade press, he got it for a relative bargain in the 300 million range. And so somebody who has had that professional experience can now transport that same level of absolute control into their social and vacation life. Audie Cornish 00:10:37 But isn't their obsession with being in our world a reflection of the limits of that power? Or, I don't know, or what happens when their own greed and psychology takes over, right? Like Bezos is not content to be a silent kabillionaire. New wife has to be in vogue, they have to have a wedding that has, like, every actor in it, whether they know them or not. Even Zuckerberg, all of a sudden being Mr. UFC guy. Like, they're actually not content with the power that they have. And I know I sound really biased talking like this, but I'm really wrestling with it, because I don't know how it's different from, like, the actual Gilded Age, the period of history we call the Gild'd Age, but there's something that does feel different. Evan Osnos 00:11:25 'I have to tell you, the word that you just used is really the central idea of this project, contentment, or more importantly, the lack of contentment. What we find is that, and this is true both in our own lives in kind of small ways, and then it becomes simply truer when you get more zeros attached, that there is a level of unsatiability that is- Defined really by the competition and the sense of status competition that goes on between people So we might say to one another how could anybody who has already accumulated all of the possible You know toys and trappings and luxuries that a human being could ever seek to want Why do they then try to surround themselves with celebrities who they scarcely really know and is you know, what? How fulfilling could that really be? Well, because that person, if we're talking about the Bezos newlyweds, they are seeking to be in a way that perhaps they don't even fully appreciate, satisfied by the idea of being surrounded by the most famous and wealthy people in the world. For them, that's become, for the moment, at least. The threshold that they're seeking to cross. I think when I talk about insatiability, I mean that there is a level, and this has been true to human beings. And I think it's been a subject of some focus in faith traditions going back as long as history has existed. The idea that you may never find yourself satisfied with the earthly delights, no matter how many you accumulate. But we're living in a moment when you can actually see people trying to satisfy that place in their lives with objects that are as distinct and visible as a super yacht on the high seas. Audie Cornish 00:13:33 More of my conversation with Evan Osnos in just a moment. Stay with me. Audie Cornish 00:13:41 We've known each other for a while. Our families know each other. Evan Osnos 00:13:45 That's right. Audie Cornish 00:13:45 And the weird thing about being friends in America, I think is, well, maybe other countries too. We've never talked about money. I now know more about you and your history with money than in all the time we've known each other and it's weird because we're all doing a version of this aspirational dance. Evan Osnos 00:14:07 That's true. Audie Cornish 00:14:08 But nobody is honest about where their supplies come from. And I'm not saying that about you, but I remember reading a review of the book where someone made a joke that it seems though you could pass. Like that you visited this boat, you visited this world, but that you're not the kind of guy they would turn away. Evan Osnos 00:14:31 Yeah. Audie Cornish 00:14:32 There's aspects of you and your life and background that like fit. And I was wondering what that was like for you to read. Evan Osnos 00:14:40 In my case, my life is this combination of two very distinct experiences of money. I mean, on my mom's side, I come from a kind of Midwestern waspy family where nobody ever talked about money. There was always a sense that there was enough in the background, but it was a very kind of, you would make a point of try to do it subtly. So it was, there was a lot of, shall we say, kind of. Threadbare cuffs. And then on the other side of my family, which is my dad's side, were descended from Jewish Polish refugees from Europe. I mean my grandfather was one of seven siblings and he's the only one that survived World War II. And so they came to this country with nothing and so had a very different experience of trying to rebuild a world that had been destroyed. And for them, that meant actually, no, you should try to get into the best apartment you possibly can. And I remember they spent $40,000 on an apartment in New York City