Ideas - The Billionaire Age Pt 2 | Disney heiress on the dangers of extreme wealth

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

If you inherited $120 million dollars, could you give away 75 per cent of your wealth? Abigail Disney did. She's an heiress to the Disney fortune. The philanthropist, filmmaker and activist offers an insider perspective into the twisted perils of extreme wealth — on society and the human psyche.Part two in a four-part series called The Billionaire Age. Listen to Part One: How did we get here?Guest in this episode:Abigail E. Disney is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, philanthropist, and activist. Her films include The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, the Emmy Award-winning The Armor of Light — both co-directed with Kathleen Hughes — and Pray the Devil Back to Hell. As a philanthropist and activist, she has championed peacebuilding, gender justice, and systemic cultural change.She is Chair and Co-Founder of Level Forward, an ecosystem of storytellers, entrepreneurs, and social change-makers dedicated to balancing artistic vision, social impact, and stakeholder return. She also founded Peace is Loud, a nonprofit that uses storytelling to advance social movements, and the Daphne Foundation, which supports organizations working for a more equitable, fair, and peaceful New York City.She is currently working on a book about wealth, power, and privilege.

Uncover from CBC Podcasts is your source for exceptional storytelling and groundbreaking journalism. Unveil the shocking secrets of one of Canada's most prolific fashion moguls. He far exceeds Jeffrey Epstein. He far exceeds Bill Cosby. And dive into the unsolved murders of two Canadian billionaires. This is a perfect storm of conspiracy theory. It's got all the ingredients, none of the answers. With new episodes released weekly, you'll hear the very best in award-weigh. Winning True Crime. Listen to Uncover wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. What does the billionaire age look like from the inside looking out?

Abigail Disney may not be a billionaire, but as an heiress to the massive Disney fortune, she has a pretty good perspective. Her grandfather, Roy O. Disney, and his famous brother, Walt, founded the iconic company. Roy was the first CEO, followed by Abigail's father. What's it like to have the last name of Disney? Ideas producer, Mary Link. Having the last name Disney is a weird thing. It's a weird thing because, like, first of all, my very first baby I brought her home from the hospital and went to change her diaper, and they had put a...

Mickey Mouse diaper on her, and I just thought, I can't escape it. It won't go away. So it kind of falls you everywhere. And there are days when I count all the Disney merchandise that I see people wearing and carrying. And it's remarkable just how many of the people I pass on the street in New York who are, you know, plonking down very significant amounts of money for that brand. So the brand is a remarkable one and it gives people joy and people love it and I hope that they can not kill that brand by being rapacious bastards because the reputation in that company is starting to change. And once they kill that brand, they can't save it. They can't bring it back. So I have this problem of when the company does something bad or reprehensible, everybody I know who reads that in the

newspaper thinks of me. And so I end up getting conflated with a lot of the bad things that the company does, and I hate that. And also, Disney is kind of fame adjacent. It's not really fame, but it's well enough known that people treat you as though you're famous. And so I hate that, too, because people defer to you when they shouldn't and you haven't earned it. They, you know, they cowtow, they laugh too hard at your jokes. And that's kind of awful, just as awful as being accused of things you haven't done. So it's kind of a, yeah, it's kind of a Hobson's choice. Hobson's choice, the choice between taking what's available or nothing at all.

What's remarkable is that Abigail Disney chose to give away 75% of her inheritance. If she hadn't, it's possible. would have been a billionaire today. She's not only a philanthropist, she's also a filmmaker and activist. Her searing 2022 documentary, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales uses the story of her family to explore growing wealth inequality through the prism of workers at Disney's own parks. The people who do the pixie dust, you scrub the kitchens, the floor, the toilets, with both of us working full time. We still fall in a while. We still fall in. poverty level. A custodian would have to work for 2,000 years to make what Bob Eiger makes in one.

Bob Eiger, CEO of Disney. You know, I think of it as the assholeification of America. This isn't just a Disney story. It's the story of nearly half of American workers who can't make ends meet. I have this passion growing within me now, building power for working class people like me. Abigail Disney is deeply concerned about the historic levels of concentrated wealth throughout the world, a world where billionaires are gaining $2.7 billion a day. There are now 20 centipillionaires in the world, people who are worth $100 billion. or more. I think we've entered a plutocracy or an oligarchy or whatever, kleptocracy is really more like it

