Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Evan Osnos:

Part of the political answer here is not necessarily that the solution is not to talk about wealth as a target. It’s to talk about unfairness and corruption and self-dealing and oligarchy as an idea.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Evan Osnos. He’s been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2008 and is known for his incisive reporting on politics and foreign affairs. For the last decade, he’s found himself interested in something more specific, wealth. He’s out with a new book. It’s called The Haves and the Have-Yachts, which paints a broad portrait of the lives of the ultrarich, the state of American oligarchy, and the direness of wealth disparity in this country. Evan joins me this week to talk about the extremely wealthy, how they live, how they think, and what to do about Americans’ bizarre and seemingly contradictory orientation towards the billionaire class. And as if that isn’t enough, we tell some personal stories too. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Why should we care about billionaires? Journalist and New Yorker staff writer, Evan Osnos, joins me to discuss. Evan Osnos, welcome back to the show.

Evan Osnos:

Thanks, Preet. It’s great to be back.

Preet Bharara:

It’s been, what has it been, three weeks since you’ve been in the show? We have you on quite often.

Evan Osnos:

But a lot has happened in those three weeks. Empires have risen and fallen.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know if they’ve risen. There’s been a bit of falling.

Evan Osnos:

Good point.

Preet Bharara:

Risen is uncertain. We’re going to talk about a number of things. We’re going to talk a little bit about wealth and the wealthy, because you have a new book. Before I tell our audience the name of the book, I promised you that I was going to tell a little anecdote about my daughter when she was young. And she won’t like this story, but it’s a famous story in the Bharara household.

She must have been eight years old, maybe seven, and I come home and my wife says, “Our daughter has a new favorite word.” And I said, “Oh, that’s wonderful.” And she’s a very voracious reader, still is. Now, she’s 24. And I said, “What is that new word, honey?” And she said, “Oh my god, daddy, my favorite new word is yatchit.” I said, “What’s a yatchit?” I think she said, “Apparently it’s a big boat for rich people.” And I laughed with her, but a little bit at her, and I was reminded sometime later that you should never make fun of anybody who mispronounces a word, particularly when they’re young, because it just means they read a lot.

Evan Osnos:

That’s true.

Preet Bharara:

And it’s a great thing. So she was speaking of the word yacht, obviously, which makes its way into the title of your book, and she did not have occasion in second grade to be using the word yacht colloquially in class. So she thought understandably, totally understandably, that it was yatchit. That’s my story.

Evan Osnos:

I think this reflects quite well on her humble origins and will be a story that redounds to her benefit someday.

Preet Bharara:

No matter what wealth she acquires, and she’s not on that path, she’s on a public service path, she-

Evan Osnos:

I’m so sorry.

Preet Bharara:

She will never have a yatchit. Anyway, people are like, why are you talking about this? And the reason I’m talking about it is because the title of your new book is called The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich. Okay. The Haves and the Have-Yachts, very clever. Did you come up with that?

Evan Osnos:

I did come up with it. The rest of the book is all generated by AI, but I did the title.

Preet Bharara:

AI sucks at the titles. Did you come up with a subtitle also?

Evan Osnos:

I did, yeah. I did. Since you mentioned your daughter and this topic, I have to actually mention a story that involves my daughter in this very title, which is-

Preet Bharara:

Then I’m going to match you and I’m going to tell you a story about my son.

Evan Osnos:

My daughter is seven, and when your dad is working on a book, you hear the title at the dinner table and you hear him, I’m talking about this topic. And so this title, the Haves and Have-Yachts, she was trying to puzzle it out. And so she would ask me occasionally. She’d say, “Daddy, is Taylor Swift a have or a have-yacht?” And I would say, well-

Preet Bharara:

Wow.

Evan Osnos:

T’s an interesting question. I’d say, “I think she’s a have-yacht, though I don’t know if she actually has one.” And then finally, after asking me a half a dozen people that she’s interested in, she finally asked, “Daddy, what is a yacht?” And I realized we’d gotten ahead of ourselves. So there we are.

Preet Bharara:

And did you explain?

Evan Osnos:

I did. I did, but it does make you realize.

Preet Bharara:

Why don’t we… I was going to start differently, but this is actually a real question, because I believe I have had acquaintances over the years who would talk about their boat.

Evan Osnos:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

And these are not the CEOs of Facebook kinds of people, but people of some means, well beyond the means of my family, and they would talk about their boat. And then you’d see their boat. That’s a pretty big boat. What’s the difference between just a boat and a yacht?

Evan Osnos:

A crew. If you have a crew that is running it for you, then it’s a yacht, and it has to be of a certain size. But I think you’ve actually hit on a cultural fact which I find very interesting, and it’s something I’ve remarked on in the writing, is that one of the style points, one of the things that separates an insider from an outsider is that you quickly learn that you’re not supposed to refer to your own vessel as a yacht. That’s a faux pas. You’re supposed to call it a boat, and not-

Preet Bharara:

A dinghy?

Evan Osnos:

A dinghy would be a little more than you should do, but you just casually call it a boat. See you on the boat, that kind of thing. And honestly, I find those kinds of sociological details really interesting. Look, I’m a foreign correspondent by disposition, by training, by nature, and so I’m always just making little inventories of the moves, the gestures, how people talk and think. And so that, you hit on something very subtle but quite true about that culture.

Preet Bharara:

So just to orient people as to this interview, it sounds like we’re making light of these things and it sounds like a frivolous subject. It is not. You get at and we will get at the roots of income inequality, what that means for our politics, what people should aspire to and not aspire. All that stuff is very important and told, as always, by you very eloquently and incisively with, along the way, references to these little details. And the idea of conspicuous consumption is an interesting way to think about and reflect on the massive amount of wealth that some people have accumulated in modern society. But before we get to that, I have a foundational question. It relates to politics and wealth. Maybe it’s not foundational. It’s my new favorite word. Here’s a foundational question.

Evan Osnos:

Just the gravity of it. Yeah, I’m prepared.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, maybe it’s some BS thing that I’m thinking about, but if you call it foundational, who are you, Evan? That’s a foundational question, for example.

