The Current - How the ultrarich get into petty fights, influence power and live so lavishly

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

<p>There’s more billionaires in the world now than ever before. And as wealth is concentrated into the hands of a small group of people, the power of those select few is also growing – particularly in the US, where billionaires have been getting more and more access to Donald Trump. The journalist Evan Osnos tells about the influence and excesses of the .01%, which he charts in his new book, <em>The Haves and the Have Yachts</em>.</p>

We learned about Leo Schofield's fight for innocence in season one of Bone Valley. Now, he and author Gilbert King are back with season two. This time, they dig deeper into the history of the man who confessed to killing Leo's wife. Do I want to talk to him? Do I really forgive him? This is the man that murdered my wife, and I've been through hell on earth because of it. I'm Kathleen Goltar, and this week on Crime Story, how Leo Schofield chose to forgive the man who destroyed his life. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. You might be familiar with the idea of a super yacht. Do you know what a gigayacht is? That is a boat that is more than 300 feet long. There are only about 170 of them in the world, including one called Chaos owned by Walmart heiress Nancy Walton-Laurie. Welcome aboard the magnificent floating wonder known as Chaos. This incredible luxury motor yacht built by OceanCo in 2017 is a true marvel of engineering and design. This tour on YouTube shows off the luxury features like the swimming pool with a built-in aquarium and the helipad at the bow of the boat.

And then, inside... The interior design of Chaos is a feast for the eyes. Lavish white and blue carpeted floors adorned with intricate designs beautifully complement the vessel's exterior and its signature aqua color. Golden accents and cream upholstery harmonize with the teak flooring creating a warm and inviting ambiance." Gigayots like these have become the status symbol of choice for the richest of the rich, a category of people whose numbers are growing, particularly in the United States. There are now 800 or so billionaires in the US, up from 66 in 1990. Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very few. New Yorker writer Evan Osnos says that growing gap between the rich and everyone else is partly what's at the stage for

the second Trump presidency and what he calls the politics of plunder inside the Oval Office. Evan Osnos' new book is called The Havs and Hav Yachts Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich. We spoke yesterday morning before Donald Trump and Elon Musk's very public relationship breakdown and I began by asking Evan who exactly is buying these really big boats? Well, right now we're in the season of the crypto billionaires. There is one person in the yachting industry said to me, there have been these generations. First, it was the oil money, there were the shipping tycoons, then there were the internet tech tycoons, and now most recently, it's become the crypto money but it's in effect the

Table stakes are about a half a billion dollars. I had a CEO in Silicon Valley say to me that a Super yacht is in his words the best way to absorb excess capital excess capital. Hmm. Yeah it's a term I hadn't really heard before but it struck me as perhaps a Yeah, it's a term I hadn't really heard before, but it struck me as perhaps a bit of a strange motto of our time. What is LOA? Cause this in some ways defines what a gigayacht or super yacht is, right?

Yeah, LOA is really the coin of the realm in the industry and it stands for length overall. Meaning in effect, you can put all the fancy accoutrement you want on there. People have things like IMAX movie theaters and cryo saunas and helicopter pads, but in the end, they measure themselves against one another by length overall. Somebody told you that if the rest of the world learns what it's like to live on a yacht

like this, we're going to have to bring back the guillotine. What do boats like this reveal about the wealthy people who own them? Well, you're absolutely right to zero in on that observation in part because that comment, one of the things that struck me about it was that it came from a yacht owner. And so there is a way in which there is a kind of anxious awareness that owning the most expensive object

that our species has ever figured out how to own, anxious awareness that owning the most expensive object that our species has ever figured out how to own also is a sign of the tensions in our society. It's almost as if the higher they get on the wealth and status ladder, the more uneasy they become. It's like a kind of vertigo sets in, this feeling that they are exposed and vulnerable and yet insatiable. It continues on.

I've talked to people who have spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars buying a yacht and they will spend most of the conversation telling you about the bigger yacht that they hope to commission and buy someday. There's a story in the book about some rich owner of a yacht who invites other rich people onto the boat and he limits the number of newspapers that are available for them to

read in the morning? Yes. It's part of, frankly, from his perspective, some of the pleasure of the experience is to watch some of the world's most powerful people jockey for just the minor advantages of even the simplest interactions. And in a way, it kind of clued me into some of the underlying social dynamics of the whole experience, which is that it is ultimately a hierarchical test. Did you start to enjoy the life? You tell a story, but your wife is at home with the kids and she's texting you about some toilet debacle and there you are in the lap of luxury. Did you start to enjoy the life? You tell a story, but your wife is at home with the

