In journalism, as in life, timing can be everything.
New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos' new collection of essays out in June, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, provides rich research and material for the conversation about extreme wealth in America today. The 10 related essays first began appearing in the New Yorker magazine in 2017.
Some, like the story on billionaire doomsday preppers, was groundbreaking. Others seem even more relevant today with a billionaire back in the White House supported by infinitely wealthier plutocrats such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and – until their recent falling out -- Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame. NPR's Frank Langfitt spoke with Osnos. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.
LANGFITT: What first interested you in reporting and writing about the ultrarich?
OSNOS: It was 2016 and the election of Donald Trump. You had voters who might tell you that they hate the elites in this country and somehow they were voting also for a billionaire from New York City. He was a creature of the money world and Americans have very ambivalent, complicated feelings about money. Last year there was a poll that found that about 60% of Americans will tell you that billionaires are making the country more unfair and almost an identical share of Americans will tell you that they themselves want to become billionaires.
LANGFITT: What do you think this book shows people that they might not fully grasp?
OSNOS: This book is actually about what it feels like to live in the new Gilded Age. I think we have an abstract sense that we're living at a time when inequality has widened and there is a group of people who are living, frankly, very far ahead in wealth terms than the rest of the country. But until you look at the numbers and you look at the actual details of that lifestyle, it can be hard to visualize.
LANGFITT: When you were reporting, were there one or two particular things that just astonished you?
OSNOS: I remember hearing that there were pop stars who were beginning to play private events for kids, kids' birthday parties or bar mitzvahs and sweet sixteens, so I contacted the rapper Flo Rida and got to see what it's like when a pop star performs for a crowd of screaming 13-year-olds. It used to be that the richest people in the country might buy seats in a skybox at a stadium to watch a big performer and now, actually, they can afford to bring that performer to them.
LANGFITT: Some of those performers actually don't want people to know who they're playing for, as you write about.
OSNOS: They keep it very low profile. There's an old saying in the private wealth management business, "the whale that never surfaces doesn't get harpooned."
LANGFITT: One of my favorite chapters is The Floating World about yachts. Tell everybody what a gigayacht is. I did not know.
OSNOS: The gigayacht is a pleasure vehicle, a luxury boat, that is the length of a football field. It can cost upwards of $500 million. It is, in fact, the most expensive object that the human species has ever figured out how to own. A generation ago, there were only ten in the world. Today, there are 170.
LANGFITT: I would think the high-end yachting world is very secretive. How did you get people to talk?
OSNOS: There's pride in the sheer luxury of it. The most telling detail that I ever heard was something that the owner of a very expensive yacht told one of his guests. He said, "it is ultimately the last true marker of great wealth. You have a chef and I have a chef. You fly private and I fly private. The only way that I can tell the world that I am in a different effing category than you is the boat." I can't imagine a statement that is perhaps more evocative in capturing the internal engine of endless pursuit and acquisition and insatiable desire for more and more stuff.
LANGFITT: How did you feel about these yachts when you were on them?
OSNOS: I was writing this because I want someday for archeologists who are looking at our time, and they may come upon these giant boats and think, "what were these giant arks, these sumptuous vessels, for?" What did they tell us about the societies and the countries and the people that created them?
LANGFITT: That's a dark image which leads us to another essay that I also found really interesting, Survival of the Richest, which was first published in 2017. You're talking to these super-rich doomsday preppers. Some of them are buying up apartments in converted missile silos. Others are buying land in guarded estates in New Zealand. What drew you to the preppers?
OSNOS: It was a tip that I heard from a stranger. He worked in San Francisco in technology, and I said, "Is there a story out there that you don't think is getting covered?" He said, "you should write about the guys who are preparing for the end of the world." What really caught my attention was Silicon Valley's self-narrative, of course, was a place that was endlessly optimistic and yet there was a simultaneous subculture of people spending larger and larger sums to build bunkers and getaway plans. I came to see it as a kind of gilded despair. They had created platforms and technologies that just might slip out of their control and might generate a level of public disarray that could ultimately imperil them.
LANGFITT: They also have a great fear of society just sort of collapsing. Do they see things, you think, that many of the rest of us don't?
OSNOS: They have an insight precisely because of the technologies that they've created. In some ways, they are an early warning system. During the financial crisis of 2008, as Steve Huffman [CEO of Reddit] later described it to me, as the economy began to turn upside down, some of the first indications of it popped up in conversations on Reddit.
LANGFITT: There are a bunch of lines in this essay that struck me. One is: You have to assure that the pilot's family will be taken care of, too. Explain what that literally and figuratively means.
OSNOS: After the financial crisis in 2008, there was this feeling that perhaps the public is going to turn on wealthy people and if they have to escape, they'll get on their private planes. But then they began to run through all of this logistical planning. Well, what do you do about the pilot? What about his family? If you don't bring his family, will he in fact fly you to where you want to go, or will he maybe turn against you and take the jet and run? These sound like science-fiction scenarios, but these were conversations that were happening quietly around dinner tables.
LANGFITT: Did you ever think that you had found yourself on the greed beat?
OSNOS: I think that is the heart of the matter and it makes people sometimes uncomfortable to talk about greed, but it is an enduring fact of life and it's an engine of a lot that happens in this country. What's new is the many ways in which we have created instruments and expressions and applications of that greed to be able to maximize it to its most extravagant and indulgent form. That's the culture of excess that I'm describing in these pages.
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