because it's not just that they're holding the levers of power. They're also wielding them so that they yet further enrich themselves at the expense of the people. You know, honestly, I thought maybe we'd hit the brakes before we got to this point, because we always have the option of hitting the brakes, but they just are wielding so much. power right now. And we've just blindly shambled into this new era that we're in. It's horrifying. Here's Mary Link in conversation with Abigail Disney, with the second part of her series, The Billionaire Age. How we get into a point, especially with centi billionaires, that they have amassed so much wealth that they are in some ways untouchable? I'm hoping that the centi billionaires are not untouchable,

but I suspect they might well be. I'm not sure. Has anybody ever tried to touch them? I don't know what the presidents are. I mean, it is difficult to imagine. And, you know, this is something that actually many years ago, the novelist Thomas Pynchon actually warned about and other things, like that the economy was becoming so global and the power of,

at least he racked it up to corporations, was so great that nation states would never really would not have the power that nation states used to have over the activities going on. And I think that's basically they now sort of have more power than nation states. They have more income from their centi billions than a lot of small countries have for an entire budget. So they can buy and sell countries if they like. So I'm hoping that I're not untouchable, but I wouldn't know how to touch them. The rise of today's extreme wealth began in the 1980s, a result in part from the policies of Thatcher and Reagan

that slashed taxes for the rich, with many other countries following suit. When Reagan did become president in January 1981, he radically changed the tax system. In fact, the top marginal tax at that time, it was lowered over its eight years from 73% to 28%. So you would have been turning around 21 or so, and your inheritance would have been kicking in too, then. How did people in your social stratosphere,

I'm not trying to lump you in with everybody, but react to those tax cuts? What was the buzz about that? You know, you can let me in with everybody else because I was sort of sleepwalking into my inheritance. I didn't think critically about it at all. And I was in college, so I wasn't really paying attention to what Reagan was doing.

And when you say the word tax, a college kid, of course, they fall immediately into a stupor. So I didn't really, understand what was happening. But I did understand that everybody at my father's company and everybody at the Wild Disney company seemed incredibly jubilant. And there was a joy in the management class and among the people who were wealthy because they just had the handcuffs taken off and they could do whatever they wanted. And so much followed from that. That's what I refer to as the assholeification. So the nature of the way people did business kind of changed.

There were restraints. When my grandfather was running Disney, he was restrained by a sense of decency and things that seemed unseemly. There was still such a thing as, oh, that wouldn't be good. People would hate that. And those kinds of regulators were taken off, not as much of the legal ones. So those definitely abandoned those. But in the inner regulators went away. And everybody became kind of willing to do whatever it took to make that extra dollar.

You said, too, that's when the U.S. really started venerate the wealthy. In the U.S., we started venerating the wealthy under Reagan. Because if you look at the covers of Time Magazine Newsweek, pay attention to who's showing up on those. You know, it used to be celebrities, it used to be rock stars, it used to be athletes and so forth. And what started kind of emerging among the sports stars and the movie stars were business stars. And they were given star treatments. So the CEO wasn't an imperial position, but it was elevated by Reagan and everyone around him through a shared set of ideas about what a CEO was. And as he was more venerated across the 80s, in the 90s, whole series of, of, of,

laws were shifted that took the weights off of what had once been the limits around CEO pay. And that's when CEO pay took off. And so when CEO pay took off. And the way that that happened was that that was in the 90s in order to control CEO pay, they said, we're going to peg it to your performance. And therefore, we're going to pay you in shares of stock. And the idea behind it was a very naive sense that that would hold CEO pay back. But what didn't happen was that they pegged it to performance. They just pegged it to shares. And CEOs started managing for maximum share value, rather than maximum profits or how well the employees are doing or what kind of things are redestroying as we make this money. So that was when CEO pay exploded. And so, you know, it sounds a little

crazy, but when I inherited money, you know, I was kind of the richest person in every room I walked into. That was just weird, and I hated it, but that was just the fact of it. But something happened in the 90s where I was content with what I had, and everyone else in New York, it seemed, just zoomed. Just zoomed. I kept thinking, but I'm fine. Why do you need all that? I don't understand. I'm fine, but everybody was looking to pad, pad, pad. And so a hedge fund manager who used to just be an investment advisor now becomes a billionaire when he used to just get a percentage of what he managed for you. So the business models changed and privileged the investment class, privileged the managerial class, and elevated a lot of people wouldn't otherwise have, my grandfather didn't get that rich

being the CEO of Disney. But, you know, we've had a series of CEOs who have, or two CEOs who've rewarded themselves, you know, to an almost embarrassing degree. Yeah, so that's Michael Eisner and Bob Iger, both became billionaires through association with, as their CEO, not just pay, but like shareholders and having having that. Should they have become billionaires as CEOs under Disney? Quick caveat here. Bob Eiger, who stepped down as Disney CEO in March 26, isn't quite a billionaire,

with a reported net worth of a mere $700 million. So, safe to say he's probably well in his way to becoming one. However, his predecessor, Michael Eisner, is a billionaire for, times over. Abigail Disney is not a fan of bloated CEO pay. My grandfather and his brother started the Walt Disney company on sweat equity, and they worked their asses off. They didn't have two pennies to rub together. And so they built from nothing, and then they had this character, and that kind of helped them accumulate some money. So, flash a word to 1930. My father is born in January of 1930, so right after the crash.