Evan Osnos:

How much time-

Preet Bharara:

And a question that I’ve never asked any guest on the podcast ever. So you have Democrats perhaps exemplified most conspicuously by Bernie Sanders, AOC. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist who is not alone in talking about income inequality. Others too, including on the right. Populism is about in some ways income inequality, but I wonder if there are people on the left who get an important, dare I say it, foundational distinction wrong, and the question is do people in the United States resent the wealthy or do they aspire to be wealthy?

Evan Osnos:

Typically-

Preet Bharara:

To me, that’s a very important question.

Evan Osnos:

Look, it’s the essence. It’s actually at the core of this, and it is at the core of this line of inquiry of this book really, which is… And I can tell you because there is data and really good thinking and writing on this topic. The answer is that Americans are simultaneously cynical and aspirational about wealth, and it’s almost identical. Last year, there was a poll, a Harris poll in 2024 that found that 59% of Americans believe that billionaires are making the country more unfair, and an identical share of Americans said that they want to become billionaires themselves, and many of them were the same respondents. This is a fact. You have to be able to hold those two ideas in your head simultaneously to understand the American mind. I think that’s important.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So what do you conclude from that? Do they think they will be benevolent billionaires or do they think they need a shot at being in a rigged system and make the world unfair because having a billion dollars and a yacht would be nice? What’s going on there?

Evan Osnos:

I think at the core of it is a foundational American idea, this is a fair description of it, which is that we really are a country that is based on this idea. Thomas Jefferson’s concept as he put it, and there were others at the time of course who were voicing the same idea, was that we would be an aristocracy of talent, that we would be a place in which you could go from A to Z, and we have never relinquished that. As much as that idea in all the ways we can stipulate has always been imperfect, has always been confined to people… Look, this country was founded of course with the right to vote for white men who own property, so we’ll just stipulate that, but the point being that that concept is really baked into who we are today.

And I think one of the hardest things for people to grasp about Trump’s durability as a political figure is that part of the appeal, and I’ve heard this in so many different places as I go around the country, I’ve been doing this kind of reporting now for 10 years, is people will say some version of, “You know, the truth is I don’t like him for these reasons, but I think that he wants me to succeed. He has higher ambitions for me, that I could somehow be like him.” And taken in a slightly different direction, one version of that, you hear people, and this is a slightly dismissive form, but I think the idea is the same, which is some people will say to themselves, “Look, if I suddenly found myself with a few billion dollars, I might behave a bit the way Trump does.”

I think that there is a piece of that, and what’s important to know though in the numbers is that the percentage of Americans who are getting where that balance is shifting towards cynicism is growing. There is a very distinct sense that you have to be a member of the club in order to achieve that mythic social mobility, and it’s especially pronounced among young people. That’s where the numbers are starkest, but just so you know that this remains the case, young people are also inclined to say, “I too want to find my way to being a billionaire.”

Preet Bharara:

So can we talk about the political ramifications of that? So if those two things are both true, is it not a mistake to indiscriminately bash billionaires as a class? And again, look, they don’t need help from me or anyone else, but is it smart or not?

Evan Osnos:

No. This is in some ways the conclusion that I reached having gone to Sanders rallies, talked to people at those events recently. They’re getting these huge crowds, some of whom, many of whom in fact have never been to Sanders rallies before. But I actually concluded, listening to the way that he was talking about it, that he was closing himself off to a reservoir of conceivable supporters for a kind of movement against oligarchy. People who actually though still imagine, they’re less inclined to say, “I want to eat the rich,” than they want to frankly join the rich at the table. And I think this is an important distinction because there was a really interesting bit of research done by an organization that was trying to figure out the language for how to talk to persuadable voters who might not instinctively support the idea of a wealth tax or things like that, but might be gettable.

And one of the lessons that they found from focus groups and survey data was that you shouldn’t do categorical villainization of the wealthy. That’s the phrase that they concluded in their findings. They said talk to people about closing loopholes and things like that. Bernie Sanders, let’s be blunt, essentially, that is his-

Preet Bharara:

It’s categorical.

Evan Osnos:

It is categorical and he is proud of it, but it is a narrower political lane for him. There’s just no question about it.

Preet Bharara:

The thing about Bernie Sanders is I think he’s sincere.

Evan Osnos:

He is.

Preet Bharara:

And one could make the argument that even the way I’m asking the question is cynical because it assumes or maybe presumes in the question that a politician who has a particular view of what’s good, what’s bad, what’s a good system, what’s a bad system, should be overwhelmed by what’s politically popular, but I’m not talking about that. So I don’t begrudge Bernie Sanders having his view. I’m going to get to Robert Reich in a moment because he posted something that I want to ask you about, the former labor secretary for President Clinton, but for the massive politicians for whom these things are not articles of faith and they’re trying to make strategic decisions about how to expand the party and not look like only the party of government largesse and not look like the party who’s anti-capitalist, then it’s probably not smart. Is that fair?

Evan Osnos:

I think you’re making that a cynical point. It’s a valid strategic point, and frankly, it is really essential for Democrats to solve. I won’t say the name of who it was because it was not an on the record conversation, but I was talking to somebody who might well be a presidential candidate on the Democratic side, and this person’s strong belief is Democrats need to figure out a way, and this is frankly pretty close to one of the takeaways that I took from this research, is Democrats need to find a way in which the key is not persuading people to give up on the idea of being rich. The key is to give people the information and the tools to understand why they’re not.

Preet Bharara:

Right. And when JB Pritzker said this, what did you say to him?

Evan Osnos:

I said, go Cubs. Okay, I can’t reveal-

Preet Bharara:

Obviously it was JB. We’re going to get to good billionaires and bad billionaires.

Evan Osnos:

No, actually. You’ll appreciate the… See, this is the depth of my sources.

Preet Bharara:

Well, so now violated a principle, because now you have made it clear that you will tell me who it is not. So when Rahm Emanuel said this to you, what did you say?