and then over the years built up as much as they could of the things that have been lost, you know, the books, the carpets, the artwork that was some of it fake, some of real. And it was this collision of these two very different cultures of money that for me felt like it reflected different elements that coexist in the American relationship. Audie Cornish 00:16:11 Oh no you don't, New Yorker. What did it mean for you? How did you feel as a kid? Evan Osnos 00:16:17 I guess I felt both of those elements in my life. I feel frankly kind of at home in both. I mean, I think the idea that I can be comfortable in a place where there is either an allergy to talking about money, meaning it's all kind of right there in the background and nobody does it very explicitly. Or, you know, you get into this world where it's much more overt. It's funny, you though, because in my family, Nobody really was in the money business, particularly. My mother worked for a human rights organization. My dad was a book publisher, but we were working around the edges always of, I was very conscious of the money that was in our atmosphere. I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, outside of New York City, which is a very rich suburb. Audie Cornish 00:17:05 I was about to say, that's a lot of money in the atmosphere. Evan Osnos 00:17:07 Exactly. And I remember kind of being very alert to the subtle distinctions of class, you know, what did it mean to be if you were in private school or public school, you know what kind of cars people were driving and, you know. Audie Cornish 00:17:24 And it's like a weird, I joke that you learn to code switch. Evan Osnos 00:17:28 Yeah. Audie Cornish 00:17:29 Like for me, I was a kid in a working class community, but we were immigrants. But more importantly, I was bussed at one point to this community out in Massachusetts that has like very expensive high school. And that's when I sort of learned the tiers of class, right? It was like, I'm getting bussed to this place, which is supposed to be so great, but like, oh, public school, you know, like the people there are like, you're going to the public school. Evan Osnos 00:17:54 Right. Audie Cornish 00:17:55 'And then there's another other whole world of private school, and Volvos, and NPR, and all of these. Even reading the New Yorker, I didn't, Evan Osnos, I did not read or pick up or see the New Yorker until I was in my mid-20s and I was a working journalist. I did no know there was a whole world people who like tore out the covers and put them inside their cabins, right? Evan Osnos 00:18:20 Yeah. Audie Cornish 00:18:20 And the reason why I'm so obsessed with this is like For you, like, can you code switch or have you crossed over? Like, have you reached the point where you're so fully in this world that it's hard to remember what it was like to struggle? Evan Osnos 00:18:35 'It's very much a code-switching experience in the sense that I feel like part of that, and I, at this point, you know, I'm 48 years old and so it's hard for me to know what is a product of my professional life, which in our business is so kind of complete. And I've spent my life as a foreign correspondent and a national correspondent, and that's different. For people who are outside of our business, I don't think they know, that's different than being like a lifer in Washington who covers that world and is like a part of that world. Like when you're a correspondent, you dip into different worlds and you try desperately to have them not kick you out. That is what it means to be a correspondent. And in a way, that's how I've spent my adult life in, whether it's in China or in the Middle East, or it didn't feel that different than when it came time to go to the Palm Beach International Boat Show and sort of sidle up to people and start chatting with them about boats. And the reality is, I had never, I don't know, the first, before this, I'd never been on a yacht. I had no knowledge of it. Audie Cornish 00:19:39 Yeah, but I went to a book party and someone came up. And mention they had a boat, maybe. And you were like, ah, how many sails? And I was like, Evan? Evan? Como? Who is this? Evan Osnos 00:19:53 Yeah! 00:19:53 What is this party? And I remember even feeling there like, oh, it's funny, all these people don't think they're rich, right? Like they're adjacent to their own thing that seems out of reach for people. Given all this writing you've done in this area. Given the conversations I assume you must have had with your parents after the book came out, if this kind of came around, how are you addressing wealth with your kids? Evan Osnos 00:20:25 I really