And my grandmother told me that when she brought my father home from the hospital in a basket, she really wasn't sure where her next meal was coming from. Because that's the amount of risk that my grandfather put himself and his family through for decades. They hocked everything. They put everything on the line over and over and over again. You know, I'm not, I'm not, Bob Eager is willing to be as rich as anybody, except for the fact that he never did that. He was an employee his entire life. He went to get a job at ESPN and he worked there and then he worked at ABC. He never didn't have health care. He never worried about his retirement. As long as he kept his job, he had a stable, steady income and he never lived in the existential risk that my grandfather experienced. So who among those two, people should become a billionaire, in your view. I think it's pretty clear that the billions should be for the people who live in the risk the most, even if billions are meant to be for anyone. But

that's not what's happening now. They're telling themselves a story about the value and uniqueness of a CEO, which is very flattering to the CEOs themselves. And all of the boards that support them and are comprised of individuals who will probably become CEOs at some point or have been. So there's a shared ethos in that world that, yeah, we're worth that much because what are you going to do? If we leave, who are you going to hire? They really do believe they have special powers. They really do believe that they are smarter than everyone else. And they may be smarter than a lot of people, but I very much doubt that they are the only people who can do the jobs.

You did a powerful documentary called The American Dream and other fairy tales. And it focuses on the Disney's corporations, low wages for its workers. Wages, you know, when you're at the time of your grandfather, Roy and Walt Disney, his brother, workers at Disney could be part of the middle class. Can you sort of compare what, at that time, when you were doing the documentary, a custodian's wage at Disney would have been compared to the CEO, Bob Eiger's salary. When I first started working with the folks at Disneyland's that were working for minimum wage, they were making $11.25 an hour in an area where the living wage was about $24. And these were parents, people who had families, they had to hold down housing in one of the most expensive areas in the country.

So it was tearing them apart. It was tearing them apart. The amount of time they spent in pursuit of just basic things, just getting to and from work, buying food in a place that isn't overcharging them, which means driving that much further. There were so many ways in which it was tearing families apart. It was heartbreaking to watch. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you had Bob, in the year that I started, 2018, taking $65 million home in compensation. And I mean, if you translate into an hourly wage, what that is, I did it once, and now I don't remember it was something like $20,000 an hour. What is he doing with every second of that hour that can possibly ever be worth that kind of money?

There is just, I mean, I've said it before, Jesus Christ himself isn't worth that much money on an hourly basis. This is nuts. And so he was at 2,000 times the pay of his minimum wage workers. And remember that these are minimum wage workers as a Canadian. You need to remember this who do not have health care. Right. And they have a very inflated housing market that they're living in in really horrible public schools. So when you're making minimum wage in the United States, that is a desperate situation. And, the idea that somebody pulling in $65 million for one year's work isn't thinking that the fate of his minimum wage workers is related to what he's bringing is shocking to me. You know, I get interviewed about CEO pay by one set of reporters and I get interviewed about minimum wage workers by a whole different set of reporters. They're not on the same beat. Why aren't they on the same beat?

They're talking about the same companies. They're talking about the same thing. This needs to be woven back together in people's heads. So at the time of say your grandfather, Rory, what would his compensation of being, so you say 2,000 times for Bob Eiger's salary compared to the minimum wage worker at Disney? What would have been the difference for your grandfather? I'm so bad with the numbers that they go out of my head the minute. I know them.

But I do know that when my grandfather was ahead of the company, he was making something like 40 times what his median workers pay was. So, you know, it was a lot more, but it wasn't enough to make him, you know, the equivalent of a billionaire at the time. And it was partly lower number because his medium worker was being paid better. And he was being compensated in things like health care and pension funds and, you know, vacation. paid vacation time and paid sick leave and so forth. So those things, one by one, got stripped away from workers. So they found themselves steadily in a worse position at the same time that the average CEO pay went from something like 40 times up to Bob Eiger's 2000. I mean, to put this in rational, real terms, when the pay ratio is 2000, that means an average low-age

worker would have to work for 2,000 years to take home what he takes home in one. There is no planet that I recognize that makes sense of that, because I know how hard these people work. I don't picture Bob Eiger carrying a vacuum cleaner around a huge amusement park at midnight every night and working until 8 o'clock in the morning. I don't see that happening. I mean, I feel like if pay is a reflection of how hard you work, we've got it upside down. You wrote to him before you start the documentary, and you wrote to Bob Eiger about the low wages and suggested for him to raise them. And what do he say to you?

