Ideas - The Billionaire Age Pt 3 | How oligarchs are taking over the world

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Elon Musk is on the verge of becoming a trillionaire. Right now Musk's wealth is currently around $825 billion US — more than double what it was a year earlier. Only 22 countries currently boast economies larger than Musk’s net worth, but he’s catching up. In the third episode of our series The Billionaire Age we investigate how Musk and his fellow billionaires are trying to take over the world. And if they succeed, what will this mean for the rest of us?Listen to more episodes in this series:Listen to Part One: How did we get here?Listen to Part Two: Disney heiress on the dangers of extreme wealthGuests in this episode:Ingrid Robeyns is a philosopher and economist. She is the chair in Ethics of Intuitions at Utrecht University, and the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.Lucas Chancel is an economist and the co-director of The World Inequality Lab. He's also a professor at the Paris School of Economics.Gabriel Zucman is an economist and the co-director of The World Inequality Lab. He's also a professor at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley.Nitin Bharti is an economist and lecturer at the University of Western Australia. He is also the South and South-East Asia coordinator at the World Inequality Lab.Lars Osberg is an economics professor at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His latest book is The Scandalous Rise of Inequality in Canada.Abigail Disney is an American film producer, philanthropist and social activist. She is a member of Patriotic Millionaires which advocates for higher taxes on the wealthy.Paul Krugman is an economist and the winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.Tim Wu is a legal scholar and professor at Columbia Law School. He is also a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. His latest book is The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.Nick Hanauer is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He co-authored the book, Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing The Lies and Half-Truths that Protect Profit, Power and Wealth in America, with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen. He also hosts the podcast Pitchfork Economics.Guido Alfani is a professor of economic history at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. His latest book is As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West.

Imagine you've been charged with a crime, and the only witness pointing the finger at you isn't even human. I remember thinking, are you serious? What is this thing? It's something artificial, created by a mysterious Canadian. And it's coming for all of us. A life-defining technology. Crime as we know it will never be the same. I'm like, oh my God, he's lying.

From CBC's Uncover, The Expert Witness. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Elon Musk's wealth is currently around 825 billion U.S. dollars, more than double what it was a year earlier. Only 22 countries currently boast economies larger than Musk's net worth, but he's catching up.

Because when his SpaceX company's stock goes public on June 12, 2026, Musk is expected to become the world's first trillionaire. There is no reason in the world to let somebody become worth a trillion dollars. Right? Like, this is just crazy. Seattle-based entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. And that's not because that person has created a trillion dollars for the value on world. They're just in a position to take advantage of some market structures that will propel their wealth to that level. The problem is, is that it's a flywheel runaway effect, right? It's much easier to make

the second billion than the first billion. If you have $2 billion, getting to $4 is very easy. And if you have 40, getting to $80 is quite easy. And if you have $100, then, you know, like it just, it just, and that's just not good for anybody. A reminder, never before has so much wealth been concentrated in the hands. of so few. Since 2020, billionaire wealth has increased by more than 80%, leaving today's 3,428 billionaires with a combined wealth of over 20 trillion U.S. dollars. That's 4 trillion more than the preceding year. Their combined wealth surpasses the GDP of every country except the United States. Canada, with its relatively small population, is home to 82 billionaires, ranking 7th in the world. I think we see in Canada today an enormous disconnect of the political and economic elite from the rest of society.

Canadian economist Lars Osberg. I think that there is no real appreciation of the insecure. and the disappointed aspirations of many middle-class families and individuals and young people. Today, part three of Ideas producer Mary Link's series, The Billionaire Age, which explores the impact of today's unprecedented levels of wealth concentration around the world. These unprecedented levels have given rise to a new class, a global wealth aristocracy. And like the aristocracy of old, the money is being kept in the family to fortify itself against the rest of society. You've said you're worried we could end up with two classes.

Yeah, I'm worried that all economic systems can revert back to a two-class society. Tim Wu teaches law at Columbia University and is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. The two-class society, Wu, fears we may be reverting to, has roots going back about a thousand years back to the medieval feudal system. So a feature of feudal societies was that there was a wealthy landowning class that held ownership over, you know, all of the, nearly all of the relevant resources that usually land, and then, you know, a laboring class, and that's it. And I think it's always possible that a smaller group will regain control over all the assets that are necessary to make money, the productive assets. So you have one group that has all of those productive assets, that everybody else at some level or another is dependent and more like a laborer, the proletariat, doesn't really have any control over their own economic destiny. and I'm worried that we're increasingly returning to that kind of society as opposed to one that is more distributed. I'll just put it that way.