Evan Osnos:

Now, I fell for that once.

Preet Bharara:

I can go through this one by one, Evan.

Evan Osnos:

I am willing to tell you this. Enough on that line. You’ve already revealed enough of my perforated source routine, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Okay, I’m sorry. Back to the wealthy. Why do you suppose if there is empirical evidence about this and if the American dream… Look, I often say as an immigrant that I am an embodiment of the American dream, right? My family came here when I was 1-year-old. I was born in India, and I say that my arc reflects the American dream because I went to college, I studied hard in law school, and then I became the chief federal law enforcement officer in Manhattan. Most of the time when people talk about the American dream, they’re talking about coming from nothing and becoming very rich and having a yatchet, right? And not in a bad way. The immigrant community talks very proudly, particularly in the face of discrimination and slurs and H1B visa controversy, talks very proudly about the American dream being embodied in numerous, countless CEOs of Fortune 100 companies.

And so the American dream, which is a very, very powerful metaphor, inspirational storyline, at the bottom, it’s about coming from humble origins and making it big, whether you’re a movie star or a CEO or an innovator or an actor or whatever it is that Oprah Winfrey does. And by the way, that is a storyline that is embraced by everyone from every part of the political spectrum. That’s not a Republican storyline, that’s an American storyline. So what gives here?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. In its own way, I think it’s the dark matter in the political problem that Democrats are facing right now, because there really is not at this point a person who represents that message with, and this is the key word and this gets back to why Sanders is able to do what he does, which is authenticity. It’s an overuse, it’s a cliche in politics, but the longer we live in this period and the more I do this kind of work, the more I’m convinced of the power of that. If people believe, even if they don’t with you about everything, if they believe that you are deeply committed and that you are enacting your genuine convictions, they will follow you. And finding the person who lives those values and represents that in the eyes of the public, that’s an essential task right now if the Democratic Party’s going to compete.

Preet Bharara:

There must be other polling that suggests that bashing the wealthy indiscriminately as opposed to talking about ways that barriers can be removed and fairness can be introduced and the playing field can be made level, that the simple bashing of successful people, financially successful people, gives you some amount of votes. That must be true. Did you come across that?

Evan Osnos:

I’ll tell you, actually, I’ll tweak it slightly. What I have come across is, because I don’t think that it’s clear that the data supports that. I think there is a populist sugar high that comes from talking about, particularly when you have a president who has named 13 billionaires to the upper ranks of his administration, it makes for an easy-

Preet Bharara:

Is that true? Is it 13?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. One of them washed out during the nomination process, so I think they’re down to a lean 12, but it’s a remarkable fact. It’s a remarkable fact, and I think that… I was talking to historians of the Gilded age in the course of writing about this, and one of the things that they said to me, I heard this over and over, was that the Gilded Age produced a very effective political target for what eventually became the progressive era for Teddy Roosevelt and others. Because even though you had a lot of disagreement among individual voters and political factions about the actual policies that you needed to get out of the Gilded age at the end of the 19th century, the robber barons were a brazen enough and coherent enough target that that gave you the foundations for a movement.

And there’s a lesson there today, which is that the Musk-Trump joint venture, for lack of a better term, even with Musk out of Washington, in some ways provides a basis for if not agreement on tactics and specifics, it provides an opportunity for a kind of general philosophical proposition. And that’s what I saw at these rallies with people who say, “I don’t agree with Sanders. I don’t agree with him on everything, but I’m here.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, I’ve always said that Trump has been right about some things in terms of diagnosis, including that the system is rigged and the playing field is not level. And think what you will of this, but he admits it freely and says as long as it’s not level, I take advantage of it. The tax code is messed up.

Evan Osnos:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

And I take advantage of it. And you know what that makes me? That makes me smart.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

My other question about attitudes of Americans is this. In the main, do US voters think that people who have become ultra-rich, because this I think answers the ultimate question that we were asking earlier, do they believe that the ultra-rich got that way because they worked harder or were smarter or more innovative, or because the system is rigged and they cheated and stole to get there, or do they draw distinctions among the ultra-rich?

Evan Osnos:

It’s a very important point, and in fact, the answer is yes to all the above, meaning that they actually recognize these different categories that coexist and they assign very different values to them. Americans historically, we see this in survey results over the decades, put a very high premium and high regard on self-made fortune. They see that as a great thing. It’s part of the reason why-

Preet Bharara:

It’s the American way.

Evan Osnos:

It’s the essence of the American story. It goes back to the Ben Franklin mythology, and I think there’s a reason why it was so important to Donald Trump to maintain the mythology of The Apprentice, which was an invention, because that satisfied that first condition. The second condition is much less attractive. We are as a people quite contemptuous in fact of inherited opportunity and advantage and wealth, and that shows up in negative opinions of that kind of money. So those distinctions are essential. They’re very important.

I think one other point on what you were saying about an unlevel playing field, I think that part of the political answer here is not necessarily that the solution is not to talk about wealth as a target. It’s to talk about unfairness and corruption and self-dealing, and oligarchy as an idea. That word may not be the right word because it doesn’t resonate, but people get the idea of the richest man in the world getting an office in the White House and a department of government with which to fire tens of thousands of employees at agencies that do business with his companies. They know that there’s something about that that doesn’t sit right, and that’s why the country in effect ejected him from Washington.

Preet Bharara:

Even though it’s so interesting that arc and evolution of that person, because I would dare to guess that if you go back even two years ago or three years ago, that the data would show that Elon Musk falls into that first category of person who would be widely… I’ve been at events with him, and everyone at the event is an aspiring ultra-rich person. There’s a cult following, and he’s an immigrant himself, whatever he thinks about immigration at the moment. And so if you asked even as recently as two years ago people about Elon Musk, probably he was viewed pretty widely as a role model and an inspiration of somebody who, through dint of hard work and talent and other qualities and talents, fairly got to where he got.

