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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.
Time of India
21-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Haves' guide to the lives of have-yachts
Great wealth brings great isolation, and a siege mentality The most expensive car is worth only around $30mn and the most expensive watch, $55mn. If you're a billionaire, neither will make you stand out in a 'crowd' of 3,000-plus other billionaires, collectively worth over $16tn. But stand out you must, because 'esteem' or 'status' is the fourth rung of the human hierarchy of needs, as psychologist Abraham Maslow declared 82 years ago. You could buy a mansion, but the costliest on the market is worth some $300mn. On a good day, Elon Musk makes twice as much. Yachts are a better bet. The costliest is rumoured worth $4.8bn – just shy of Trump's net worth – and even relatively modest ones, like Jeff Bezos' $500mn 'Koru', cost many thousands of dollars per hour to maintain. There's no return on investment here, only loss, and if you're brave enough to bleed dollars without noticing, sociologists will now place you above the 'haves' as a 'have-yacht'. In his new book The Haves and Have-Yachts, New Yorker writer Evan Osnos dwells on this super-wealthy class and its quirks. In 2022, he'd written an article – The Floating World – focused on owners of 'gigayachts', that is yachts longer than 295ft, which already numbered around 100 then. But the book, which is a collection of his New Yorker essays on the super-wealthy – hence subtitled Dispatches on the Ultrarich – explores their attitudes, illustrated by actions. While Musk, possibly the wealthiest man in history, talks about settling Mars, other ultrarich have been making D-Day plans for Earth. Osnos writes about Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, who got eye surgery done at 33 to improve his odds of surviving a disaster. Antonio Garcia Martinez, who used to be product manager at Facebook, bought five acres of woods on an island, and installed generators and solar panels there. What raised eyebrows, though, was his decision to bring thousands of rounds of ammunition. 'I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now,' he told Osnos. This survivalist streak also drives yacht-buying, says Osnos. Billionaire Peter Thiel, whose name crops up regularly in connection with America's rightward swing, has been known to fund the Seasteading Institute, whose mission is to 'enable floating societies which will allow the next generation of pioneers to test new ideas for govt'. Their website mentions 'building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy.' Read together, 'new ideas for government' and 'political autonomy' suggest a real estate analogue of cryptocurrency. One of Osnos' essays, 'Ghost in the Machine', offers a peek inside the money-making empires of tech moguls. For example, when Facebook Live faced the problem of livestreamed suicides, its chief technology officer sent an internal memo: 'Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.' To ordinary mortals, who satisfy Maslow's fourth level of needs with a new bag or a pair of shoes, these ideas and attitudes may be troubling, but it's important to be acquainted with them, to understand the forces shaping our world. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Washington Post
18-06-2025
- Washington Post
‘The Haves and Have-Yachts' mingles with the new aristocracy
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