How under threat is the middle class right now in the Western world? I feel that is the most endangered class. I mean, I would be terrified to be in my 20s or 30s right now and facing the kind of prospects. You know, becoming your own autonomous source of wealth seems very challenging right now unless you you know, happen to bought the right meme coin at the right time. It sort of says something to me now that many of the young people, I know, they're throwing their savings into like the craziest kind of memeist investments, like random stocks or types of cryptocurrency. Because I think they've just lost faith in the economy. And they see it more as a, like a casino where you,

you know, put your money on the right roulette number and then you hope you turn out. And that's your only path to wealth in a way they really believe in. So, yes, I'd be terrified to be that age. It's almost impossible to imagine how much a trillion dollar, well, even a billion dollars is basically an inconceivable sum for most of us. Can't imagine what that involves, what it buys, what it looks like. It's insane. American economist and Nobel laureate, Paul Kruig. I think the way to, just to think that everything, things that are a lifetime achievement for most people, buying a nice house, paying for a college education, are literally like a dime that, for a billionaire, it's like you've dropped a dime and you think, and it's not even worth looking for it because it's such a tiny sum. So it's just living in a completely different universe. materially and financially.

Yeah, a study just came out by the Lidwick Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, and they did a study and concluded that, quote, for the bottom 60% of U.S. households, minimum quality of life is out of reach. So they define that, forget the daily necessities like food and shelter. What they mean by that is unable to pay for things like technological tools, necessary for work, higher education, health, and child care costs. Is that shocking to you, or are you surprised to hear that?

I'm not surprised to find that a reasonable definition of what a decent life looks like in the modern world is out of reach for half or more of the population. Because if we were looking at living standards as they were a couple of generations ago, most people have enough to be what we considered middle class then. but class and adequacy is a social construct. It really means participation. I mean, there's a level of, do you have enough to eat? And we have people in advanced Western economies that don't even have that. But there's also a question of having enough to be a part of the society, which is a higher level and it's somewhat of a moving target.

If you go back, Adam Smith, people think of Adam Smith, as the avatar of free markets and whatever the gods of the markets say is right. The invisible hand is also the hand of God. But in fact, he was very much aware of that, very much aware of the fact that what really defines poverty is lack of social inclusion. And there's a quite amazing passage in the wealth of nations

where he says, what does it take to be respectable in England right now in 1776 when he published the book. And he said, you have to be able to afford one good linen shirt. Because if you couldn't put on a good linen shirt when you were out in public, you weren't just not really a member of society. And the point was, of course, lots of people didn't have that. Now, well, you need to be able to be online. You need to be able to send your kids to a decent school. You need a car. Most of America, you cannot manage without a car. So there's a lot of things that you need. And yes, that's a target that rises over time, but it should. And so

we are definitely in a society where a lot of people are just kind of excluded in a fundamental way. And so here we are today, us versus them, them being the expanding global wealth aristocracy. When we talk about the development of a global aristocracy, the point is asking ourselves whether there is a relatively small group of people around the world who have shared experiences. They went to the same school. They have the same interest. And they tend to meet each other in the same places. They do things together.

To some degree, they have connections one to the other. Guido Alfane is a professor of economic history at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Why does this matter? Because if they really become an aristocracy, then they will start to actively act against something which we value, which is up-wobility from those who begin at a lower level. So that's because by definition an aristocracy has to try to close itself to the outside because as an aristocracy is defined on the fact of having some sort of privilege,

you can't share a privilege to widely, otherwise it's not a privilege at all. connected to this we have that very often the members of these growing, developing global aristocracy were born into their high wealth conditions. If we look at billionaires and if we look at billionaires across the West, about one-third of them was already born into extreme wealth. If we look about the others, many among them were born into maybe at least, upper middle strata, but at least one third, they became billionaires because they had inherited billions. And the share over total wealth of inherited wealth has been growing dramatically

from the 1970s zone. It's quite something to think about that so many billionaires simply inherited their billions. They're not self-made, they didn't create jobs, they didn't improve the economy, except for themselves, they were just born into astounding levels of wealth and consequently power. So one reason why the increase in the prevalence of inherited wealth today might be a problem is that we, in our Western culture today, have a bias in favor of wealth which has been made versus wealth

which has simply being inherited. Because for us, the most legitimate kind of, wealth is the one which you have made, which is also why many among nowadays billioners are trying to present themselves as self-made men, usually they are men, not always, but tend to be men. And the point is, if a certain level of wealth inequality is ever more clearly the consequence of inherited wealth of that kind of wealth which we tend to think is less legitimate, then the same level of inequality will be perceived in a more acute way leading to a higher degree of potential social problems,

which go from widespread social unease at this condition to political instability, to unrest, with always the risk of political instability becoming something worse. Even acts of violence against the rich could become more frequent. The philosopher D.H. Haslett has observed that we have abolished the inheritance of political power, well, the states and Canada in various places. We've abolished the inheritance of political power. Why then should we not abolish the inheritance of economic power as well? What do you think?