do find myself, and I think this is something that applies even to people who haven't written books on these topics, is like I was talking with my daughter this morning and I was talking to her about how we have to try to separate out what she admires of Taylor Swift for talent and what she admirers of Taylor Swift, for this phenomenon of fame that is such a, I think, really dangerous seduction for kids right now. We're trying to parse it out. And, you know, she'll roll her eyes at me. She's seven and she's like, all right, daddy, whatever. But I just want to be friends with Taylor Swift. But I'm like, yeah, but let's, let's focus. I'm Like, some of this is, is a celebration of art, of artistic power and of her ability to speak to people and to, to connect to their experience. And then there's this other thing, which is right now, our society is celebrating to an unhealthy effect of money, power, and fame. And I think I am trying to talk to them about it in a way that hopefully makes some of this seem like it's not God knows about the objects, but is about what it says about our society, which we care about. Audie Cornish 00:21:37 'And about responsibility. And I think that has been one of the things I've struggled with to say, because my kids are growing up in a house bigger than the house I grew up in. I grew in rental apartments. And they are completely like, yeah, this is how life is. This is how we roll. And I'm like, uh-uh, little prince. Evan Osnos 00:22:01 Yeah. Audie Cornish 00:22:02 'There's an old school version that's like, this ain't your house, this isn't my house. You know, like, you're- But there's also a version that says, what's the responsibility of having this? And I know this sounds far off from where we started, but that's one of the things I think that most of us who are now maybe polling a little less interested in the billionaire class, it's that sense that they feel no responsibility to the rest of us, right? Like I'm gonna get on my boat and I'm going to do things to the environment and when something goes wrong, I'm to go to space. It feels very far philanthropy age and all this other stuff. And somehow I have to tell my kid, like you can invent something and be incredible. And also you then have a responsibility to the people around you just because, right? And I literally have to explain that because I don't see anyone modeling it. Evan Osnos 00:22:55 It is exactly the era that we find ourselves in and people have described it in different terms somebody described it as noblesse without oblige this idea that we're in this period when suddenly the there is a celebration of the accumulation and absolutely no talk about what are the obligations to society that come with that power and that's a dangerous evolution in culture. And so part of the what's happening now is that you've got all of these little aspiring Elon Musk's out there, you know, who have, they're building their fortunes. They're somewhere in Silicon Valley. We haven't even heard their names yet. And yet they are patterning themselves after individuals who have made it pretty clear that they don't see much commitment or responsibility to the thriving of a broader society. And I think part of the reason to document it in this kind of detail, it's sort of the anatomy of this culture, is to then be able to say, when we look back on this period, or even frankly in the present, is this really the way we want to be applying the wealth of society that's been accumulated into the hands of a tiny number of people? Is this really how we think it should be used as a culture? That's a plastic matter. That's something that can change with public acceptance or rejection and public pressure, and it can change internally too. You know, I remember once a CEO of a company in Silicon Valley saying to me, the thing I hate most about Silicon Valley is the conversations that people have about where we'll go in the event of a collapse of society, even if it's our own doing, he said. You know when that happens, I want to say to people, well, if you're so concerned about the pitchforks, what are you doing? To help the homeless in your community. And I think that there is a way in which talking about it, making explicit, putting it out into public view, what is usually shielded from view, is part of the process of pressure testing it. Audie Cornish 00:25:04 That was Evan Osnos, journalist with The New Yorker and the author of "The Have and The Have Yachts" a book of essays that is out now. I want to thank you for listening, please do rate and review the show, definitely share it, it really helps. And I'll see you next week.
