Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Management at the University of Cambridge and author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Cost.
Sergey Brin’s family fled Soviet authoritarianism, an experience he’s now invoking to portray a proposed wealth tax as Soviet-style tyranny. Ironically this sort of rhetoric is more likely to bring the US closer to today’s Russia: an unabashed oligarchy.
The cordial meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani wasn’t as strange as it looked; both reject the myth of a self-regulating market. The difference is that Trump uses the state to shore up wealth, Mamdani to expand rights and public provision.
Billionaire Bill Gates says we should back away from urgent emissions cuts and bet instead on tomorrow’s tech. But unless that innovation is democratically controlled, it will serve the same interests that caused the climate crisis in the first place.
Billionaire Peter Thiel insists that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and his portfolio of data mining and political bets puts that belief into practice. His is a program of authoritarian control disguised as innovation.
Donald Trump’s tariffs amount to a stealth tax on the middle and working classes, wrapped in the language of sovereignty. In practice, it’s upward redistribution and corporate price-gouging, fueling inequality that corrodes stability and erodes democracy.
The myths that billionaires earn, invent, or give their way to virtue don’t survive scrutiny. Billionaire wealth isn’t built on genius — it rests on public investment and ends with the power to shape law, labor, and markets.
Drawing on a century-old theory about the inevitability of elite control, billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen champions Silicon Valley as a new ruling class. His worldview revives the reactionary dream of greatness unencumbered by the masses.