Yeah, you know, the inheritance tax, that's actually a U.S. invention. We developed it in the early 20th century. it's never complete, but it used to be quite substantial levy on inherited wealth. Paul Krugman. It's kind of interesting. If you go back to early 20th century politicians, they would say quite frankly that it was not just about raising money, that it was also about preventing inherited, basically about preventing oligarchy, about preventing a permanent plutocratic class.

and their arguments are as valid now as ever. All right, there becomes a little bit of a question of personal liberty. If you think about an inheritance from the point of view of the inheritor, why should somebody be rich just because their father was rich? There's no justice there. If you think about it from the point of view of the father, well, or the mother, but still mostly fathers, should you have the ability to do something? something for your children.

And within limits, okay, we don't want to completely eliminate human feeling and so on. But very large estates should face very high tax rates. That's just really clear from any reasonable point of view. And by the way, if you say, well, we've eliminated the inheritance of political power, do you want to say that to George W. Bush, do you want to say that to RFK Jr., who's now our Secretary of Health and Human Services? And a lot of that is through money,

although some of it is also through kind of just the fact that the aristocratic instinct apparently is rather deeply embedded in people. But a large part of the reason not to tax large inheritances is not just because of the monetary side, but also because of the political side. side. And what may surprise you is that Canada has more billionaires than countries such as the UK, France, Japan, or Australia. How come we have so many billionaires, small little country,

Canada? Well, we don't tax them much, for one thing. Delhousie University professor and economist Lars Osberg. And we protect them through government policy and we don't have an inheritance tax and we leave them lots of tax. And we leave them lots of tax planning options for minimizing their tax burden at the top, yeah. Federal inheritance and estate taxes in Canada were abolished in 1972. I said earlier that there were 82 billionaires in Canada. That figure comes from the Forbes magazine's annual billionaire list. But Lars Osberg says that number is somewhat deceiving as it doesn't include everyone,

namely several wealthy families in this country who hold joint trusts that are worth billions. In the Forbes list, I think, doesn't include the Damare family, and it doesn't include the Rogers and Shaw families. I think because those families hold their assets through family trusts rather than as individuals, at least I couldn't find those guys in there. I double-checked. They're not on the list. So, for instance, Suggberry-born Paul Demeray, Sr., built a $5 billion fortune and finance.

He died in 2013, leaving an inheritance to his four children. Their family trust is now estimated to be worth $12.7 billion. Inheriting money is a very tricky thing, morally and emotionally. I always felt weird about it. Aris Abigail Disney says she inherited about $120 million. Her grandfather Roy co-founded the Disney company with his brother Walt Disney. But Abigail Disney has done something unusual with her inheritance. She's given away 75% of it.

I always questions why it was just understood that I got to have what I wanted when I wanted it all the time and that we were so clearly living so much better than others. And so it was just from my girlhood. I just was uncomfortable. And then when I moved to New York and saw people sleeping on the sidewalk, which was kind of a new thing for me to see, I thought like, this can't be. It just felt uncomfortable to me.

And I don't understand people for whom that's not uncomfortable. I think that the rise in private spaces and private elevators and private doors and private entrances and all these kinds of things are, partly to spare rich people that discomfort. Because when confronted with the difference, like so nakedly as walking by a person sleeping on the sidewalk, it's pretty hard not to feel uncomfortable. And so the problem with the global aristocracy is they're constructing a world in which they're never confronted with that.

It's a troubling character development. And I, as someone who inherited money, my mother from a very early age would say to us, you know, people will want to hurt you. People will want to trick you. You can't trust people. And she was protecting me, and I understand it. But it was a horribly toxic thing to say because when you tell your kids that you're telling two things. One is people are not you. In other words, people are not as human as you. And that you're going to be isolated, and that's the right and appropriate thing for you to be isolated. And what I've found, when I moved into my 30s and started opening myself up to different kinds of work and different kinds of people,

was that I'm no better than anyone else, and that's the good news. Like, my mother was worried that I would get the news that I was no better than anyone else, and I'd feel sad about that. But I'm telling you, that was good news. And it made me feel like, oh, there's this party everybody's heading that I wasn't invited to, but I can earn it. So one third of all billionaires inherited their billions. Another third made their billions in finance. Yeah, the financial sector has really, really quietly enriched itself while everybody was looking at the tech folks.