Fast Company
01-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
The danger of American oligarchs
New Yorker staff writer and author Evan Osnos spent decades chronicling the social, economic, and political changes in China and currently writes about American politics. To understand the second election of President Trump, though, he realized he needed to understand the vast inequality in American society. According to 2024 data from the Federal Reserve, more than two-thirds of the country's wealth is held by the top 10% of U.S. households. And the top 1% of U.S. households hold more than one-third of the country's wealth. Osnos's new collection of essays, The Haves and Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, explores the world of the 1%, from their tax-dodging and yacht-buying techniques to their propensity for building luxury bunkers and employing pop stars to perform at private events. Osnos came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about his book, what's behind the rising inequality in America, and the danger that inequality poses to democracy. Why did you want to write about the ultrarich? In 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president, I realized that the normal tools of political analysis—the way that I usually write about what's happening in the world—were not going to suffice. I couldn't understand how a guy who declared himself the enemy of the elites could somehow inhabit that role while being the billionaire son of a real estate family in New York. I needed to understand. The answer to that lay, ultimately, in trying to understand the mechanics of the big money world. That was the origins of this. You begin the book by talking about how ubiquitous the ultra wealthy are in the administration and you write that inequality has led to the undoing of many societies. Do you think that is happening in America? We are at a very tenuous moment, and I don't think I'm unique in that impression. All of us, no matter where we sit on the political spectrum, we look at it and say, this feels really fragile and it feels volatile. The question of course is, why? From my perspective, you can't understand this periodwithout recognizing that we're living at a time of really historic, arguably unprecedented inequality in this country. That's not an abstraction. The richest people in America have a larger share of the nation's wealth than their predecessors did in the Gilded Age. If you want to really have an honest conversation about what it will take to hold this country together, we have to be honest about the facts. Let's remind ourselves [that] we've been through these moments before and we've found our way back to a more stable, productive, democratic future. The super yacht is the super symbol of our era. There used to be 10 of the largest yachts [available] a generation ago, and now there are 170. They occupy this kind of strange place in our culture. They're both visible and invisible. I mean, you see them in the New York Post or in the Daily Mail. They're designed to stay out of reach, but they are the most conspicuous machines that anybody could possibly own. The yachts are a symbol of a world in which capital is more mobile and more fluid and in which borders are liquified. I had this really interesting interview with a guy who has been in the yachting world for decades. He watched it turn into this ginormous industry with huge amounts of money on the line. And he said every decade or two [the yacht buyers are coming from] a new industry. First it was the Greek shipping fortunes. And so you saw Aristotle Onassis competing against another shipping magnate [for the most ostentatious yacht]. [Then] it was the oil money. All of a sudden, it was people from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and they had different needs. They were sailing their yachts around the Arabian Peninsula and they were inside all the time. They needed good air-conditioning. But what's really interesting about [yacht buying] is that it tells you something about the global economy. Where is the center of gravity at any moment in our time? You could chart the history of American economics over the last 60 years by looking at the high seas. They also depreciate in value immediately. I remember the Financial Times wrote a great piece that described them as about as financially prudent as buying 10 Van Goghs and then holding them above your head while you're treading water. [Yachts are] essentially something for people who have limitless resources. You write about how it's almost easier for a billionaire to live on a luxurious yacht than on land. It might seem uncouth to show how rich you are on land; on water, it's a different story. A Silicon Valley CEO said to me that the honest fact is that you can't live in a $500 million house because the optics are weird. Your employees will be enraged at you. But a half billion dollar boat is pretty nice. This same CEO said to me that the yacht is the best place to, as he put it, absorb excess capital. A certain number of businesses have generated so much [money] because of the ownership structure for their founders and for key investors that [these people] are quite literally encountering this problem of having excess capital and having to figure out ways to park it in places that won't cause blowback socially and culturally and ultimately in business terms. One of the themes that I noticed across this world was that, in a way, this is the natural result of an unthinking cult of scale. It's not that long ago that we thought scale was an unambiguous good. When I wrote a profile of Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago [for The New Yorker ], I was talking to him and to his employees about this period when essentially connecting people was a euphemism for growing. And growing was a self-justifying, self-fulfilling idea. It was an end in itself. The yachts are the symbolic representation of that concept. You grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and