Now, there’s a contrary narrative about subsidies and some other things and he got help along the way. I take it as an article of faith that nobody, no matter how they turn out, rich, ultra-rich or the richest in the world, got some help along the way. Nobody is fully self-made. I don’t care who the hell you think you are, but that’s true of the middle class. The middle class has help along the way too. And I’m not sure that there’s a huge distinction in between those categories, but the point is even if you have a figure who is widely acknowledged to have made their way to the top in the best American tradition of innovation and talent and meritocracy, if that’s true, they still resent that person having political power too?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, this is a really key point. I agree with your assessment. A couple of years ago, if you’d lined up college students and asked them to name somebody who’s inspiring, he would have been at the top of the list. And I think it’s a bit of a case where he got so accustomed to that climate of reception that it began to feel to him like a permanent location in the American culture. It’s an example of actually a sort of broader risk for the kinds of people that I’m writing about in this book, which is that you can become so secluded in agreement in people who are constantly telling you that you’re an inspiration and have sterling judgment that you then find yourself almost mugged by reality when you suddenly realize how out of step you are.

I think he was speaking with conviction when he said on a podcast that empathy is the greatest weakness in Western civilization and he talked about social security as a Ponzi scheme and so on, and that was in a way a tell about how much his world, which as we can all agree is fairly idiosyncratic, personally and every other way, it’s just so apart from how most Americans actually live.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Evan Osnos after this.

I think part of the problem with a certain class of the ultra-rich or ultra-successful is a deep, deep and deepening arrogance that you’re successful in this one pursuit in life, which for many people is the main pursuit, right? Liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness. What’s the pursuit of happiness? Wealth really. We care about property in this country.

Evan Osnos:

No, I think that you’re essentially describing the phenomenon of people who take success in one domain and assume it makes them smart in everything.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So they’ve achieved the thing that’s maybe hardest to, and that’s most acclaimed, and they think that they can apply that to everything. And the example I’ve been thinking of recently, although I don’t mean this in a pejorative way, but Michael Jordan was in the most rarefied position of anyone who had ever found themselves in sports. Certainly the best basketball player when he was playing. Some people will still say, and there’ll be debate around a beer over this, the best basketball player in the history of basketball. It’s like, “Okay, I see my basketball. I’m now going to become the greatest baseball player.”

Evan Osnos:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not that different from that, and you think, oh, I can do this one thing. There are some people who can be at the top of the world in two things, that’s incredibly rare, but no one’s doing three things. And so that’s by way of preface to my question to you, is in your research and doing all of this analyzing and thinking, did you come across a humble ultra-rich person?

Evan Osnos:

Certainly, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

You did?

Evan Osnos:

Somebody who stays in their lane. This is not a particularly original example, but there’s a reason why Warren Buffett is stylistically different than Elon Musk, and I think it’s more than just an affectation. It’s how he genuinely sees himself. He says, “Look, I’m pretty good at picking investments and sticking to my principles and staying in my lane,” and he actually valorizes that. And I think I’ve come to believe over the course of this writing actually that we could use a lot more Buffetts and fewer Musks in our public culture, and that’s not just because of this phenomenon, but also their views of philanthropy and the way they think about their responsibilities.

Look, I think that that phenomenon you’re describing, the Michael Jordan baseball problem, is a cousin of a related problem, I’ll use a similar analogy, which is if you’ve ever seen the video of Vladimir Putin playing hockey, you learn something which is he’s on the ice with these other players, and they’re quite clearly getting out of the way and letting him push the puck into the goal as he staggers around. And I see that, and now may it’s either because I grew up as a hockey player, but I see that analogy all over the place. The scholars call it authoritarian backlash. This is when you are so surrounded by agreement that you come to believe that you really are right on all big questions, and I think Elon Musk fell for that problem. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? You apply your specific acumen to almost a kind of human general intelligence, and it tends to be more of an illusion than a satisfaction.

Preet Bharara:

That’s an interesting set of thoughts you have about Bill Ackman that you just articulated on the podcast.

Evan Osnos:

I fell for this once, counselor.

Preet Bharara:

You didn’t mention him name, but we all know who you’re talking about. We all know who you’re talking about. But what does this mean? Let me ask you this question. Have we already spent too much time talking about the ultra-rich? Because it is true, and I think you have this figure in your book somewhere, there’s something like 900 billionaires in the country. That’s not a lot of people. So on the one hand, you can think it’s just a few people and whatever, and some of them have interesting personalities and some of them are good role models, some of them cheated their way to the top. There’s a distinction, et cetera, et cetera. But to the extent that the existence of and the qualities of these billionaires is driving debate, including on this podcast, it’s beside the point. We should really be talking about lifting up people into the middle class and the upper middle class, improving everyone’s lot in life, because most people, most people will never be anywhere close to billionaires, and there’s nothing wrong with that and there’s no failure in that.

On the other hand, if you multiply the individual wealth of the 800 out, you get many trillions of dollars, which is a substantial percentage of the wealth of the United States of America. And for that reason, we should talk about them and we should talk about Elizabeth Warren’s proposals to tax wealth as opposed to just income. Are both of those things true also at the same time? Because now I know I can’t ask you A or B, because you’re going to be like, “It’s A and B.”

Evan Osnos:

Here’s the reality, is that you hit on something really important in the whole theory of this project, which is my last book was also about inequality. It was called Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury. That book was focused and rooted in places like West Virginia and the South Side of Chicago, and I was trying to understand how inequality was experienced by people on the bottom end of it. And what I concluded having done that was actually, I was probably looking in the wrong place if I really wanted to explain this phenomenon, the origins and the impacts, because we’re not writing about 900 people here because those 900 people loom larger. It’s because they have a much larger effect on the overall experience, on the lives of everyday people. And I’ll give you a prime example.

When you want to understand what social media means for our politics, for our lifestyle, for our attention economy, all of those things, you have to look at the person whose values are the origin of that company. I think more and more, we are aware of the fact that companies often reflect the values of the person at the helm, for better or for worse. And one of the essays in here is a profile of Zuckerberg, because having spent time around him, I came away with the very distinct impression that his strengths, like so many of us, were also his weaknesses. His commitment, his intense commitment to growth, to building this thing as fast and as extensively as possible ultimately made him more inclined to accept trade-offs that were damaging, and I think he would acknowledge that to some degree now. B.