And the financial sector, the people who drive the really obscene amounts of money in that zone, are not creating anything of value. If anything, they leach money off of transactions. So as things move through the financial system, it's like I think of it as every time there's a transaction, it's like there's a collision and a little money falls out of everybody's pockets. And the finance guys are there to scoop it up. And over a lifetime of that, you put together you can amass quite an enormous fortune. So I think they've only made the finance business more of a burden on the economy. they make transactions more expensive than they used to be, and they're hindering and slowing financial growth,

all while squeezing money out of a system that has stopped producing value. Today, financial assets are the most important component of the wealth of the very richest, say the top 0.01%. Guido Alfone. Enrichment to finance is much more frequent compared to any previous point in human history. history. Interestingly, at least in the context of Western history, which is the context I know better, making money out of money has always been seen with suspicion. The financier in ancient Rome, we've seen with suspicion. We know that some senators were in practice lending money,

but they always had to use intermediaries to at least save the appearances. And then, of course, the medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas, he was saying, that money shouldn't be generated by money. And for the medieval theologians, the problem is that if you were asking interest on loans, you are basically making people pay for time. But time is owned only by God. So it's like stealing from God, asking loans. Of course, this position becomes practically untenable,

so the church has to find ways, which make financial activities acceptable, you know, within certain boundaries, but do you continue to see finance with some suspicion. When does this suspicion arise more clearly well whenever there is an economic crisis? In particular, financial crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which develops after the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007-2008, is the most recent example. And in that context, there was also, again, interestingly, a condemnation of greed, right?

Because today, those who, like former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Griespan, said, the crisis for Griespan had also been caused by excessive greed among those involved in finance. What I found really interesting when I was doing all this research was that when I think of big billionaires, I think I'm not alone when I think, oh, those are the tech people. But the majority of billionaires are the finance people. Yeah. What does that what does that say to us? It says that we've allowed our economy to be financialized in a way that makes no sense. Entrepreneur and civic activist Nick Hanauer.

The richest people in the world do nothing more than rub money together to make more money. money. They don't make anything. They don't produce anything. They have a different story, of course, but, you know, what is a hedge fund other than just a way for rich people to get richer? I mean, believe me, I have lots of investments in hedge funds. You know, like I play that game too, but this is why Mary, it's so important to not believe that prosperity is GDP or money and to believe it's solutions to human problems because that forces you to confront the fact that you're not really solving anybody's problem. And, you know, there's a reason why these business models are so powerful is that there is only one commodity on planet Earth for which there is infinite demand,

and that is more wealth, right? Everything else, yachts, pick it, you can have too many, right? But you can never have enough wealth, ever. And that's what that's what propels those business models and that dynamic, right? Infinite demand. So what can be done about that, the idea of the, you know, people rubbing money together and making more money, but not jobs, not helping the economy. How does one counter that, then, that kind of wealth? I don't know. I don't know. I can tell you what has happened in history is revolution and the whole thing gets burned down and we start over again. We might be heading there. Yes, exactly. This is ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Imagine you've been charged with a crime, and the only witness pointing the finger at you isn't even human. I remember thinking, are you serious? What is this thing? It's something artificial, created by a mysterious Canadian. And it's coming for all of us. A life-defining technology. Crime as we know it will never be the same.

I'm like, oh my God, he's lying. From CBC's Uncover, the expert, Witness. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. We return now to part three of producer Mary Link's series, The Billionaire Age, and its consequences for our lives today. Among them, soaring wealth inequality and the return to a two-class system. And you can also add societal unrest, the destruction of democracies, and environmental devastation. But the reaction from the top 1%, for the most part, indifference.

Look, the neoliberal version of capitalism confers an advantage onto people who don't care about other people. In 1995, Nick Hanauer was the first non-family investor in Jeff Bezos's then-fledgling online bookstore, Amazon. Today, it's worth nearly $3 trillion U.S. dollars. Hanauer left the Amazon board in 2000 and is a vocal critic of concentrated wealth. Jeff Bezos today is the fourth richest person on the planet, just after Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Bryn and the top dog Elon Musk. I think if you look at the people, particularly in the technology industry,

who lead these large companies, there is one thing that makes them all similar, and that is that they don't have a lot of events. empathy. These are not people who care about other people. Just like Elon Musk, Jeff is just being himself, which is a person who thinks that whatever's good for Jeff is good for the world. Have you seen a transformation on him? Because you knew him, right? You know him. Yes. He's always been the same. Right. He never cared about other people. And his politics have always been libertarian. You know, that's just the way these guys think. They're just, that's just how they are.