So when I first started talking the workers who reached out to me through Facebook, and I went out and sat in a circle with them and heard from them. And I came out of there so livid. The furthest thing from my mind was making a movie. I was actually just thinking about my grandfather and how horrified he'd be. He would never have accepted that. And, you know, he was a big conservative, so that's a big thing to say. But I just do not expect that he would have disrespected people the way that the company does now. So, yeah, I went home and I thought about it a lot, and I thought about it a lot, and I agonized over a long letter that I sent him,

that I'm sure he was only so delighted to get for me. I already had a reputation as a problem anyway. But, you know, I felt like I owed him at least to go and speak to him directly about it and express what I thought was the problem. And I also thought, you know, he has an opportunity here. He's talking about retiring. He could create a legacy. He could leave as a super rich guy that would be one legacy to leave with, or he could leave as the guy who raised the wages and restored dignity to American workers. I mean, it did feel like an opportunity in a way. He considered running for president as a Democrat. That's how far the party has sunk. So, yeah, I wrote to him, and I got a very terse response back, part of which said, this is really more the government's problem. It's the government not doing its job,

which is rich, given how much that company does not have to pay any taxes, how much pressure they put on the government to pay them subsidies to build parking lots and bring businesses. And that's rich coming from him. But also, he just thought I was raising an issue that was off the wall. He just thought I was crazy. Why would I care about that? And that's the thing I recognize after a while kind of fighting them and fighting lots of different managerial type people in other companies. It feels to me almost like they think of the people who work at the bottom there as not really as human as they are.

They look upon those people as somehow inferior and they don't care what happens to them. You know, there was a, I think a Swiss, I don't know, was a psychologist. Anyways, the Swiss academic talked about in France, you know, all these workers who came from Algerian stuff and worked in the mines and various things in France and then are there for a few generations. But when they came, the Swiss academic said that they thought they were bringing in workers, not people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what I could see was it was so interesting to me when I was fighting the company about pay because the company to save face and to quiet me down, would go on Twitter and saying, we have a new education program. Yay, we'll give

them education. We'll give you education. We'll give you this. We'll give you that. They would give them everything except money. And the one thing they didn't want to give up was money. And that was a sign to me that they just don't see them as human. I mean, there's a fundamental underlying belief when you offer a minimum wage worker education to lift them up. And And that belief is that, well, you'll rise. These other people will stay there, but you'll rise. And so it leaves the basic structure intact. It's not a threat to that structure.

They want everyone to see themselves as on this escalator going up and leaving people behind themselves and just looking out for themselves. And that's not how people work. That's not how people work. That's not how people see the world. And that's not how people work. at least not the, you know, people who are not making billions. And people, they very much care about what happens to their families and to their fellow workers. And they're not excited about getting on some imaginary escalator.

When you made your documentary, the minimum wage you were saying before was around $11 or so an hour. As of July 20, 24, through union talks and everything, the starting wages range now from around 20 to 25. Do you think that the documentary had impact on this pay raise and is this enough money now for people to exist on? Well, when I started the documentary, definitely a part of me was thinking, that's a nice little brand you got there. It'd be a shame as something happened to it. I honestly really did think the thing to do was to threaten the brand by going after the idea of their niceness. They're not nice people. but anyway, there's a belief that they're nice. And that worked. They knew. They knew inside the company that this was hurting them. And so I did that very much by design. But none of this would have happened if the unions hadn't been incredibly powerful, hadn't pulled together and organized in a way that they hadn't in decades and fought really hard. I talked to a lot of the folks in that union and they were on it. They were impressive. And I think that it's those two things together. I don't think we should be reliance.

on charitable heiresses to make things right. But it doesn't hurt to have a charitable eras if there's also this powerful union in place. And I think it's going to take a lot of efforts from a lot of different places. I would love to take all the credit for the incredible progress in pay at Disney, but they didn't have a choice.