Ut it’s a numerical fact that these folks hold a larger share of America’s wealth than even the robber barons did a hundred years ago, or to be more precise, in 1913, but it is also true that they hold a much larger share of our cultural space and our head space because of the power of the technologies at their command, and that’s the case for paying attention to billionaires.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. No, that makes sense. But it’s interesting that if you asked an ordinary American to name as many of the 900 billionaires as they could, the percentages of who would rate highly in those polls are some of the people we’re talking about. There are many, many, many billionaires who are not only not household names, but are virtually unknown to 95% of the American public, and they have built wealth over time quietly or they’ve inherited it, but often they built wealth over time in more mundane industries than electric vehicles and e-commerce and computer chips. Is that because of social media alone or is it because the outside success of some of those people causes them to seek attention? In other words, is it the public that has an insatiable appetite for information about those people or those people have also some appetite for attention like celebrities? Billionaires have not always been celebrities, or have they?

Evan Osnos:

No, this is a really important point too. Amazingly, I happened to be looking into this recently, that this is a modern phenomenon. John D. Rockefeller had no publicist until he was in his seventies, meaning that he did not want to be a part of the public culture. He wanted to be able to manipulate politicians from a distance, but the last thing he wanted was to be in Washington on the front page. And to take this point and make it even a little clearer, it was actually as a result of investigative reporting about some of the labor problems in his facilities that caused him to finally hire a publicist. And one of the things the publicist suggested was you should give out dimes, and this became a kind of famous thing that he did, and it helped his image.

But there was a time when the big economic entrepreneurial icons of our society had a different relationship. They didn’t really want to be necessarily celebrities, but they wanted to have a mark on history, and I think this is important to keep in mind. Andrew Carnegie, he looked at the problems of the country and said, “Illiteracy is going to be a fundamental crippling fact,” and that’s why he then created these libraries. John D. Rockefeller created the University of Chicago and so on. There was a degree of publicity management.

Preet Bharara:

On that spectrum, because I was going to get to him, where’s Bill Gates?

Evan Osnos:

I think Bill Gates is of a generation that stands between that early 20th century phenomenon and the group we have now, and I would put Buffett in the same category. They really did-

Preet Bharara:

I’m asking the question because you talked about… I think I read in the last 24 or 48 hours, that he’s planned to give most of his money, hundreds of billions of dollars, to causes in Africa.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I read that. I can’t be sure this is right, but I interpreted that as him saying I am trying, frankly, in effect, to make up for the phenomenon he described so memorably recently when he said that the picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one. That is about as powerful a summation of the moment that we’re trying to encapsulate here in this conversation as you can get, because what he’s getting at there, Preet, which I think is so fascinating, is the power of one person. It is not hyperbolic to say that Elon Musk going to Washington, being given the Department of Government Efficiency and the power that it had to eliminate USAID in the way that it did has cost innumerable cases of human suffering, and we can’t ignore that, and we have to acknowledge the full scale of that, and I think Bill Gates, with the credibility that comes from having been the world’s richest man, him saying that is meaningful.

So I’m not trying to valorize one cohort and demonize another. What I’m simply saying is there are multiple ways to be a billionaire, and we see these examples, and I think it’s worth identifying and doing a taxonomy because there’s lessons there.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about the psychology of the ultra-rich for a moment? Because I’ve really wondered about this, and I prosecuted lots of people, or at least a number of people who fall into the ultra-rich category. I have a mention in your book. If I’d done the Washington read and got into the index, I’m like, free for our page, whatever.

Evan Osnos:

But it’s true. It’s true. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t mean to defend anyone, but look, putting aside how someone got their money, how they choose to spend their money, it’s an interesting parlor game, and I’ll give a personal anecdote. I was a government servant for most of my adult career and I made a government worker’s salary, which is a pretty good salary, a very good salary in America generally speaking. Three kids, a family to support, and I very proudly drove my Honda Accord 2005 for 17 years. And perfectly good car. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles for safety.

Evan Osnos:

Like seat belts and stuff like that?

Preet Bharara:

It has seat belts. Don’t be a wise guy. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles that you get when you change lanes. It doesn’t have-

Evan Osnos:

You’re moving into the… Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, and I have kids who are beginning to drive, so I justified what I’m about to reveal on that basis, but that’s kind of BS. It doesn’t have that rear view camera so you can back out of a tight space, whatever. But then I went to the private sector and I have more cash on hand than I used to have. It’s not a secret. I don’t go around talking about it, but I have more wealth than I had eight years ago when I was a United States attorney. And at some point, and again, these are not equatable but I want to put some skin in the game here. I’ve never had a luxury car. Do I need a luxury car? Not really. The trusty Honda Accord, which I still have by the way. Now it’s 20 years. Could you patch it up some more and continue to drive it? Sure, but there’s a luxury car that for a long time, I thought it’d be nice to have that car. It is of the German persuasion. That’s all I’ll say. That narrows it down.

And you know what? I leased that car, and does it bring me joy? Not really. Do I enjoy the ride? I totally do, and I can afford it and it’s not a problem for me and it’s not extravagant given the deal that I got. Now, I’m going to link it up. I would dare say that that car is a smaller percentage of my net worth or income than one of those yachts is for Mark Zuckerberg, and very few people would begrudge me my German car. Why do we begrudge Mark Zuckerberg his yacht?

Evan Osnos:

I think that… And by the way, your experience is exactly the experience I think of many of us. Look, I’ve had a similar kind of experience. You go from working in a newspaper, you go to a magazine and so on and so on.

Preet Bharara:

You want to impress a girl, you can’t afford the car, but then you can afford the car when you’re old.