So you didn't get invited to the wedding, you're telling me? Oh, my God. It's just like so, so grotesque. No, I mean, but, you know, I mean, the thing is, is that these guys are all tone deaf, right? They only read their own press and, you know, like, and besides, just don't care. Don't care. You talked about for the people like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff B.A. Sos or that they, you know, you play nice but get shamed anyhow.

And now that they, they're starting to think that if you're big and evil anyhow, we may, may as well ditch the noblesse oblige and just embrace being big and evil. Do you think they're embracing now just being big and evil and feel so removed and so powerful that they don't care what other people think about them? I think that's a new trend. I think over the last five years or so. Tim Wu's latest book is called The Age of Extraction, How Tech Platforms Conquer the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. I think over the last five years or so, many of the big tech multimillionaires, have basically said themselves, no more Mr. Nice Guy. You know, we tried being nice, we tried being woke, but people hated us anyways. So a guy like Mike Zuckerberg or maybe Sergey Brand, Larry Page at Google, they're just like, forget it. And they also have the example in front of their faces

of Elon Musk, who has, you know, behaved reprehensively and managed to make more money anyways. And they're like, why are we playing the suckers here? Elon, you know, has been this sort of negative example that makes everybody else feel like, forget it, I'm not, I'm through with this. Peter Thiel, also, I would suggest, was a leader in this more Anne Randian kind of me-first ideology among the fact, billionaires. When it comes to politics, billionaires have been spending heavily, unfavored candidates, candidates who don't object to their soaring wealth

and the consequences, including a deteriorating middle class. Elon Musk's campaign donation was a significant factor in helping Trump win the 2024 election. It rang in at an astonishing 288 million U.S. dollars. Nick Hanauer. And when you combine those enormous concentrations of wealth with a political system in the United States that treats a dollar as a value, vote, which is what the Supreme Court effectively has ruled, that's the catastrophe. Because when you can convert wealth into political power, that's where societies really, really come off the rails.

You know, 40 years ago, you couldn't invest $250 million in a presidential campaign. There were limits. I don't remember what it was. It was $25,000, something like that. And we have limits in Canada, but at the same time, there's other ways of influence if you're a very wealthy person. If there's anything that 10,000 years of human history has showed, it is that enormous amounts of concentrated power and wealth are bad. They just are. There's no social utility in that at all. In 2014, Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and an expert in antitrust policy decided to enter politics. You ran for Democratic nomination for New York's lieutenant governor, and you also had the New York Times. endorsement, which is pretty impressive. But in the end, it went to Kathy Hocall, who, according to the New York Times again, had a quote record setting $21.6 million in donations flowed from the who's tool of New York special interests, which included Manhattan's mega-rich real estate developers. But when you ran, and you were sort of as a regular person, so to speak, I think you might have sort of considered yourself. But you had, according to BuzzFeed, now whether or not this is true, you accepted money.

from some tech giants. They said you accepted money from Netflix, read Hastings, and you've been critical of Netflix, of course, in terms of monopolies. In an ideal world, would you have liked to run without the need from money, from large donors? Oh, absolutely.

And in fact, I think it's moving in a direction where the only people willing to run are independently wealthy because it's such a pain asking for money. Yeah, I remember in that campaign, we were outspent, I think, 60 to 1. And anyone who I knew at all, I asked for money.

because we needed to have some chance of winning. We were an outsider campaign. We kind of were like an early version of Bernie Sanders. But yes, I think, in fact, I believe in a society where relatively normal people run for government, I don't know, maybe you're a union organized, maybe you're a school ticket, whatever, you decided you want to do your part and be part of this thing. And ideally it would be based on the idea that you give a good speech. and are able to convince people

that you're going to do what's in their interests. But it's not like that at all. As soon as I think about running for office now, immediately the only first thought I have is money. And there's a reason in the United States the press doesn't take anyone seriously. It doesn't even report on them unless they happen to be an independently wealthy billionaire

running for office. But as soon as you are, you get to go. So it's so past being corrupted. It's like corrupt isn't even a good enough word. it's all it is. It's only really, it seems, getting started about having some kind of money. And I despise it, and it actually, frankly, keeps me out of politics because I don't want to call people and beg for money. So did you get money from Reed Hastings? Yeah, yeah. I asked him, can you help me out, Reed? And he said, yeah. And did you feel that would somehow compromise you or make you beholden? I know that that would not be what you would want to do.