decided to write about the town's turn towards Trump. Why did you want to write about it? It's always been a prosperous place. It was an amazing place to grow up as a kid. It has the only public high school that I know of that has an electron microscope. There was also a point at which I became aware that Greenwich told us something important about what was happening in Republican politics. Greenwich had been traditionally the birthplace of the country club Republican. The Bush family was from there. Prescott Bush, who was the father of George H.W. Bush, was quite literally the country club golf champion in town. He was the senator from Connecticut, and he was an old-school moderate Republican—what they used to call a Rockefeller Republican. But in 2016, the Republican Town Committee in Greenwich was led by somebody who came out and said they were not going to vote for Jeb Bush. They were going to vote for Donald Trump. That became a revealing indicator: Republican strongholds that we might've thought of being more inclined towards moderate Republicans were lining up with Trump. Part of the explanation is that there had been a decision along the way that we can no longer afford to do the kind of moderate Republican thing that gives a little here and takes a little here, but ultimately believes in working with Democrats. There was an argument to be made that there was a similar thing going on in the Democratic side, in terms of getting more and more extreme. But it was when you had the birthplace of Country Club Republicanism begin to line up with Donald Trump, I said, I've got to understand how that happened. And this essay tells that story. What did you learn about how American elites paved the way for Trump's election? There is a lot of blame to go around for creating the myth of Donald Trump that continued for so long. Around New York City, Donald Trump was a permanent piece of media furniture. He was in the papers all the time, partly because he was pretending to be his own publicist and planting stories. To see him, through The Apprentice, become something else in the eyes of Americans more broadly was a turning point. All of a sudden he [became] known, through the power of this invented persona, as the icon of a big city, successful capitalist. Part of the reason why I think why the word elite has become so fraught is that Trump used his own position in communities of power to say to the American public, 'Because I am an elite, I can help you pick the lock. I will help you understand why [the government] is corrupt, how it works, and therefore I, dear voter, will give you a piece of the action.' After a half a century of him selling the illusion of access to power and fortune, he and his family have now realized that in 2025 the thing people will pay most exorbitantly for is access to the highest reaches of the United States government. His son has created a club called Executive Branch with an initiation fee of up to $500,000. It's funny because at the same time, he hired a lot of elites to his cabinet. He named 13 billionaires to the highest ranks of his administration. You can imagine a scenario in which you say, look, these are people who have succeeded. They understand the market; they understand economics. What becomes a problem is when the administration is so secluded from the experience of regular life that it has a very hard time expressing and enacting the public will. It was quite telling when Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, said that his mother-in-law wouldn't notice if her social security check didn't show up. I think there's a lot of Americans that probably would notice if their social security check didn't show up. I think this is part of what Elon Musk ran into, when he started talking about empathy as a weakness of Western civilization or social security as a Ponzi scheme. It was a revealing indicator of how much his life had become divorced from the experience of ordinary people. You've written about elites deriding other elites and saying, 'I'm different because I understand the common man.' Why do you think that is so resonant with voters? Americans at their core want to get rich. We always have and we always will. That is baked into the American idea. What's happening now is that people in larger numbers are beginning to realize that there are impediments to that process. Part of the reason why Donald Trump was able to win again was that he is able to say to people, even in an unspoken way, that he wants them to prosper and succeed. Part of the process of getting people to understand [our level of inequality] is getting [them to] visualize some of the fault lines in our economy that are making it harder for people to prosper. The key is not saying to people they should give up on the goal of getting rich. The key is giving people the information to understand why they're not. When you're talking about the sort of elites who have yachts, are they completely divorced from understanding the common person? I think that the experience of entering into that world is actually farther away from regular life than outsiders imagine. There was a yacht owner who said on a documentary that if the public ever knew what it's really like on these yachts, they'd bring back the guillotine. It sounds like a joke except that part of what's happening is that [elites] are aware. There was a really prophetic comment a century ago from [Supreme Court justice] Louis Brandeis. He said, you can either have democracy or you can have money concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, but you can't have both. That was one of the observations that led to the New Deal and to an effort to try to shift the balance from a concentration of resources into the hands of too few, into a more equitable distribution. [That] led to what was ultimately a period of rising standards of living for more people. That period came to an end in the late 1970s. I think there is a recognition