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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. Evan Osnos, great to have you with us. Staff writer at The New Yorker, as Tom alluded to there. The new book is called The Haves and Have Yachts, Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich. Congrats on the book. Congrats also on the title, which is excellent. Let's start with the warning that we heard from former President Biden as he prepared to leave office. He said, today an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights, and our
and freedom. He sounded the alarm as he was making his way to the exit. What has changed when it comes to wealth inequality in this country over the last five, six months? - Thanks guys. By the way, Tom, you made my day. We live in a world John McPhee made. I'll say that the,
You know, what President Biden was getting at is something really important. To a lot of folks, frankly, it sounded almost belated. Look, the good news is this country has never been wealthier in so many respects. We are building companies. We're on the cusp of a new era of technology. And all the ways you talk about on the show every day, whether it's AI and robotics,
And yet at the same time, as you know, there are about half of American adults who will tell you that they don't have $1,000 to spend on an emergency expense. We are at a point now, it's really sort of similar to where we've been at moments in our history, where we have tremendous technological opportunity, huge wealth creation, and we're also facing a fork in the road to make sure that that is also not...
steering our government down a path that, you know, Henry Ford used to say that he wanted to make sure that his own employees, his own workers could afford the cars he was making. And those are some of the decisions we have to be making now. This is clearly a theme that has animated a lot of your work. I look at the Osnos-Ufer going back to your first book, Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, which
I read on my first trip to Shanghai and you remarked then on just the abundance, the amount of wealth, the excitement about wealth and upward mobility in China. As you look at this particular book, are we looking at something that's uniquely American or has this rise of the ultra-rich been sort of shared globally?
Yeah, it's a fascinating parallel in many ways, David. I mean, I first started reading, in a sense, about the American Gilded Age when I was living in China because I was trying to understand what was happening. We were seeing railroads built at a pace we hadn't seen since America in the 19th century. It's fitting in some ways that I used the Great Gatsby when I lived in Beijing to conceptualize it. Here we are. It's 2025, 100th anniversary of that book. There are a lot of lessons in there about how do you take that sense of
cultural energy that we might have had at certain moments in the roaring 20s, but also the awareness that without making really smart choices, we're not going to make sure that this money gets into the hands of people who can rise with the tide. Evan, you grew up in the crucible of this Greenwich, Connecticut, where I'm sure three kids down the street did have Hinkley picnic boats. You didn't. Your father was acclaimed within journalism.
But what does the crew do below the fancy people to try to get their kids to motivate and have a good life and even aspire to be richer? I mean, this is topic one right now between the buffeting of AI, the decline of liberal arts. What do the kids do just below those with the super yachts?
Yeah, I face these questions myself. I'm a dad. I've got two kids. I think about the challenges of people coming out of school today and how hard it's going to be to get those first jobs. But here's the thing. We have some pretty great models to inspire us in terms of how to think about
being energetic, being creative. I think about Warren Buffett. He's on our minds a lot, all of us these days. You know, he talks about how much he left, how much he will leave to his kids. He likes to say, as you know, Tom, he says, I want to leave them enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. I try, as I think about the opportunities that are coming, to say to people, look,
It's not enough for us to just say Elon Musk has now crossed the $400 billion threshold. We've never had somebody with that kind of prosperity. Isn't that a sign of strength? No, we have to be saying to people, if we don't make smart choices, it's going to end up with too many Musks and perhaps not enough Buffetts. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
Spare a tear for the billionaire class, but I am interested in this element of loneliness that comes through in your book. So you have billionaires buying these super yachts. They can be in isolation on the open seas. You have another chapter or another piece that you've written about Silicon Valley billionaires who are looking to remote New Zealand as a place where they can go weather the storm if that's a nuclear disaster or something that's a natural disaster. What's the difference?
What explains it? And just I think the contrast is so stark to what you were talking about a moment ago, which is during the Gilded Age, you had billionaires, multi-billionaires, I should say, maybe not billionaires, who were interested in philanthropy and in helping the wider population, building libraries in towns across America. It seems like there is a stark contrast that exists now between the aspirations of a lot of these ultra-wealthy than what we saw before. Yeah.
Yeah, David, you know, for the reporting for this book, I went to New Zealand, I went to Monaco. Hardship pay was not forthcoming, despite my insistence. And
It was a fascinating way of getting into the minds of people who have succeeded. And I think what you find in a lot of cases, and this is the surprise, is a sense of fear, frankly, a sense of vertigo. You know, a lot of people will say, look, you've made all the money in the world. What are you afraid of? Why do you need to stand on the stage with a president who you may not even necessarily ideologically agree with? And I think what that tells us is that the higher you get, you actually can end up feeling quite vulnerable, quite exposed. I mean, a Silicon Valley CEO said to me,
I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time and I have a bunker with an air filtration system. And I think that is another former hedge fund manager said to me, look, there are 25 hedge fund managers in this country who make more money combined than all of the
kindergarten teachers. And he said, and it doesn't feel good to be one of those 25. That's the vertigo.
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