but how do you accept money like that and not be beholden to someone? I completely hated the fact. Diller was another... Barry Diller, right? Who's the head of former media guy, a billionaire? I asked him for money. And I remember once I was talking with some people

and also the phone rang and it's him, and I'm like, oh, I got to answer this phone. And I was like, this is just how it goes. You know, I felt like I learned the straightforward way the way that money corrupts you directly by starting to think that some people are more important than other. And when you run for office in the United States,

rich people are more important than poor people immediately. Like whatever people say, right away the equation is all pressure to make you feel that, you know, you have to... And then if they want you to do something, there's a strong sense that maybe you better do it or not get the money again. So, yeah, no, I didn't like it at all.

I felt exactly what, you know, everybody writes about, you know, beholden. Now, I would say they're not the only people who are pushing me around. The unions were pretty tough. So were some of the interest groups. But yes, there's no question that I personally felt the pressure of money when I ran for office. I think that anyone who says they're entirely uninfluenced by donors is lying. In the end, Tim Wu says he raised only about a couple hundred thousand dollars for his campaign, far less than the historic $21.6 million that his opponent Kathy Hochle raised, who had many more billionaires on her side and went on to win the general election.

Economist Netampaharte has studied the rise of the billionaire class in India. Their nickname is the billionaire Raj, as their wealth now far surpasses the British Raj, the colonial elites who once ruled over the country. Are you seeing the billionaire class, the billionaire, Are they exerting a lot of power politically? When we look at the member of parliament, and I'm talking about the elected member of parliament in national elections, so in 2000, average politician had 150 times more wealth than an average Indian.

That has increased to 350 times. 350 times the average wealth of an Indian. Huge jump. 90% of these politicians, based on their wealth, they fall in the top one. percent of the population. So you can think that if in Indian politics, if these people are coming into politics, what kind of life experiences they have and based on which they are going to make laws and all the policymaking, and that is going to impact the policymaking in India. That fact explains in part why, despite having one of the fastest growing major economies in the

world, India's wealth inequality is also soaring. Globally, 74 billionaires are reported to hold executive or legislative political offices. Oxfam International says billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people. And in the context of the West, until relatively recently, I don't think that a super billionaire could have been elected by minister or president in any Western country in the 1960s, for example. Then something happens after that.

Economic historian Guido Alfane. And the first moment when we have a sign that the voters are more accepting of the super-rich acquiring a very direct role into politics is when in 1994 in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi runs for elections, wins the elections and becomes prime minister for the first time. And by the way, Berlusconi apparently had been inspired by Ros Perrault in the election campaign in United States. two years before. Perrault didn't win the elections, but he got a totally unexpected result, right? So possibly Berlusconi observed this, and he realized that in the context of Italy in 1994, the new political offer could be delivered by a super billionaire. And Berlusconi in that period was extremely wealthy shortly after he ranked 20th in the Forbes list of the richest people in the was really one of the richest people on the planet.

And additionally, he also had his wealth invested to a substantial degree in exactly the kind of things which allowed him to expand his political influence. He was controlling a very large part of the Italian televisions in that moment. He controlled also many among the traditional media. He had newspapers. And all this was kind of helping. in. And that's another reality of the billionaire age. Billionaires increasing control of the media and social platforms. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Murdoch, it goes on. And they are not followers of democratic ideals. More recently, close associates of Trump and tech billionaires, David and Larry Ellison,

bought CBS News and are in the process of acquiring CNN. Tim Moose says even Elon Musk's campaign contribution of nearly 300 million is not the full picture of his political influence on the 2024 U.S. election. I think Elon Musk, when he bought Twitter, effectively made a $45 billion campaign donation. The largest donation in human history turned an entire sort of dominant social media among voting and informationally sensitive people entirely into the service of the Trump campaign. And I don't think Donald Trump would have won without that. I think that's straightforward. In the meantime, some billionaires have greater ambitions than just buying elections. Belgian Dutch philosopher and economist Ingrid Robbins.

Now, of course, the most recent group of libertarian ideas stemming from mainly the tech billionaires from Silicon Valley is to, you could say, almost dismantle democracies. They basically think that democracies are. are a problem for them. So they are increasingly making an direct attack on democracies. And they're playing with ideas such as to have city-states that are basically run-like enterprises where you no longer have rights as a citizen, but where you have rights that stand from your purchasing power. So I think we have to realize that we are really in a very particular point in history, which may go into different directions.

we are really in a crisis of systems. And that is why it is also so important to really look at the interplay between our political system and democracy and the influence of the billionaires. Billionaires influencing political systems is one thing. But what might be even more troubling is there increasing control over the global technologies and their stake in the looming AI revolution. You've talked about the possibility of a technological armored wall that will separate the have and the have-nots. Again, another dystopian scary thing, but I can also see it. So can you explain what this technological armored wall would be like separating the halves and the have-nots? Tim Wu.