kids and she's texting you about some toilet debacle and there you are in the lap of luxury. I do confess there was a moment of supreme guilt. She happened to text me with this kind of mechanical disaster at the very moment that I was just tucking into an omelet and a glass of really extraordinary fresh squeezed juice and I looked out from the terrace where I was sitting and I saw this man on a rather, shall we say, mid-tier yacht and I just noticed that he was looking up at me on this terrace. And he didn't know, of course, that I was an interloper, a fraud just there for the sake of journalism. And I felt this very distinct and unfamiliar

sensation, which I realized was superiority. Let's talk about some of the other ways that really rich people are spending their money. Why are so many rich people getting laser eye surgery right now? Well, the CEO of Reddit, which is a popular site a lot of people will know and use, told me that he had gotten laser eye surgery because he worries about the breakdown of society, essentially an apocalypse scenario, and he doesn't want to have to rely on contact lenses or eyeglasses in the event that the supply chain collapses. And that interview, which frankly kind of staggered me, it prompted me to talk to a bunch of other people in Silicon Valley and in Wall Street.

One person led me to the next. And as I describe in the book, there is a culture of doomsday prepping that has grown up on the fringes of these two communities in the country that are in many ways some of the most powerful people in the world, but they have become preoccupied by the belief that society is on the point of great fragility. And so they're doing things like buying houses in New Zealand where they could escape and making plans about what they would do in the event of a disaster. And it was quite a startling thing

to discover is happening. These aren't the, I mean, people think of survivalists and as you say in the book, it's not, you know, the tinfoil hat guy with a basement full of beans. These are incredibly wealthy people who are quite convinced that something terrible is going to happen and that in their eyes, this is what you say, survivalism is not a step toward prevention, it's an act of withdrawal. What does that mean? It's, I'm afraid, a fairly bleak fact

that I concluded that in a way, preparing for the worst consequences is natural, it's logical. And what we do when we're thinking about our own lives is maybe you say, well, what can I do to try to prevent this terrible consequence that I'm worried about? But that's a different thing than saying, all I'm going to focus on is how can I invest in protecting myself in the event of that worst consequence? Another CEO in Silicon Valley said to me at one point, you know, when this conversation comes up at dinner parties, he said, I like

to push back on it. He said, I often like to ask people if you're so concerned about the pitchforks, as he put it, how much are you giving to your local homeless shelter? How damaging do you think it is to the idea of society if there is an incredibly, I mean, this is the theme that runs through the book, an incredibly powerful segment of the population that isn't thinking about, they have the power to solve some of these problems, but they're not interested in that. They're interested in going to New Zealand if the wheels fall off. Or to Mars.

Or to Mars. I mean, these are other, they're really points on the same spectrum. I've really come to be quite conscious of the fact that some of the dominant cultural figures, people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, are no longer convinced actually, as some earlier generations were, like John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, that really it was their requirement morally and in civic terms to put their money back into the soup, in a sense. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago, Carnegie created libraries all over the United States.

And even more recently, you see people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have devoted the lion's share of their fortunes to philanthropy. And Musk has a different view. Musk's view is, as he has said explicitly, he said, my greatest gift to humankind is being the CEO of Tesla because of what it could do on climate change. I think that there is a way in which the current generation, and this is really, frankly, the purpose for writing a book of this kind, is I wanted to illuminate that there are multiple ways to be a billionaire. You might choose to go in the path of somebody like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, who has devoted so much to try to, frankly, work on vaccines and protect the world's most vulnerable

people. Or you could go the path of somebody like Musk, who is right now discovering, I think, the limits of public tolerance for his ideas and learning that he is right now discovering, I think, the limits of public tolerance for his ideas and learning that he is quite secluded, I think quite disconnected from the actual experience of people who get up every day and don't really agree with his idea that social security is, as he says,

a Ponzi scheme and things like that. What about Mark Zuckerberg? One of the things you say in the book is that these are people in a world that does not welcome a lot of outside attention, but you had the opportunity, and this is before he became a gold chain wearing mixed martial arts practitioner. You spent a lot of time with Zuckerberg and managed to speak with him on a number of different occasions. What did you learn about

who he really is and what drives him in his role in society? 05 I was writing a profile of him for the New Yorker and so that process can unfold over the course of a few months and I would have always liked to spend more time with an interview subject, but I was grateful to be able to get a view into this world, this very strange experience of somebody who, as a teenager, you'll remember, created his big idea. And then from that moment on, when he dropped out of college, he was creating a world of his own design. So it became a real reflection of his values and his worldview and his mindset. And so I wanted to try to understand that as best I could. And in some ways, perhaps one of the most revealing conversations I felt