They were really, really suffering in terms of public opinion. Do they make enough now, do you think, at Disney? The hardest thing about raising a minimum wage is that that will always move. I think we need to be talking in terms of living wages instead of minimum wages. That having been said, this was a huge, huge gain for the workers who were at minimum wage. This was an enormous accomplishment, and it did materially shift their lives. lives. But the prices only go in one direction. And if they don't keep fighting, they will eventually

find themselves back behind the eight ball again. That never goes away, that sense that the company is going to have to have the metaphorical gun to their heads before they'll actually do the right thing by their workers. You were, you talked before a government panel talking about living wages and the need for minimum wage to be raised. And you recalled, a socialist. Yeah. The committee will come to order. The hearing is in tight.

Abigail Disney was testifying before a U.S. host committee back in May 2019 about the immense pay gap between CEOs and workers. A month earlier, she had tweeted that Disney CEO Bob Eiger's compensation of $65.6 million was, quote, insane.

The tweet caused an uproar and went viral. The gentleman from Indiana is now recognized. Well, Dr. Disney, I heard you several times say what CEO pay should be, what living wage should be, up and down the spectrum, C to shining C. That is, we have a definition of that. That is socialism. We know what that is.

This idea that a company exists solely to maximize profits. That is simply not true. Companies have moral obligations to their employees. If you don't want to call this social, I suppose you can call it Marxism, Neo-Marxism. It certainly isn't the path that made our country the world's land of opportunity. The reality is the entire American workforce is benefiting from this era of prosperity. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, I laugh when I hear that because I remember I was just like, when's it going to come, the socialist thing? Oh, there, you're the guy with it. It's so predictable. And to me, I mean, I grew up in a really, I grew up in a real world.

real cold warrior household. My grandfather was a big anti-communist and, you know, Uncle Walt testified for the McCarthy hearings. Like, they knew what they thought about all of that. And I know enough about socialism to say that advocating for your workers to be well paid is not the same as socialism. And it's just justice. So, you know, they have a word that they like to trot out that scares people. it's the kind of oversimplistic analysis that they like to lapse into because they don't want to engage you on the issue because they know they lose when we actually talk about what workers should be paid.

It's just a scare tactic. Do you think that the majority of people still believe in the American dream or the Canadian dream or the French dream and aren't on the streets saying, why are you lowering the taxes for the wealthy, which Trump has done even more? Why this sort of mass amnesia, do you think? think. You know, I find it really interesting that a handful of times I've written things that were

published about the estate tax, which I very much support, because I thought I was living in a meritocracy. In fact, the billionaires are the ones who talk about meritocracy the most. But, you know, the idea of a meritocracy is everybody starts at the same starting spot. And I start so far ahead of everybody else, we should at least tax that estate so that you don't get people starting that far ahead of everybody. But every time I write it about the estate tax, the angriest responses I get are from working class white men. And I really think they believe that they're all just billionaires waiting to happen, you know, that a lot of Americans have absorbed this idea that it can happen for anyone. It can happen anytime.

And they're living in the fantasy world. It's just never going to happen for a person who's employed at a weekly salary. It's not going to happen for the vast majority of small businessmen. I think, you know, your son is more likely to go to the MBA than you are to be able to make a billion dollars. So when I talk to low-wage workers, they have no sense that there is such a thing as what we call the American Dream anymore. They don't even hope for social mobility at this point because the schools have gotten so bad. They're just struggling to put enough food on the table. and I don't see what the exit looks like for them.

So I think most low-wage workers have given up on this idea of the American dream. And the people who are really boosting it, I mean, they're the small business people who all carry this sense that like any one of them has the one great idea that's going to go far. And it's just fantasy. A poll commissioned by the Times of London in April 26 found that only, Only 38% of Americans now believe the American dream exists for everyone. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldhar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic.

I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast crime story comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teachers' Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on. For the Insider's Group, find Crime Story in your podcast app.

We return now to part two of our series The Billionaire Age. Ideas producer Mary Link in conversation with heiress, philanthropist, filmmaker, and activist Abigail Disney. Her father, Roy E. Disney. The last family member to be CEO of Disney died in 2009. Forbes magazine estimated his personal fortune at $1.2 billion. Well, first of all, that's an inflated number. He was nowhere near that. He was more like around 500, and that was if you included all of our net worth with it.

Still an impressive amount of money. How did that kind of wealth impact your father? It did affect him. I mean, because when I was growing up, we grew up in a kind of upper middle class. I remember asking my mother what class we were in the 60s, and she was like a middle class. And I said, really? And she said, upper middle class, upper, upper middle class. So, I mean, we had a nice life.

