Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Evan Asto is great to have you with a staff writer the New Yorkers. Tom alluded to there. The new book is called The Haves and Have Yachts Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. Congrats on the book. Congrats also on the title, which is excellent.
Let's start with the warning that we heard from former President Biden has prepared to leave office, he said today, and oligarchy is taking shape in America, of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom. He sounded the alarm as he was making his way to the exit. What has changed when it comes to wealth inequality in this country over the last five six months.
Thanks guys, by the way, Tom, you made my day. We live in a world, John McPhee made. I'll say that what President Biden was getting at it is something really important to a lot of folks. Frankly, it sounded almost belated. Look, the good news is this country has
never been wealthier in so many respects. We are build holding companies, were on the cusp of a new era of technology and all the ways you talk about on the show every day whether it's AI and robotics, and yet at the same time, as you know, there are about half of American adults who will tell you that they don't have one thousand dollars to spend on an
emergency expense. We are at a point now. It's really sort of similar to where we've been at moments in our history where we have tremendous technological opportunity, huge wealth creation, and we're also facing a fork in the road to make sure that that is also not steering our government down a path that Henry Ford used to say that he wanted to make sure that his own employees, his own workers, could afford the cars he was making. And those are some of the decisions we have to be making now.
This is clearly a theme that has animated a lot of your work. I look at the Osmos Ooh for going back to your first book, Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, which I read on my first trip to Shanghai, and you re mark then on just the abundance the amount of wealthy excitement
about wealth and upper mobility in China. As you look at this particular book, are we looking at something that's uniquely American, or has this rise of the ultra rich and sort of shared globally.
Yeah, it's a fascinating parallel in many ways, David. I mean I first started reading in a sense about the American guilded age when I was living in China, because I was trying to understand what was happening. We were seeing railroads built at a pace we hadn't seen since America in the nineteenth century. It's fitting in some ways that I used The Great Gatsby when I lived in Beijing to conceptualize it. Here we are, it's twenty twenty
five hundredth anniversary of that book. There are a lot of lessons in there about how do you take that sense of cultural energy that we might have had at certain moments in the Roaring twenties, but also the awareness that without making really smart choices, we're not going to make sure that this money gets into the hands of people who can rise with the tide.
Evan, you grew up in the crucible this Grantwich, Connecticut, where I'm sure three kids down the street did have Hinckley picnic boats.
You didn't.
Your father was acclaimed within journalism, But what does the crew do below the fancy people to try to get their kids to motivate and have a good life and even aspire to be richer.
I mean, this is.
Topic one right now, between the buffeting of AI the decline of liberal arts. What do the kids do just below those with the super yachts.
Yeah, you know, I face these questions myself. I'm a dad, I've got two kids. I think about the challenges of people coming out of school today and how hard it's going to be to get those first jobs. But here's the thing, you know, we have some pretty great models to inspire us in terms of how to think about being energetic, being creative. I think about Warren Buffett. He's on our minds a lot, all of us these days. You know. He talks about how much he left, how
much he will leave to his kids. He likes to say, as you know, Tommy says, I want to leave them enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. I try, as I think about the opportunities that are coming to say to people, Look, it's not enough for us to just say. Elon Musk has now crossed the four hundred billion dollar threshold We've never had somebody with that kind of prosperity. Isn't that
a sin of strength? No, we have to be saying to people, if we don't make smart choices, it's going to end up with too many musks and perhaps not enough buffets. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
Spare a teer for the billionaire class. But I am interested in this element of loneliness that comes through in your book. So if you have billionaires buying these super yachts, they can be in isolation on the open seas. You have another chapter or another piece that you've written about Silicon Valley billionaires who are looking to remote New Zealand as a place where they can go. Whether the storm, if that's a nuclear disaster or something that's a natural disaster,
what explains it? And just I think the contrast is so starked to what you were talking about a moment ago, which is during the Gilded Age, you had billionaires, had multi billionaires, I should say, maybe not billionaires who are interested in philanthropy and in helping the wider population and building libraries in towns across America. It seems like there is a stark contrast that exists now between the aspirations of a lot of these ultra wealthy than what we saw before.
Yeah, David, you know, for the reporting for this book, I went to New Zealand, I went to Monico. Hardship pay was not forthcoming despite my insistence, And it was a fascinating way of getting into the minds of people who have succeeded. And I think what you find in a lot of cases, and this is the surprise, is a sense of fear. Frankly, a sense of verdigo. You know, a lot of people will say, look, you've made all the money in the world, what are you afraid of?
Why do you need to stand on the stage with a president who you may not even necessarily ideologically agree with. And I think what that tells us is that the higher you get, you actually can end up feeling quite vulnerable, quite exposed. I mean, as Silicon Valley CEO said to me, I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and
I have a bunker with an air filtration system. And I think that is Another former hedge fund manager said to me, Look, there are twenty five hedge fund managers in this country who make it more money, and by and then all of the kindergartener teachers, and he said, and it doesn't feel good to be one of those twenty five. That's the vertigo