like was when I was startled to discover how much he admired ancient Rome, how fascinated he was by ancient Rome. He had named his three children after Roman emperors. In fact, when he and his wife went on their honeymoon in Rome, they had so many pictures with statues of Augustus that she began to joke that it was like the three of them were in a marriage. And, you know, for people who've maybe, you know,

it's been a few years since you read the classics, you know, Augustus was known for having achieved great victories across Europe and Northern Spain and so on. But he was also somebody who was, frankly, known for a pretty domineering form of politics. And it was a pretty harrowing time to be in his midst. And when I asked Uckenberg, he said, you know, he found it fascinating to think about the trade-offs. That was the term he used between achieving impact and the harm that it takes in the process. And in some ways he, I think in his own life

has come to see the attempt to make a great impact, to be a great person of history might involve some trade-offs along the way. The challenge is for the rest of us that those trade-offs can reverberate through our lives, whether it's the way that social media impacts our attention spans or our children's emotional health, or frankly, the functioning of democracy

and the information sphere. And so that kind of way in which one person's interests can be magnified across society because of the scale of their fortunes, that I found quite interesting. How do you understand how his politics have changed? I mean, and it's not just, you know, the comments on Joe Rogan talking about masculine energy and we need more of that, what have you. It's him cozying up to Donald Trump, Donald Trump, a figure that there was certainly tension and heat between the two of them before. Now

it feels as though that has dissipated in part because of what Zuckerberg has done. How do you understand that? You know, I think in his case, I think he doesn't have any particularly fully articulated political views. And I think he felt a little bit surprised. And I think this is a theme that runs through many of these people's experiences, that they were surprised, frankly, to discover that the public didn't see them the way they saw themselves.

They see themselves as great innovators and creators. And in some ways, they have achieved extraordinary entrepreneurial achievements. But they've also shown themselves to be somewhat out of touch with what people are actually concerned about people really are worried about the role that things like social media and have on our on our culture and I think that experience of being scorched by that public backlash Made them more inclined to want to gravitate to Donald Trump when the moment arrived. And you see that Zuckerberg donated to the inauguration. He made a series of changes at the company to try to cultivate his relationship. And that has been quite a startling trajectory to watch.

It was over 30 years ago that Clifford Olson first called me. Secret phone calls from Canada's most notorious serial killer. I knew I was killing the children, but I couldn't stop myself. Now it's time to unearth the tapes. Because I believe there are still answers to be found. I'm Arlene Bynum, from CBC's Uncovered. Calls from a Killer killer, available now. You wrote a book called Wildland, The Making of America's Fury.

What is the connection between the fury in your country and the increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of these individuals. These two books are in a way, I think, part of the same long project of my life, which is to try to understand this role of inequality in this country and what it's doing to us. Wildland looked at it from the perspective of people in the middle and at the bottom.

And I'm often reminded these days of some of the comments people made in the course of that report. I spent a lot of time in West Virginia and there was a coal miner there who said to me at one point, he had heard that the CEO of a company involved in his coal mine, which was struggling,

had said that the CEO was making about 400 times what the frontline workers were making. And this coal miner named David Ifos said, he said, I've never met any man who is actually worth three or 400 other men. Have you? And I thought it was quite a, it reframed the question to me in terms of what do we value as a society? Are we valuing ourselves by length overall to use one form of measurement? Or are we valuing ourselves by other things like the dignity of work and the value of a decent way of life?

Pete You have reported on Donald Trump for many years now, and you write in the book that if you want to understand the change Trump represented, you have to look beyond politics, that he is a creature of money and the money world, specifically a period of Americans going on about greed and fairness and liberty and dominance. What does it tell you that Donald Trump named, what, 13 billionaires to the top ranks of his administration? In those inaugural photos, that event that some of the richest, most powerful people in the world were standing with him on stage ahead of people who would be in cabinet, people who would be making those decisions.