Evan Osnos:

And I think that the reason why these yachts somehow get caught in our cultural throats a bit is because they are something that is a super symbol. They really are beyond what is the normal parameters of an indulgence. But look, I think there’s also something revealing about that hedonic treadmill. The experience, as I had a Silicon Valley CEO say to me, there was a point he said when a fifty-meter yacht was pretty impressive, he said. And this is his words. He said, “But now that would be kind of embarrassing.”

Preet Bharara:

He said that to you?

Evan Osnos:

He did. He did. And I think that that process, that essentially, it’s not about the yachts. It’s about the insatiability. And the reason why I find that subject interesting is taken to its logical extreme, that’s where you get a culture that becomes distended and disconnected, when people have the ability to make their experience so completely different than others.

Preet Bharara:

That’s so interesting. So I have two responses to that. Number one, if you ever write a novel, it should be called The Hedonic Treadmill. That’s number one, so that’s for free from me.

Evan Osnos:

I’ll take that. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

The second is you said it’s about insatiability, and I wonder if something that’s related to that but slightly different, and that is just another keeping up with the Joneses on steroids. And that’s why I’m trying to get to, to the extent it’s interesting and maybe it’s not interesting to everybody, but psychology and ambition are super interesting to me.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, me too.

Preet Bharara:

And the keeping up with the Joneses occurs at every income level. In the middle-class, you’ll have the family on the block that has the slightly older or shabbier house, and then they tear it down and they put up the mini mansion. It’s not a yacht. You spend some money and then the other people on the block are like, “I got to work a little harder because I want to tear down and want to put up a nicer house,” or the cars or whatever the symbols of some success or means are. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. Maybe at certain levels. The example I’ve always thought of in my own experience was from a couple of different people that I prosecuted when I was a US attorney, the people in my office prosecuted, two insider trading defendants. Because I would always say, and this would be a logical defense always for a rich person, “I’m rich. Why would I do a crime? I’m already rich. I’m rich legally, legally rich. Get off my back.”

And initially, that’s kind of compelling. Why would you? I don’t know. Why do people commit crimes? Some people do. And so if you have a billion dollars or 3 billion or 5 billion, that’s more money than you’ll ever need in your entire life, no matter how much you want to spend, even if you want the yachts. And yet I’m convinced to this day that there’s a person named Roger Gupta who was worth about a hundred million dollars and had a great life. He’s written a book about various things including making attacks on me, so I think I can make a surmise about his psychology. I think I’ve earned that.

And my view is even though you and I think that’s an extraordinary, and everybody listening, is an extraordinary amount of money, there was another guy who he thought was kind of a punk-

Evan Osnos:

Raj Rajaratnam.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, and less erudite and less sophisticated and less smart and less worldly and less godly perhaps, and that guy has a billion dollars, and I want to be like that guy. Is that different from the middle-class neighborhood where someone wants to have as nice a house as their neighbor?

Evan Osnos:

It’s not different at all. In many cases, the money is just a proxy for status and for status anxieties. I have a curious relationship knowledge of the Raj Rajaratnam case, which you know so intimately, which is that he used to live up the street from where I grew up. And he at one point, as some listeners will remember, this was a really important insider trading case. I can say flattering things about our host today. Raj Rajaratnam ended up sentenced to a significant term for a major insider trading case, part of Operation Perfect Hedge I think is what it was called.

And the detail that always struck me as significant was that at his birthday party, and I put this in the book actually, at his birthday party, he hired Kenny Rogers, the Kenny Rogers to come and play his favorite song, The Gambler, because that’s how he regarded himself. And he asked Kenny Rogers to play that song over and over and over again, to perform it over. Finally to the point, and I checked this with the Kenny Rogers estate people, representatives I should say, that Kenny Rogers finally said, “I’m out of here. I’m not going to do this anymore.” So what inspires a person to say I want to bring my favorite performer there, and on some level, humiliate them a bit by having them perform this song over? And that’s because you can. That’s the key thing. You do it because you can.

And the reason why I think that this all relates to this, we’re circling this fascinating question which is we are hardwired as a species to want to do that. And I recently had a reason to go back and look at some of the-

Preet Bharara:

That’s too bad.

Evan Osnos:

Well, I accept that that also is what makes us achieve. That’s what makes us build, it’s what makes us innovate. The very first people that formed organized societies, one of the things that they did was the people who mastered irrigation became the first chiefs, and then they would acquire cattle and livestock and they would use that to then acquire defense and land, and off you go. And there are always a few among them. I came across this in the anthropology of oligarchy and chiefdom. There are a few among them who are known to scholars as AAA personalities, because they are just biologically inclined to be more acquisitive, aggressive, ambitious, and they-

Preet Bharara:

They’re good at towing your car?

Evan Osnos:

But they’re the ones you follow it to its maximum degree.

Preet Bharara:

That’s my dad joke. That’s my dad joke for the day. The triple A is now-

Evan Osnos:

You’re entitled person. You come by it honestly, you come by it honestly.

Preet Bharara:

I’m a father multiple times over. But your Kenny Rogers story reminds me of two things. Everything you say reminds me of two things, not three things, not one thing, Evan, but two things, very binary. One is, speaking of this kind of thing, there is another way to have conspicuous… Well, you make an interesting point in the book, that as a matter of aesthetics, at least I find interesting, it’s not cool to spend a half a billion dollars on your home that violates some aesthetic that I’m not aware of or familiar with, but you can have a half a billion dollar boat, yacht. And there’s something about that that’s different. Now, there’s a violator of that principle. His name is Mukesh Ambani, who’s the richest man in India, whose home, I don’t have the details in front of you, but whose home-

Evan Osnos:

It’s a high rise.

Preet Bharara:

Is a skyscraper.

Evan Osnos:

It’s a skyscraper. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

So he violates that principle. Maybe it’s culturally a different place. And I believe at the wedding of his son, he did not have Kenny Rogers, but he had Rihanna.

Evan Osnos:

He had Beyonce. Yeah, I think you’re right about that.