Yeah. So I should say that I feel that with the technologies of our time, it could go in more than one direction. I certainly don't think it's inherently evil or anti-egalitarian. I think historically there have been technologies, the plow is a good example, that have made a lot of people wealthier, but there's also been technologies like the cotton gin, which fortified the economics of southern slavery in the United States, which have clearly made things worse. The challenge in our time is that technologies like artificial intelligence and the platforms are very carefully designed to extract as much wealth as possible. from all other parts of the economy. And my concern, you know, you can see that if you're, let's say, a seller on Amazon. So the people who are sellers on Amazon have really seen their fortunes change. Amazon used to be a good and easy place to make a lot of money. It's gotten harder and harder

as Amazon has fine-tuned its extraction so that people can barely make money. They're still there, but they can't make a lot of money. and what I'm concerned about is the building of a technological economy where, as I said, the platforms extract all the money from everybody else, including the newspapers, including small business, including small sellers, including workers, and it's all sort of finely calibrated so that people aren't starving or unable to do anything, but that no one's able to get rich except for the platforms themselves. and the billionaires who own these platforms. And if I haven't painted a dire enough picture yet of the impact of the billionaire age, let me try to give it another shot. How about this?

The destruction of Earth itself. The richest pollute more than the rest of the population. Why is that? Well, when you are wealthy, you are going to consume a lot of things. and this consumption is associated with some pollution. Luca Chancel is a co-director and senior economist at the World Inequality Lab, at the Paris School of Economics. But when you're wealthy, you are also going to have relatively more power over the firms that you may own.

And so these firms pollute. So we all contribute to global pollution, but not in the same way. And what studies have shown is that there's a really strong social gradient. By this, I mean that the richer you are, the more likely it is that you're going to pollute, to contribute to pollution more than other groups. And the very rich can better protect themselves from climate catastrophes. In the sense that we're also all affected by these pollutions, but not in the same way. Some are much more exposed to the effects of climate change.

Think, for instance, of different locations. In a country, some might be more arid, others will be more temperate. And so what we know is that when there's a drought, when there's a heat wave, well, those places, those locations that are more arid will be more at risk. They will be hit harder by the heat wave than places that are more temperate. Well, in many developing countries, it happens that low-income groups are more concentrated in those places that are more arid. And so, they are more exposed than wealthier population. They do not live in these places.

Another example in the U.S., for instance, in Louisiana, when Cyclone Katrina hit about 20 years ago, the city, not all households were exposed in the same way to the risk of floods. There were some rich neighborhoods on the hills of New Orleans that were not exposed to the risk of floods. But low-income neighborhoods were particularly exposed, and in fact some of them were so exposed that they even have not been rebuilt after 20 years, an entire neighborhood. So that's exposure. But then there's another dimension which is vulnerability. Here there's a systematic relationship between your level of wealth

and how vulnerable you are to these climate-related shocks. So is the large part of climate denial, do you think it's because the wealthiest, the top 1%, 10% are not affected by it as much as the rest of us? Oh, definitely, 100%. You know, when you benefit from a situation, you just enjoy the status quo. You don't necessarily want to change it.

And they don't perceive the risk in the same way as the rest of the population. And the extreme case of that might be things like the silo condo or survival condo project in the Kansas Desert. It's a former nuclear silo that was transformed into luxury lofts. And you can buy these lofts in case of collapse or in case of huge. climate-related disaster. Or general unrest, pandemics, war, even nuclear war, billionaire bunkers are becoming very popular. The one in Kansas is called survival condo.

It has 15 underground levels, housing 12 condos, where one can survive for more than five years. And they've sold out, but don't worry. The same company has a new bunker site scheduled for completion in 2026. It's called the Defenbaker. It's a former Cold War below-ground bomb shelter in the small community of DeBurt, Nova Scotia. 50 luxury condos, with bonuses such as a medical center, workout facility, and military-grade protection. And there's already a private airstrip, about half a mile away. Prices for each unit are being kept private from the public,

but their top Kansas underground condo went for more than $4.5 million U.S. dollars. And the Defenbaker's motto, where legacy meets luxury. At the Defenbaker, your safety and comfort are our top priorities, no matter the state of the world outside. Our facilities, staff, and amenities are always ready to welcome members ensuring uninterrupted access 24-7. Whether during times of regional instability or global events, our dedicated team is prepared to receive, you with seamless service and immediate support. The Defenbaker offers a constant sanctuary where your arrival and well-being are guaranteed, reinforcing our commitment to providing a safe and luxurious refuge whenever you need it.