We lived well. We didn't want for anything. We had nice vacations. We drove nice cars, all that kind of thing. But it wasn't until the 80s and the 90s when the ethos that the company shifted. into a full-on Wall Street shift. And all of a sudden, share prices started going crazy. And what my family owned primarily was Disney shares. That was the most of our network. And, you know, it changed in part because my father wasn't happy to sit passively by and watch the basis of his wealth disappear,

which was happening in the 70s. So he started making money. And what I saw in him then was pride, first of all, which was good, right? He, you know, he always lived in the shadow of his father and his uncle, and he was accomplishing something on its own, and I think it was very proud of what he was doing. But there was a tipping point in there, and I couldn't tell you what it is, but I traced it sort of through the airplanes. Like, we had an airplane, but it had propellers, and that's just really, that's like a poor man's airplane. You know, you're kind of embarrassed. to park it next to your friends' jet. And then we got a jet, but it wasn't such a good jet. And then we got a jet, but you still had to crouch when you got onto it. And then he got it at 737. And somewhere in

between the plane with the propellers and the 737, he had really changed. And there was something dark behind his eyes. I hate saying that because he was a good man. He really was. But I think that you get to a point where you are so busy defending the wealth and so busy maybe justifying it to yourself? I don't know. And comparing yourself to other people, I do think that there's a darkness that rises up in people. And Paul Piff, there's a wonderful sociologist in California who talks about what happens when people get wealthy. And one of the things he tracks is they get meaner. People get meaner as they get wealthier, and I kind of saw that in my father. That's sad. I hate saying it. I really do hate saying it, because he was a good man.

Yeah. Yeah. It changed. You also said for your father, and this is funny because it made me think about other people I know, and I do know some billionaires, but you were saying that you saw over your father's lifetime losing friends one by one replaced by people who were in some paid capacity. And ultimately, these men were the only many trusted. And it really hit home for me. But talk to me about that. Yeah. Yeah. When I was growing up, my parents had a couple of, maybe three or four couples that they just loved and hung out together and they traveled together. And they'd come to our houses and we'd share Christmas, all that kind of very intimate families together sort of stuff. And in the 80s, my dad got busier and busier. He chalked it up to

busyness, right, that he wasn't seeing his friends as much. But they got scarce, right? And I remember my mom saying to me at the late 80s saying, oh, they're boring. So something kind of switched in terms of how they wanted to think about things, how they wanted to look at the world and what they were interested in talking about. And unfortunately, those friends no longer had the, what they wanted. And so one by one, these very dear friends would just sort of drop off the map. And yes, it was people who were employed by my family who took the place of those friends. And they were friends, and I don't doubt they're good faith, and you get really close with people. But they're factotums, right? They still, at the end of the day, you're asking them to do something for you.

and there's the implied coercion of their paycheck in, so you're not just asking, you're telling. And you can really trick yourself in those relationships into thinking that this is a real friend when it's really kind of not. It's one of the reasons addiction is really hard on wealthy people because they've lost all the people who are willing to tell them the truth because they don't risk their livelihoods by doing so. And the loss of the truth tellers in your life is a really tragic one. Abigail, thinkers from Aristotle to Aquinas have argued that a good life is one that acknowledges clear limits,

that one that admits the satiability of our wants and needs. What about for you personally? I mean, you've inherited a lot of money. You've given away a lot of money. Your siblings probably have way more money than you'd have, I wouldn't imagine. What do you think is enough? It's really hard for me to say. I know giving away over 75% of my net worth.

and I'm still giving, and I haven't had to change my lifestyle, really. I'm in the process of changing my lifestyle just because I should. I should live on less. I should need less. I should use fewer resources. So I'm in the process of doing some stripping down of my life deliberately, but not out of economic necessity. Good Lord, I've given away 75% of what I inherited, and it hasn't.

it hasn't slowed me up a bit. That's just so clearly I inherited, you know, it's hard to say what the number was because the values go up and down, but about $120 million. And clearly that's more than enough. And, you know, so the right number is somewhere around there or lower or half of it. But I don't, It's weird to have less than your siblings because you've given it away because, you know, sometimes I'm a little jealous. Because, you know, we all love what we love, fancy food or whatever. But, boy, I feel light. I love that you say that you're jealous. You're just being human.

