billionaire class Concepts

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words

them, just as he had done with Trump, on the value of TikTok. Yass checked many of the boxes expected of the post-Citizens United billionaire class. He was passionate about “school choice” and less passionate about paying taxes.18 19 He was financially and ideologically invested in the charter school movement

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources

by Geoff Hiscock · 23 Apr 2012 · 363pp · 101,082 words

stake in BYD, which was set up by Wang and Lu in 1995. They both hold stakes in BYD that put them in the paper billionaire class. Like the wind sector, solar power—both thermal and PV—faces a shakeout in the years ahead as consolidation follows the first rush of enthusiasts

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff · 7 Sep 2022 · 205pp · 61,903 words

, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies, and dining. Ultra-elite shelters like the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated

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service to their genetic programs. They are primates subject to biases and blind spots. It’s a sociopathic perspective that makes science valuable to the billionaire class because it helps justify their most shameful behaviors—from trafficking young women to exploiting an entire underclass of workers and consumers. These fans of science

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

by Anupreeta Das · 12 Aug 2024 · 315pp · 115,894 words

this 99% pledge.”16 Small-dollar donations are mostly a reflection of pure generosity by individuals. It’s therefore not surprising that philanthropy by the billionaire class is also seen as unadulterated generosity, except that it is supercharged. In 2022, very large gifts by individuals represented 5 percent of the nearly $500

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wealth to charitable causes during their lifetimes or in their wills. The highly publicized pressure campaign, called the Giving Pledge, was meant to get the billionaire class thinking more deeply about philanthropy. The idea had come about after a small group dinner for about seven couples in 2009 hosted by David Rockefeller

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world’s 2,600 billionaires. A large number are from the United States, but there is a growing contingent from other countries with an emerging billionaire class, including India and China. There were a couple of years when the pledgers numbered more than two dozen, but on average, there have been 15

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practicing Catholic, during Sunday mass, kids in tow. As children who grew up in inconceivable luxury, whose lives could only be truly understood by the billionaire class, they indulged their passions, and continue to do so. Jennifer is a pediatrician, having graduated from the Icahn School of Medicine at New York’s

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can do because of the Indian government’s restrictions on foreign funding for domestic nonprofits. Gates is also a role model for India’s emerging billionaire class, whose wealth has spurred their philanthropic ambitions. Indian billionaires like Nandan Nilekani, a cofounder of the IT giant Infosys who helped the government build a

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is the sprawl of the Gates family life, and the range of services and the efforts that go into lifestyle upkeep. Like many in the billionaire class, Gates owns multiple homes around the United States. Those alone add up to about $300 million. During their 27-year marriage, the primary home of

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State University’s Fisher College of Business, decided to study the apparent contradiction between people’s love of individual billionaires and their dislike of the billionaire class. As a doctoral student, he and his thesis advisor, both lifelong tennis fans, got to talking about Roger Federer and how “it seemed weird that

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, people put it down to benefits they have had as a group. Similarly, Walker found, when you lump people into a class, such as a billionaire class, people are more likely to believe that there is something wrong with the system that allows so much wealth accumulation for a few.3 Their

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as a group. That, Walker said, is an important policy takeaway for any politician advocating for higher taxes.4 People’s growing distrust of the billionaire class comes from two interrelated occurrences: Not only has their wealth ballooned in the past decade, but it has increased at a rate well beyond what

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History

by Casey Michel · 23 Nov 2021 · 466pp · 116,165 words

reason for Teodorin’s insecurity. With his dark skin and charcoal eyes, Teodorin, born in 1968, came of age when the only members of the billionaire class were Europeans or North Americans—when wealth was, in essence, white. Sure, there were members of the monied class who were non-white. But they

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer

by Nicholas Shaxson · 10 Oct 2018 · 482pp · 149,351 words

the handouts, and the small fry are forced to pay the full price of civilisation – plus a surcharge to cover the roaming members of the billionaire classes who won’t pay. This ‘competition’ systematically shifts wealth upwards from poor to rich, distorting our economies and undermining our communities and democracies. The free

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. That’s not just because the poor and middle classes feel increasingly left out, and have less and less to lose, but also because the billionaire classes need to distract us away from focusing on how they got rich. So they revert to the old political formula: using their control over the

Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers

by Katherine Clarke · 13 Jun 2023 · 454pp · 127,319 words

. In fact, Steve Roth was firmly the judge and the jury when it came to design, programming, and buyers. As an established member of the billionaire class in New York, he could speak peer to peer with prospective buyers, and much like Harry Macklowe, he made decisions based not on the advice

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in New York real estate. But the prominence of 432 Park and the grandeur of the apartments, coupled with the secrecy and mystique surrounding the billionaire class of owners, made the suit catnip for the media, which salivated over each allegation. First there was the noise. The board complained of “horrible and