What does that tell you? Yeah. In fact, maybe the most telling detail of that scene, that really indelible scene on Inauguration Day, was that the leaders of Congress itself were actually relegated offstage entirely. They were in the audience, which is a strange indicator of where power really lies right now. The fact is, American political values can't be simply described as one or the other of people either worshipping Donald Trump or hoping for his downfall. As we know, as you know Matt so deeply,

we are living on a razor's edge, a kind of 50-50 America in which you have these two very powerful competing conceptions of the place. And I actually think that the view of money is a reflection of that. If you look at public polling, you find that as a poll found last year, 59% of Americans believe that billionaires

are making this country less fair and an almost identical share of Americans want to become a billionaire. And that ambivalence, that duality, these two ideas that coexist simultaneously are in a kind of struggle, a sort of competition for which one dominates. And right now, it's pretty clear we're in the season of the oligarchs. It's just a fact. But the question becomes what...perhaps it's not really a matter of persuading Americans to give up on the dream of getting rich. Perhaps really the key is about giving them the information and the tools

so that they can understand why they're not rich. You wrote in the New Yorker about Donald Trump selling influence inside the Oval Office and that there is a willing audience there. The people who are rich are buying that influence. Give me an example of that. What have you seen specifically? People talk about that, but again, the piece spoke specifically about, about how the president is exchanging his position for cash money. How did you see that?

Well, the most public and brazen example that has happened recently was something utterly unprecedented, which was that the family crypto venture auctioned off dinner with the president to the 220 highest paying owners of their meme coin. To be frank, we've never had anything even in the same solar system of that kind of naked transaction of money for influence. But it's actually, it can perhaps distract from the fact that day to day, all the time now in Washington where I live, there is essentially an open marriage of profit and politics.

And the following kind of example, I mean, I've talked to a lot of folks who work in the lobbying and government affairs work. And by December, shortly after Trump was elected, it was already well understood that for a million dollars you could get dinner at Mar-a-Lago in a group with him, send that money to MAGA Inc., which is a super pack. And then by the spring, the prices had gone up and it was now, according to an invitation

from MAGA Inc., it was $5 million to have a one-on-one conversation with the president. And as one government affairs executive said to me, the truth is we have no idea where that money ends up. Naive Me asks, are there not rules against such a thing? Well, rules in Washington are, they don't exist until they've been tested in court, frankly. And I think you're at a point now where what I just described actually is probably completely legal in the legal regime created by the Citizens United decisions, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision back

now a decade and a half ago, which essentially took off any limits on political expenditures. Just opened the taps. Yeah. I think if you take another example, it's a lot more of a gray area. Take, for instance, that crypto auction I mentioned. I won't be surprised to see that tested in the courts. There's also a whole host of ways that people are figuring out other ways to get money into the president's world. For his inauguration fund, which is usually a fairly sleepy bit of financing, he raised a record amount of money, $250 million from corporations and CEOs and other aspiring friends. And the largest donation came from a company called Pilgrim's Pride,

which is a poultry processor. And a few months later, his administration announced that it would not be adding any new rules on salmonella testing for the chicken people eat, and it would also be getting rid of what it called unnecessary bureaucracy. Now, of course, there may be no connection between these two facts, but it does leave the question one, it leaves the public wondering, and this is why most administrations, frankly all administrations before this, have sought to avoid these kinds of apparent conflicts of interest because it makes you wonder whose interest is the administration really acting in? How big is the backlash, do you think?

I mean, Bernie Sanders and AOC have been out holding these fighting oligarchy rallies and railing about billionaires. Is that catching on? I've attended some of that and I will tell you, it's striking to me when you talk to people in the crowd, how many of them are there for the first time at a Sanders rally? These are not diehard Sanders fans actually. In some cases, they're quite sympathetic traditionally to Republican arguments, but they find themselves a bit bewildered and seeking to do something, anything really,

right now, to push back on something that seems to have tripped a wire in the public consciousness. There was a noticeable moment just last month actually when there were these protests in a bunch of cities across the country and they were much larger than the organizers expected in Washington. They were actually five times what the projections were. And there's some more protests scheduled coming up. I do think those are important to watch as a political analyst. Just it's a little tell of what the mood might be like. Let me end with this, which is just, I mean, and maybe it goes back to the guy on the yacht

worried about the guillotine being wheeled out. There have been examples of stark wealth inequality before, you think of the Gilded Age and what have you, but I mean, you write in the book about a point of untenable imbalance and that the United States is approaching that point now. How close is the US to that point? Well, I think we're in dangerous territory and that's not an abstract assessment. That's just a reality.

I think when you measure the health of our democracy, it is struggling right now and you see it, anybody can feel it, whether they're at the top or the bottom of society. We talk about it constantly in this country. I'm often reminded of a comment by a great historian of Rome. He was Ramsey McMullen, a great Yale historian who studied the fall of Rome. And he said, you know, it took 500 years, but it could be condensed into three words, which was that fewer had more. And from my perspective, I think that's a lesson that we should take pretty seriously right now in this country as we think about inequality.

It's a fascinating book. I'm really glad to have the chance to talk to you. Evan, thank you very much. My pleasure, Matt. Thanks for having me. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.