Preet Bharara:

And Beyonce, and I think he paid them millions and millions of dollars. Because I suppose at a certain level of wealth, there’s lots of wealthy people who can throw a multimillion dollar party, but to be able to have such excessive wealth that you can throw millions of dollars at a world-famous artist with some pride, that’s real spending money you got.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. That’s part of the… Your observation about the optics in a sense, there has been… It was actually a CEO in Silicon Valley who told me this fact, who said, “Look, the reality is you can’t really use half a billion dollars on your house because your employees won’t be happy about it and it’ll cause you trouble in the press.” He said, and this is a quote, he said, “But a half billion-dollar boat is pretty nice.” And he also said, he called a yacht the best place to absorb excess capital. And I think that may be the most iconic phrase that I encountered in this whole process, because there’s a lot there. There’s a lot there.

Preet Bharara:

It’s kind of a tacit admission that I have too much fucking money.

Evan Osnos:

Correct. He knows it.

Preet Bharara:

Right? It’s like-

Evan Osnos:

A lot of folks know it.

Preet Bharara:

And even if it’s the case that it was earned honorably and lawfully in the main and because you provided some product or service to the public, whether it’s a computer or some other thing, at some point, it’s like, what am I going to do with all this? And I feel like in the old days, and maybe I wasn’t around in the old days so I’m more charitable so to speak about the old days, there was an understanding that that was all going to work out in the end because there was going to be a lot of philanthropy and helping of communities and countries and a lot of largesse, and so it’s a wash, whether you’re talking about Mr. Carnegie or someone else, and that doesn’t seem to be the case today. Is that part of why the equation is a little bit mucked up?

Evan Osnos:

It is different, and I think there was this… For a while… Look, a lot of this comes down less about rules than it is about culture and it is about the norms, and what we’ve been talking about is the status anxieties among people that drive them to acquire. But there is also an equivalent set of competitive instincts, which is about what we valorize. And this is why it’s important that these figures, like somebody who is this much admired, much emulated icon, somebody like Musk, if he is not giving philanthropically the way that previous generations did, like Gates, like Buffett, that message goes out across the land in a sense. All the little aspiring Musks take a point, and he has a worked out theory for why he doesn’t give more. He believes, as he has said, that his greatest gift to humankind is being the CEO of Tesla because of its work on climate change. I think people may disagree with that.

I think that people may, but I think that that’s the… Where I come down is that part of the reason to talk about this subject of what can seem like why do we care about the lifestyles of these folks? Because they are reflections of values, they’re reflections of a worldview, and they’re reflections of a culture, and how we as a society expect our most advantaged, prosperous, successful people to participate in our commons. That’s what this is. It’s a commons. We are trying to be a coherent political society, and either that can be done by norms, by the expectation that I will give back, that I won’t pass through the eye of the needle without doing so, or there are other ways, and that’s where you start talking about rules and taxes, and all of those are in the mix.

Preet Bharara:

For purposes of completeness, scholars of this program, and I know there are to be many, I’m cracking myself up. Scholars of this program will note that I said I had two reactions to your earlier story and I only told one. The second one is just not as relevant. It just popped into my head, but I’ll tell it very quickly. In 1993, my family went on a vacay, long before I got banned from Russia, long before I began practicing law. I was graduation president for my graduating from law school, my brother graduating from college. Was our mom and dad, we wanted to take an interesting historical trip. We went to Saint Petersburg and Moscow, Russia. It was a super interesting time in 1993. There was a lot of crime, there was not a lot of law and order. The most dangerous job you could have at the time was bank president because since you didn’t have a good system of law and order given the suspension of prior harsh practices, if you didn’t like the other bank, you just killed the guy.

And we walked into a newly renovated, lovely hotel in St. Petersburg where there was a piano player from somewhere in Africa who spoke English. My brother and I sat at the piano, and I even then thought maybe one day I’d be a prosecutor and maybe super interested in the mafia, and this was the origin story of the Russian mob. And oddly, unlike in other circumstances, the Godfather was art imitating life. There was no tradition of mob or mafia or organized crime, dress or culture or anything else in the Soviet Union. That all arose when the Iron Curtain fell, and this pianist, you’ll see why this is relevant, this has already gone on too long, was like we were talking about how he does, how well he does as a pianist at this expensive hotel. And we saw ourselves and he talked about people would come into the hotel who were dressed with padded shoulder suits, the collars like looking directly from Goodfellas, because that’s the fashion that the emergent embryonic mob in Russia knew about from the movies.

And again, here’s the punch line, and he said one night, and this has happened more times, he said, than just once, a guy comes in dressed like a mobster as he understands mobsters are supposed to address from the movies, gives the guy $800, the equivalent of $800, which is years’ of salary in the Soviet Union to play the theme of the Godfather. And then he told him to play it again and again. And this guy, unlike Kenny Rogers, did not look the gift horse in the mouth. He played the damn Godfather theme the whole night. That’s my story.

Evan Osnos:

And you know what’s amazing about that? What’s amazing about that is the through line is they do it because they can. It’s an assertion. It’s an assertion of I am here. I am here.

Preet Bharara:

What I appreciate about you as a guest, you’re very kind. You bolstered the relevance of my story, even though that was not necessary, and you know who thanks you? You know who thanks you, Evan? The scholars of this program.

Evan Osnos:

They’re meeting at a conference in Fort Lauderdale in a week, and this will be on the agenda, I’m sure.

Preet Bharara:

How do you think the scholars of this program dress? I think in robes.

Evan Osnos:

I was going to say capes and robes.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Or it could be togas. I don’t know.

Evan Osnos:

It’s ritualistic garb, no doubt. I think we can agree on that.

Preet Bharara:

It depends on who they are.

You have been very generous with your time. Thanks for talking. We’ve got to do this more often. The book, once again, people should pick it up. It’s out now, The Haves And Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich. Evan Osnos, thanks so much.

Evan Osnos:

Preet, thank you. I always enjoy chatting with you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Evan Osnos continues for members of the Cafe Insider Community. To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about the fake video showing Trump hitting Bruce Springsteen with a golf ball and about paying taxes.