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas · 27 Aug 2018 · 296pp · 98,018 words

ideal for workers. The country was two months away from a referendum on Clintonism. Hillary Clinton had beaten Bernie Sanders, who spoke of putting the “billionaire class” in their place in order to make the working class thrive, whereas Clinton had spoken of wanting everyone to do better. Now she found herself

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire

by Tim Schwab · 13 Nov 2023 · 618pp · 179,407 words

them. They form monopolies that asphyxiate competition. They cause social problems to make a profit…,” Giridharadas noted, hammering on the serial misdeeds of the the billionaire class. “And they use philanthropy, some of the spoils of dubiously gotten wealth, to whitewash not just their reputations but to actually create the ability to

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… several million lives, perhaps more than any other living person today.” Variations on this winning argument have long played counterpoint to any criticism of the billionaire class. As high-profile political figures in U.S. politics—from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—challenge the very existence

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sidestep these rules speaks to the ways that extreme wealth is so destructive to democracy. The problem is bigger than the Gates family, as the billionaire class today readily engages in a seamless mix of philanthropy and political coercion to advance its ideas, interests, and ideologies. In 2022, Politico profiled how Google

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World

by Ruchir Sharma · 5 Jun 2016 · 566pp · 163,322 words

former bastion of moderation like Chile should have been less surprising. Reading the Billionaire Lists Billionaire watching is exploding as an industry, alongside the growing billionaire class. Forbes has published its annual World Billionaires List since the 1980s. The number of billionaires has doubled in the last five years and tripled in

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Democrats won the 2014 election, promising to impose higher taxes on the rich and to reduce inequality to levels last seen in the 1990s. The billionaire class in the United States did not look terribly bloated until recently, despite the country’s long-standing reputation for a particularly brutal form of winner

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to slow when inequality is very high but also when it is very low.4 While it seems a bit odd to argue that any billionaire class is too small for a nation’s good, that may be the case in Japan, and some Japanese seem to realize this. They have a

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away from reform and cultivated a class of politically connected tycoons. Two of these regimes are in Putin’s Russia and Erdoan’s Turkey. The billionaire class in Turkey controls a rising share of the economy, and the share of wealth that comes from rent-seeking industries has spiked. Nine out of

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about his “trivial greed.” This was likely all for show, since Deripaska and Putin are still believed to be close allies. Popular resentment against the billionaire class is also palpable in Mexico, where the tycoons are famous for growing rich on monopolies. They have almost exclusive control over industries ranging from telephones

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limited scale relative to the size of the economy, and operate almost entirely outside the rent-seeking industries, the dominance of family fortunes in the billionaire class helps explain why in recent years inequality has surfaced as a political issue in Seoul. A similar political backlash is starting to percolate in Taiwan

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twenty-eight billionaires in Taiwan are related to at least one other person on the list. The Wei family alone has four members in the billionaire class. The perception that Taiwan’s formerly egalitarian society is developing an increasingly entrenched family elite has helped the opposition make inroads against the ruling KMT

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thousand of the nation’s wealthiest residents, with their tax rate increasing from 40 to 45 percent. In countries like Taiwan, growing resentment of the billionaire class is compounded by the advanced age of the leading tycoons. In 2015, the average age of billionaires worldwide was close to 63, in both rich

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tax dodging at the top creates a strong disincentive for any Indian citizen to pay up, in turn perpetuating tax evasion. The habits of the billionaire class matter greatly because they tend to set the tone for the wider business culture. In India, many of the top tycoons command sprawling empires that

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more likely to rub shoulders with the middle class, and both are more likely to live in the shadows cast by a fast-growing global billionaire class. Inequality and the tensions it can cause are rising in importance as a political issue and threat to growth. I am wary of countries where

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by observation and not in data, good billionaires can rise and help trigger a process of wealth creation that spreads its fruits more broadly. The billionaire class is a useful bellwether for the economy as a whole. As the number of billionaires rises, the data are getting more significant over time, as

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whether an economy is creating the kind of productive wealth that will help it grow in the future. It’s a bad sign if the billionaire class owns a bloated share of the economy, becomes an entrenched and inbred elite, and produces its wealth mainly from politically connected industries. A healthy economy

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the right by the real estate billionaire Donald Trump and on the left by Bernie Sanders, who is calling for a political revolution against the “billionaire class.” The language of class warfare rarely bodes well for an economy, especially if it pushes mainstream candidates to adopt more radical positions. Many of the

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has turned itself into the geographic heart of European manufacturing, with supply networks branching out into the lower-cost labor markets of eastern Europe. Its billionaire class controls vast wealth but generates the majority of it in the kinds of productive industries that are most likely to generate good jobs and least