“My father was a brute,” is how the fictional Kendall Roy eulogized his billionaire progenitor on Succession. And then he proceeded to valorize billionaire libertarianism:
For a brief moment the left and right in America was united on the unmitigated awfulness of SuperYachts.
Last year, President Joe Biden announced a little something called Operation: KleptoCapture. It was, in fine, The U.S. Global Magnitsky Act on steroids. Not only would the Justice and Treasury Departments jointly target assets of Russian oligarchs, but they would work multilaterally with the governments of Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Commission so that the seizures would ultimately pay for the war and the rebuilding of the Ukraine. Overnight Superyachts became a symbol of hubris and thirsty, cartoonish evil. The BBC’s Alessandra Bonomolo & William McLennan, granted exclusive access behind the scenes of the superyacht seizure of The Amadea, wrote:
The Amadea is roughly the length of a football pitch, with a helipad at one end and a 10-metre infinity pool at the other. Inside, there is a gym, beauty salon, cinema and wine cellar. There are luxury cabins for 16 guests, and accommodation for 36 crew to service their every need.
From a distance, it appears like the tip of an iceberg. Sleek, clean lines and a gleaming white facade seem to project an image of pristine purity. Simply keeping the Amadea shipshape comes at vast expense, with annual running costs estimated at £25m or more. But the ownership of the yacht, and the source of the wealth locked away in its marble floors and teak decking, remains disputed.
US investigators say billionaire Russian politician Suleiman Kerimov is the true owner. Mr Kerimov, a senator in the Russian parliament, rejects the claim.
Of course he did. Russian parliamentarians are not technically supposed to have $12 billion in assets and shell companies. It might — how does one put this politely — cause questions. Like the questions that Putin’s dacha on the Black Sea conjure.
The seizure of the SuperYachts was one of Biden’s finest, most resolute moments as President. The House — the divided House! — passed it overwhelmingly.
Fast forward to a year later. Have these targeted seizures and sanctions been effective in curbing the oligarchs of Russia from propping up the Putin regime? Well, some fault lines have appeared in Russian society — particularly between the Kremlin and military bloggers — but otherwise it seems not much change at the top. Was it all just largely performative theatrics for the world’s press? Was there something more about that moment, where there was an almost universal appeal of cracking down on Dadaist wealth in the form of #Superyachts, while so many suffer in quiet desperation? Jordan Neely was homeless, hungry, thirsty and was killed for acting out his frustration at his desperate state of being. And weeks after his unnecessary death, the gossip rags are salivating over the number of carats in Lauren Sanchez’s engagement ring.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to the new Gilded Age. It is an era where a billionaire can refuse, through his lawyers, to provide information to sitting US Senators regarding gifts to a Supreme Court Justice.
In the new Gilded Age, 661 billionaires pumped $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections, or about 1 out of every 10 dollars contributed. Billionaires, further, spent $880 billion influencing candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. 40 of those billionaires actually wrote checks out to Herschel Walker’s campaign for a US Senate seat in Georgia, a man who was utterly unqualified for the job. We live in an age in which petty tycoons battle over clam shacks in Nantucket. Bestride the globe like colossi. An age where nepo-babies are, wholly without shame, exploding our democracy.
The new Gilded Age is largely brought to you, courtesy of Citizen’s United …
Let’s face it — the blush is off the the billionaire class. In time even Trump voters will see that their aspirational optimism is a false bill of goods. And their children will have to compete against the children of the overclass, who went to Le Rosey or Horace Mann or Avenues and can speak conversational Mandarin, code and have never worked a manual job a day in their lives. The wealth disparity that exists right now and continues to grow has all but warped our sense of the value of human life and the dignity of all labor. What will happen when even the white Christian nationalist identity politics cannot paper over the vastness of the divide between the over and underclasses?
In the age of William Randolph Hearst, what happened at San Simeon stayed at San Simeon. But now social media — and their need to be seen in all their wealth and inherited finery — exposes the emptiness of their advantage. Unfiltered social media has allowed billionaires and, of course, their neo-babies to project their incessant vacuousness into the cosmos. Nowadays, we can see an interview with a Zuckerberg or a King Charles in a way unimaginable to, say, a peasant in the thirteenth century. The wealthy were draped in ermine robes and distance from the rabble. Today, we can see how ultimately silly they are. Pity them, though; it is hard to be intellectually curious, or even interesting when one is so far away from adversity and struggle.
Billionaires love libertarianism. And I have always maintained that libertarianism is the philosophy of precocious 14-year olds. Elon Musk, who slipped from No.1 on the Forbes billionaire’s list to No. 2, after the ill-advised purchase of Twitter, fancies himself a libertarian. And there is a real “libertarian chic” thing going on among Silicon Valley millionaire and billionaire bros. But true libertarianism — social liberalism combined with fiscal “laissez-faire” capitalism— is not what many, if not most billionaires, actually believe. Ed Luce writes in FT:
Once you accept that Musk’s world view seems to be that he should be allowed to do what he wants, his philosophical confusion ceases to matter. The same applies to many in his cohort, such as Peter Thiel, Ken Griffin and Charles Koch. Watch what they do, not what they say. Many of them subscribe to the outlook on life of Ayn Rand’s epic individualist John Galt, the fictional character in Atlas Shrugged, whose selfishness is presented as heroic. This novel’s message is that extreme selfishness can be extremely moral.
Some of Musk’s fellow billionaires support Donald Trump, who is the most un-libertarian figure in US politics. If the former president is re-elected next year, he has promised to pass a federal ban on abortion, deport millions of illegal immigrants and impose a loyalty test on federal employees. He has vowed to be America’s “retribution”.
Little of this fits with commonsensical ideas of freedom.
Further, Peter Thiel — like Trump himself — has serious issues with free speech, which is at the core of libertarianism. Thiel, in secret, backed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that eventually crushed Gawker. That actually sounds more on the authoritarianism side of the political spectrum, which would align more with his backing of Trump. And the circle is now complete …
Not all billionaires are capitalist tools, it must be said. Jay Z and Beyonce’s $200 million mansion, purchased in cash, could easily have gone to scholarships that actually changed lives. No human being needs to live in a $200 million mansion, when even a fraction of that sum could alleviate a lot of human suffering. But billionaire Harvard Medical School professor and entrepreneur Tim Springer, by contrast, donated $210 million to a biomedical nonprofit. But he is not a typical billionaire. He made his fortune very late in life, has a PhD in molecular biology and discovered monoclonal antibodies. He made his money investing in biotech companies, including Moderna.
And I am pretty sure he is not a nepo- baby.
The History of Nepo Babies Is the History of Humanity (TNY)
Inside the Garden of Evil. (The Atlantic)
Beware Elon Musk’s warped libertarianism (Ed Luce)
A Guide for How the Legal Press Corps Could Do June Better (Slate)