That's the appeal of it all. But do you have, you don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but do you have still the same? amount of money essentially that what you inherited, but just you would have had 75% more or whatever. There was a moment in the odds right before the crash of 2008, where the family kind of got together talking about like where will we go from where we are right now. And so the number was thrown out a billion. And I'm kind of proud of like pretty much everybody in my family said no, which is remarkable, actually, long before we were beating billionaire. up. People in my family had the judgment and the moral underpinnings and the strength to say no to that. And I'm

really glad about that. And that's about where I reached my high watermark in terms of my net worth. And that was when I began sort of building it down. Because all I had done up until that point was listened to the advice of everybody who'd been sort of preloaded into my world. Because when you inherit money, you get also advisors with them. And they tell you what you're parents want you to hear, you know, which is that your job is to grow this period. And that was, at that moment, I think I had a moment of thinking, well, what is the point of that exactly? Why keep, you know, passing this weird, stinky thing along when it hasn't really, it's been a barrier in a lot of ways to living a good life. And I don't, I do not belittle.

the kind of problems that money solves, you know, and I don't want to dismiss that as not important. But above a certain threshold, once you've answered the basic, you know, fundamental questions of survival and safety and dignity, beyond that, money becomes a little pointless and it's just there for your entertainment. And I'm not satisfied by that. But you are still a wealthy woman, right, at this point? By any standard, I'd be considered a wealthy woman, and I still have a lot less than I started with. I'm curious, why do you think that the rich, the extremely rich, are so opposed to paying taxes when it won't harm the growth of their overall wealth? What's behind it?

I've been thinking about the idea that if I had $100 billion that I might hate paying taxes, and I just can't wrap my brain around it. It makes no sense to me because very clearly, if I have that kind of money, it's in part because I've used the systems in place that are supported by my taxes to create that wealth and that I care about other people. I think They are so irrational on this subject, the cent of billionaires, because they already have more money than they can ever use. They get more income than they can ever use. Of course they can pay their taxes, even very onerous taxes, wouldn't do nothing to change their lifestyle. And they maybe even spend more money avoiding taxes than they would ever spend just on taxes. So it goes to a level of irrationality and it makes me think there's something else in operation here.

and it's almost like a religious belief. And I mean, I'm not saying that it's a religion, but they carry it with the same kind of zeal that other people carry religion, especially the libertarians. And now when I talk about libertarians, I am talking about the tech folks who have really grown up on Iran and objectivism and the idea that a handful of people shine, the rest of society pulls them down, they're a barrier, there are a hindrance, and that we should let these people. free to be as great measured by money as they can, as high as they can soar. And so they believe anything, any tax they pay is an insult to their belief system. I think that's really more why they're evading taxes than the cost of actually just paying their taxes. Yeah, according to ProPublica, Jeff Bezos paid no federal income tax in 2007 and 2011. And that's because he doesn't rely on a traditional salary.

What are your thoughts on him then and that? Yeah, so Jeff Bezos and others like him, they don't go to a job every morning. And so they don't pull down a salary. And so they don't pay the tax rate that everybody else pays on the money that they gather. I don't pay that same tax rate either because I live on passive income. So I live on the appreciation of my assets and the dividends or investments. or interests or other kinds of passive things that come from those things. And if you just think about the word passive, and you understand that I'm benefiting more from that

than a person who, you know, wakes up to the alarm every freaking morning and goes to their job and sweats at their job all day long and that they're paying a higher tax rate, it disgusts me. It's the opposite of everything I thought my country was about. There are some wealthy people like Abigail Disney who believe they are not being taxed enough. They're members of the patriotic millionaires. A non-partisan organization advocating for higher taxes for corporations and the wealthy. It began in 2010 in the United States.

There are now also chapters in Canada and the UK. To become a member, you need either $1 million in annual income or more than $5 million in assets. Tell me about the patriotic millionaires, the group that you're involved with. Yeah. I mean, I really love the patriotic millionaires. I met Erica, the woman who started it right before she'd started it. And when she came up with that name, I said, that is the most of nauseous name I've ever heard and it will work. Because the wealthy have commandeered and the conservatives have commandeered the idea of patriotism. And I know I love my country and that's why I pay my taxes. And that's why I don't, you know, do backflips to avoid them. And I think we need to take that back. So first of all, patriotic millionaires is brilliant. And we are kind of the people who are doing the best job of elevating the idea that you can actually speak against your own self-interest.

Because up until we started talking, I can't think of a single person who would represent anything but their self-interest in the public life. When I started talking about taxes, I found an article on Snopes.com. And Snopes is there to kind of help you decide whether or not something's a hoax. And Snopes had to establish that, no, actually, in fact, I had been speaking in favor of taxes, even though I'm a member of the wealthy class. That was how difficult it was for people to believe that I would be more interested in the greater public good than in my own well-me. And that is a sad, sorry statement about the state of society that that feels so crazy and impossible. I don't know what to do with that, really, except to say that we've sunk very low.