An exclusive community for leaders to ensure your legacy, values, and way of life endures. So that's just an illustration of how, when you're very, very, very, wealthy, you might feel that you're shielded, that you're protected much more than the rest of the population. Above the underground billionaire bunkers, the ultra-rich are also fortifying their mansions and personal safety. Mark Zuckerberg's annual security bill is reportedly more than $20 million, all out of sight from the rest of us by design. Philosopher Ingrid Robbins argues the invisibility of the ultra-rich can blind the average person to just, how bad wealth inequality has become.

You were also saying that we see the poor, but we don't see the rich, and that's perhaps part of the problem that we don't realize the wealth that is out there. Yes, we're seeing poverty, we're seeing the people who are begging on the streets, because that's often their only way of survival. But many of the richest are also, you could say, behind fences. They may also operate in their own circles, So I think the degree of wealth inequality is often surprising to people. But lately, the ballooning almost inconceivable wealth of billionaires is being noticed by the rest of society.

And I think it's a combination of both the fact that overall we've become so rich, especially in North America, especially in the USA. And at the same time, inequality has increased. That is actually almost like a lethal cocktail that now. leads to all these harms to society, including the one that really is now exploding in our face, which is that it's undermining democracy. I don't think it's going to get better. Nick Hanauer. I think it's going to get worse.

Until it doesn't. When it doesn't, man, it's going to be ugly. There will not be a hole you can dig deep enough to hide from what's coming. Yes, I do believe the pitchworks are coming. Eris, philanthropist and social activist Abigail Disney. I definitely believe that. And I don't know how I'm going to do when it happens or whatever. But like Russia is a great example of a place where they've established a society where pitchforks are sort of assumed. And so they have little enclaves of incredibly wealthy people who have lots of security around them. And they move freely in those enclaves. And then the rest of everything is a hellscape. And I think that we're halfway, maybe three quarters or even 90 percent of the way. to that kind of world where the rich people have separated from us, and they've just decided to make their own little worlds where they are

and let everybody fight for everything else. I do think that that was the secret, always the secret agenda behind the gun agenda, frankly, was promoting chaos and death in the common people so that they would be ready for the chaos and the death that was coming when they all lifted off from Earth. Naomi Klein wrote a really good piece and has been talking about what it is that binds the billionaires with the Christian nationalists because it is a really odd pairing and they are just together in lockstep. And this is so smart because they don't believe in the future any of them. The white Christian nationalists believe firmly that the apocalypse is right around the corner is going to happen.

What's the point in worrying about the global warming? What's the point in any of this? Let's let it all fall apart. and that'll bring it on. And the billionaires also don't believe in a future. They think it's all falling apart, and it looks like it has escaped them already, and they're preparing for a world in which they live completely separate lives.

So they're all pro-apocalypse and anti-every one. And I think that feels true to me. French economist Gabriel Zuckman says the battle of the 21st century is oligarchy versus democracy. Yeah, I mean, wealth of billionaires has grown from 2% of world GDP in 1987 to 14% of world GDP today. If this continues, it's going to be 25, 30, 40, 50%,

50%. It is such an overwhelming power that people just won't accept it. But we can fix this now, before it gets to this stage, before the pitchforks. Do you think billionaires will soon, are too wealthy now to have their wealth curbed?

No. I'm really confident, deep down, and optimistic about the power of the forces of democracy to prevail. This has happened in the past, including in situations that seemed hopeless. For instance, I don't know, in the U.S. before 1913, you have all this debate about creating an income tax. But people said, no, the Constitution prevents it. So it seemed hopeless. But the truth is. change the Constitution, they created an income tax, which not only they created it, but they made extremely progressive with those rates of almost 100% for the top incomes. So, you know, look, change happens. So as bleak as a scenario I've painted so far, there are solutions to our historic and

dangerous levels of wealth concentration. And that doesn't necessarily mean completely tossing out our current economic system. It just means making it more equitable. for everyone, but first there has to be the will to change. That was part three in a documentary series called The Billionaire Age by Ideas producer Mary Link. Part four will offer hope as you'll hear concrete solutions to redress the extremes of the billionaire age. Technical production, Emily Kiervasio and Pat Martin. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas.

Senior producer Nicola Luxic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.