on the part of some in politics that we need to figure out a way to get back to that. What was your favorite essay to write in the book? The piece about pop stars performing at private parties. I embedded with Flo Rida for a bar mitzvah. It was an experience that as you're doing it, you say to yourself, I think I will be able to die happy when I've done this. The reason I got interested in it was [wondering], what are the economics of that? What makes a pop star who could be performing in front of 40,000 screaming fans say, Actually I'm going to go to a sweet 16 in Teaneck. In the end, it's not that complicated what motivates them to go. The reason why this is an artifact of our time, why it's like a new thing, is the simple fact that, until recently, people couldn't afford to have the Foo Fighters in their backyard on a Thursday, and now they can. I sometimes feel like I'm like a historian writing in real time about a world that we need to describe while it exists. In 2015, Uber famously offered Beyoncé $6 million to perform at one of their corporate events. Instead, she requested an equity stake in the company and ultimately made $300 million from it. If you step back, what's fascinating about that is that right there is a transaction between billionaire and billionaire. When you can get on board a certain kind of opportunity and experience, then the curve goes vertical, and you get access to all kinds of other things. It can be quite dangerous for a country because it means that those people are then getting further and further from the experience of everybody else. I think it's perilous for those individuals because they run the risk of suddenly encountering a kind of backlash and realizing they've lost touch with the people they were supposed to be in touch with. I quoted Ramsay MacMullen, the great scholar of Rome, in the book. He was once asked if he could summarize the epic history of the fall of Rome as concisely as possible. He said that it took 500 years but it can be distilled into three words: fewer had more. The extended deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is this Friday, June 27, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Fast Company
19-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Modern oligarchs? Evan Osnos on billionaires and broken systems
Is America in a Second Gilded Age? Evan Osnos thinks so. In this episode of Most Innovative Companies, Osnos unpacks how extreme wealth, corporate influence, and political inequality are transforming American life. If you've ever wondered how the 1% really operate, this is the deep dive you need.
New York Times
06-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
A Chronicle of the Rich Getting Richer, Crasser and More Obscene
THE HAVES AND HAVE-YACHTS: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, by Evan Osnos I kept thinking about the Weegee photograph 'The Critic' while reading 'The Haves and Have-Yachts,' Evan Osnos's collection of his 'revised and expanded' New Yorker articles about the 'ultrarich.' In the 1943 picture, two socialites, clad in furs, jewels and tight, dignified smiles, walk into the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera while, off to their left, a tipsy, bedraggled woman in a cloth coat gives them a withering stare. Osnos, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is urbanely critical of the rich who have gotten too rich, but is not Weegee's Critic. There are constant reminders that the various yacht owners, tech disrupters and hedge funders profiled lead a more lavish lifestyle than does the author — but it's clear to the reader that he can pass. Osnos is not a hater of success or even privilege; he's more an anthropologist of unseemly excess. In the acknowledgments, he thanks one of his sources and inspirations: 'a stranger, sitting next to me on a flight nearly a decade ago,' who happened to work in Silicon Valley. This person urged him to examine the 'changing conceptions of wealth, government and the future' then metastasizing among the elites of the ascendant tech sector. Presumably Osnos and this deep-pocketed Deep Throat were not flying coach. Osnos himself grew up in Greenwich, Conn., the son of a publishing executive. After Harvard, he made his way to China first as a student in the wake of the Tiananmen clampdown. By 2008, he was corresponding from Beijing for The New Yorker, at a time when many of America's business elites were making vast sums of money there. His excellent 2014 book 'Age of Ambition' won the National Book Award for its low-high depiction of a country coming of age — which, he writes, most reminded him of the Gilded Age United States. Back in America, Osnos was put on the plutocrat beat, just in time for a scheme-y new Gilded Age. There's plenty of excess to gawk at with him here, but the message is always that great wealth is in some way its own trap. Osnos gives us Anthony Scaramucci's few possible avenues for the rich: 'the art world, or private aircraft and yachting, charity-naming buildings and hospitals after themselves — or they can go into experiential.' Rod Stewart, Usher and Mariah Carey are hired to play at private parties. There's the guy selling 'experiential yachting' programs, which recreate the Battle of Midway to entertain 'bored billionaires,' complete with haptic guns. We meet estate planners who keep the rich from paying their fair share of taxes — if any. A good-looking, if mediocre, actor with an impressive social media presence runs a Ponzi scheme pretending to be a successful movie producer. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'New and very uncertain territory' as billionaires pay their way into Trump presidency
Evan Osnos, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the newly published "The Haves and Have-Yachts," talks with Jen Psaki about the rise of American oligarchy and how billionaires have had their way with the Trump administration, and the power of civic outrage to take the country back.