Do you have many billionaires in the group? No, patriotic millionaires doesn't have any billionaires yet, but we may get some. I mean, I certainly among the very young people who are inheriting money from their billionaire parents, I meet a few who are prepared to really ask some difficult questions when they get the opportunity to. And I hope that they do that. I mean, I hope that some of what I'm doing, you know, openingly questioning, particularly the source of the well and asking whether it's ethical and decent or kind, I'm hoping to model some behavior for them. So I've talked to a lot of different young people who come from those families. They're being raised on a planet we've never lived on before.

This is not a planet I grew up on. None of us did. So I don't know who those people are going to turn out to be and what those billions are going to do to their sense of themselves. But if they don't take a critical eye toward what they have, what they're going to live is lives that are lonely, that are uny, that are. isolated, that are tiny, and that don't challenge them. So I hope they recognize that the way to happiness is to engage with people, not to cut yourself off from them. I'm surprised. I thought

there'd be at least a couple of billionaires. There's billionaires who support, you know, democratic causes, and you have none. Right, right. You know, a lot of billionaires have supported Democratic causes and a lot of money has gone from very wealthy people the Democratic Party. But the minute you get a progressive analysis about taxes, about banks and holding banks responsible for what they do, then they start to really flee. And I, again, I had a hedge-run friends say to me that, you know, if Elizabeth Warren were named a presidential candidate, there'd be a depression the next day and he would vote for Donald Trump. So the idea of a progressive financial vision is anathema to them.

They hate the idea of a progressive agenda on finance. And so they may be supporting the Democratic Party, but they don't support Democratic values. It's just less repulsive to them than the Republicans. And yet, the proposed 2% tax on the global wealth of the top point 0.001% would hardly cause a dent and their growing fortunes. But what I find fascinating about Abigail Disney is how much farther she is willing to go, that she has voluntarily given away 75% of her fortune, not on her deathbed, but in her prime.

Would you be able to do that? Would I? Disney has a clear-eyed insider view of the devastating harm of extreme wealth, not just to society, but also to the human psyche. You've escaped a lot of things because of it. I do. You're lucky that you chose what you chose because most people just would be incapable of doing that, of giving up all that wealth and power, right? Well, you know, that's one of the reasons I'm kind of, I want to be,

visible in the choices I'm making because I had to make them up. I'd never seen anybody do that before. And now, as I've grown in the world and I've met other people who have done that, oh, it feels easier to do. So, like, I need to be visible for young people because they need to know that they do not have to make the set of choices that their parents have already made for them. They could go their own way. They can make their own choices. And they absolutely should because the path that they're on in terms of just expanding the wealth and living outside of the flow of the real world is it's emotional suffocation. Yeah, there's that famous story, the two writers, Kurt Vonnegut, and you know that story where they're the hedge fund in... No, I don't know.

Oh, okay. So it's Kurt. Who wrote, just wait, who wrote Catch 22? That was... The Joseph Heller. Okay. So Joseph Heller and Kirk Vonnegut of my memory serves me right. And they went to a dinner or whatever at a hedge fund billionaire in New York. And Kurt Vonnegut says to Heller, you know, what you've earned by your American classic novel, you know, Catch 22, this fellow's earned a day. And Heller said, yes, but I have something he doesn't have. I have enough. Yeah, that's exactly right, because enough is if you're not paying attention, unachievable, or the best thing that ever happened to you. Yeah, I think of that story all the time, even for myself, I'm not a billionaire, but I think of it just to be satisfied with enough, because that's the problem, is that we keep striving to have more,

have more. And we live in a culture that surrounds us with images of all the more that you can have and the, and we ennobled the actual hunt for more. We, we raised that to like almost a heroic quest when it's not heroic in any way and it's just such a path of sadness. Where do you think we're headed in terms of this billionaire age, which could soon turn into the trillionaire age? I don't think we've struck bottom at all. I think we'll get some trillionaires before we strike bottom. I don't know where we go from the bottom because when we do hit the bottom and it will be years before we do, I don't know how many countries will Bangladesh be uninhabitable because it's underwater.

I don't know what's going to be happening, but I imagine there will be yet more migration, yet more racial and national resentment about migration. There will be chaos and they will be governments falling apart. I hate saying that. I sound like such a pessimist, but I can't see wealthy people using their resources to move the dynamics of the moment we're in in anything like a better direction. And unless they do that, we're in some trouble. But I will say money also doesn't always win the elections. Organizing beats money when organizing is really good. And I do see that we're coming into maybe a new golden age of organizing. Everybody I know in the organizing world is really getting it together. And, you know, they may make some sense of this. This was part two in a documentary series by Ideas producer Mary Link called The Billionaire Age.

She was in conversation with Abigail Disney. Part three will examine the impact of extreme wealth on the world today. Technical production, Wilyar and Emily Carvezio. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayad.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.