Before I get to your questions, I have a small favor to ask of you. Vox Media would love to learn more about how you engage with podcasts. Your feedback will help us figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how we can make our shows even better. Visit voxmedia.com/survey to give us your feedback. Now, let’s get to your questions.

This question comes in an email from Calvin, who writes, “In your view, does Trump’s reposting of a fake video showing him hitting Bruce Springsteen with a golf ball undercut his criticism of James Comey’s seashell Instagram post?”

Well, to refresh everyone’s recollection, in May, former FBI director, Jim Comey, posted a photo on Instagram showing seashells arranged to form the numbers 8647, accompanied by the caption, “Cool shell formation on my beachwalk.” So a number of Trump supporters predictably got into high-dudgeon about the 8647. They focused in particular on the number 86, which is widely understood in restaurants and the hospitality industry as slang to get rid of or remove something from the menu. And so in their interpretation, 8647, given that Donald Trump is the 47th president, was an invitation for people to do some violent harm to the sitting president of the United States. They went so far as to allege that Comey was explicitly calling for violence against the President, indeed lethal violence.

Trump, for his part, seemed to agree with that interpretation. He actually said on Fox News that Comey, quote, “Knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that means assassination.” End quote. Now, I won’t rehash all the things I’ve said about this imbroglio before, but as an initial matter, for his part, Comey has gone on television and explained the origin of the post. He was walking on the beach with his wife, he saw the formation, thought it was interesting, thought it was expressive, took a picture. He says his wife suggested that he posted on Instagram, so he did. He says he did not understand or believe that 86 was a call to violence. As soon as people started to make that connection, he took the post down and denounced violence in all its forms as he’s done throughout his career. He’s many things to many people. He’s not an advocate of violence. He never has been, and he is not now. He’s also not a person who speaks obliquely through the formation of seashells.

And the question you pose, Calvin, is what to make of Trump’s posting of that video showing him hitting Springsteen with a golf ball. Now, obviously, I’m opposed to the hitting of Bruce Springsteen with a golf ball for lots of reasons that I don’t have to set forth here. The video shows Trump hitting a golf ball followed by a clip of Springsteen tripping on stage, and it’s edited to make it appear as though the golf ball struck Springsteen in the back causing his fall.

Now, what’s my reaction to that? Honestly, it’s the same as my reaction to a lot of things that Trump does and a lot of things that his supporters do. I want to be careful not to overstate the significance of the thing, but I also don’t want to understate the significance of the thing either.

Is there an argument that it was in good fun and is not calling for actual violence? Can there be people who are opposed to Trump, who themselves get into too high a dungeon over a video like this, which is meant to be comical in the eyes of the people who posted it? I suppose. On the other hand, is it beneath the Office of the Presidency to post a video like that? I think that’s true as well. Do I think Springsteen is at risk of physical harm because of the posting of that golf video? I really don’t think so.

But the posting does illustrate a consistent and persistent pattern. Trump condemns behavior directed at him and then casually engages in or promotes similar or more overt acts of hostility against others. This is a man, together with his supporters, have implicitly and explicitly supported violence or condoned violence in some form or another again and again and again, by pardoning violent January 6th defendants, by using vulgar and violent language against his political enemies, and by excusing the violent rhetoric of other people. But I will say it’s just another example of accusations being made by Trump and his advocates are often performative, counterfactual, hypocritical, unserious, and downright childish.

Lastly, and most importantly perhaps, I would like to point out that the Springsteen remarks that triggered Trump’s reaction are included in the newly released Land of Hopes and Dreams EP, and so if any Stay Tuned listeners are curious about the speech that upset Trump, you can now hear it on all major streaming platforms.

This question comes in an email from Dave who writes, “While reading the about page of a legal think tank, I came across a lawyer who describes himself as having, quote, “served in the US House of Representatives,” end quote, but he was never a representative. I was under the impression that the phrase served in the house is generally used by congressmen, not by staffers. Am I incorrect? Would you Preet Bharara say that you served in the Senate?”

So you’re a very assiduous reader of the about pages of institutions clearly, Dave, so I appreciate your attention to rigor and transparency and your exactitude. So as I was looking at your question and thinking about it, I was pretty confident that I don’t do that, and then I can confirm that on my own law firm webpage, the bio page that has all my experiences and expertise listed says the following:

“Before serving as US Attorney, Mr. Bharara was chief counsel to Senator Charles Schumer, the current US Senate majority leader. Mr. Bharara was also the staff director of the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the courts.”

So it’s a bit more of a mouthful than served in the House or served in the Senate, and it is fully accurate and I think the right way to describe my experience, and that whole passage I just read to you, I realize just now reading it aloud, does have one error. The error is obviously, Senator Schumer is not currently the US Senate majority leader. He’s the minority leader, so I’ve got to talk to somebody about updating this page. Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate it, and if you are available for light copy editing from time to time, send us your resume.

This last question came in a series of two posts from BlueSky user, IRescueDachshunds. That’s the handle. About three weeks ago, this user asked me, quote, “Is there a legal basis for not paying taxes due to irresponsible use of tax income and ignoring Congress authorizations?” End quote. And so I didn’t answer that question because it’s a short answer and probably not one that the user wanted to hear, but once again, the same user posted on BlueSky, “I’m still wondering why I have to pay taxes to subsidize activities that are not in the best interests of US citizens at best and are unconstitutional at worst.”

So let me address your question, IRescueDachshunds. I understand, I guess, your frustration about contributing your tax dollars to government actions and programs you don’t agree with. Many of us don’t agree with all the programs enacted by our government and many of us don’t agree with the way our money is spent. You can see that fight on the Senate and House floor as we speak, this week, but I have some bad news. You got to pay your taxes. Federal courts have consistently rejected political objection as a valid ground for refusing to pay taxes, and the IRS explicitly classifies arguments against paying taxes on the grounds that you cite as frivolous. So let me see if I can put it as nicely as possible. Pretty please with sugar on it, pay your taxes.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Evan Asnos.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Blue Sky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.