Shabbat shalom!
In his recent book, The Haves and the Have Yachts, Evan Osnos paints a grimly comic portrait of the billionaire class. I met Osnos recently at a book festival, and after his presentation, I asked him to compare the robber barons of the gilded age to today’s tech billionaires in terms of their level of philanthropy. His answer: No comparison. The gilded age barons were orders of magnitude more philanthropic. And he cited as an example, the world’s current richest man, Elon Musk, whose largest public demonstration of philanthropy so far was to bankroll Ad Astra—a private school he founded on the SpaceX campus, where several of his own children attended!
Musk is just one example of this new class of tech billionaires who, instead of pouring their obscene wealth into schools, libraries, hospitals, or climate solutions, are sinking it into apocalypse bunkers, mega yachts, private islands, and escape hatches to Mars. Most of their investments are not in our shared future, but in their own private exit strategies. Their yachts become glossy magazine spreads, their retreats are whispered about by tech bros like some kind of mythical kingdoms, and their half-baked techno-utopias get treated as “visionary” instead of sociopathic. I guess when you have “Fuck You” money, it’s pretty easy to just say “fuck you” and spend another gazillion on some nuclear protected Shangri-La at the bottom of an old missile silo.
And here’s the kicker: not only do we let them get away with a complete lack of stewardship for our country and the planet, we even celebrate them. They are adorned on the covers of business magazines, their fortunes erroneously perceived as “self made” even though almost every fortune in the US not inherited is at least partly the product of networks, publicly paid for infrastructure, and institutions (social, educational, transportation, legal, political, security, health, etc) that the “self made” billionaire holding the fortune had nothing to do with. In other words, they could not have made their fortunes without other people and the institutions all those people paid for.
This is not a “tax the rich” screed, although I do believe they should be paying a greater share of keeping our systems and infrastructure in shape to support the next generations of “self made” billionaires. No, I am a firm believer in our current state of capitalism, whatever its many flaws and growing disparity between the wealthy and not wealthy. But I worry about the message this new generation of “self made” billionaires is sending to future generations. And that’s where the phrase I heard on a podcast the other day comes crashing in:
we are what we celebrate.
If that’s true, then what does it say about us?
Because as we worship the billionaires who are preparing for the end of the world instead of preventing it, we are applauding those same men who dig literal holes in New Zealand to hide from the collapse of the society they helped destabilize. We are celebrating the very people sprinting for their private planes (presumably with their pilot’s families) while the rest of us wait out the apocalypse at the local pub.
And the statistics drive it home. As The Haves and the Have Yachts points out, 25 hedge fund managers make more money than all the kindergarten teachers in America combined. Let that sink in. The people entrusted with shaping the next generation are, collectively, worth less than a couple dozen men who shuffle money around like poker chips. And yet it’s the hedge fund guys who get the magazine profiles, the yacht spreads, the recognition and applause. If we are what we celebrate, then we’ve chosen the wrong heroes.
This isn’t a new debate. More than a century ago, Andrew Carnegie, in his Gospel of Wealth, wrote that the billionaire should see himself as “but a trustee for the poor” because his wealth is not his alone. He is simply “entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community.” And because the billionaire’s wealth is not his alone, Carnegie argued, he has a duty to give that wealth away in whatever manner he thinks will best benefit the community. As brutal a capitalist as he was, at least Carnegie recognized the important role of stewardship that comes with the privilege of wealth.
Those who don’t are, in Carnegie’s eyes, moral monsters: the human equivalent of dragons who hoard wealth and breathe their last on heaps of gold. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” Carnegie famously concluded. Harsh words were not enough for such miscreants, however. Their wealth should largely be confiscated, he argued. “By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.” If that was Carnegie’s view in the age of steel, how damning would his words sound today, when billionaires sink fortunes into rockets and bunkers instead of schools and communities?
But this isn’t just about selfish billionaires. It’s also about the cultural diet we’ve chosen. America doesn’t celebrate community builders; it celebrates empire builders. We don’t canonize teachers or social workers or climate scientists, we canonize moguls with clever tax attorneys. And if we are what we celebrate, then it’s no wonder our collective soul resembles a luxury bunker that is sealed off from the world, lit by fluorescent paranoia, and stocked with creature comforts that will probably never serve any useful purpose.
Israel offers an interesting counterpoint (there is always a Jew angle in the JNR!). The Israeli calendar puts Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day) right before Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day), grief leading directly into celebration. The message is baked in: independence isn’t a yacht you hide on, it’s a collective achievement built on sacrifice, memory, and shared responsibility. Compare that to America’s Memorial Day, now better known for Target sales and Costco barbecue ribs. Our rituals have been hollowed out, leaving only smoked meat and discounts.
And of course there is the orange man child: a living tribute to a nation that celebrates fakes and gilded, narcissistic morons. Trump 2.0 has taken the spectacle out of the campaign arena, and installed it in the White House itself while trampling on the rose garden as well as our institutions and political norms. What used to be carnival rallies are now daily acts of governance-as-performance, with cruelty not just as the main act but as official policy. Immigration roundups staged for TV cameras, cabinet meetings turned into ass-kissing loyalty pageants, and executive orders rolled out like halftime shows. This isn’t a government, it’s a reality TV show, with state power as the prize. And if we are what we celebrate, then America today is celebrating vengeance and kleptocracy dressed up as leadership.
But here’s the thing: celebration isn’t trivial. It’s formative. It shapes what kids aspire to, what adults value, what societies replicate. When we elevate athletes, we inspire play. When we elevate scientists, we inspire discovery. When we elevate billionaires and bunker culture, we inspire retreat, selfishness, and the normalization of inequality.
That’s why the phrase we are what we celebrate sticks with me. It’s not just a bumper sticker, it’s a warning. A country that worships billionaires will get more billionaires, and fewer communities that can survive them.
But here’s where I want to complicate the picture. The Haves and the Have Yachts rightly skewers the class of billionaires stockpiling bunkers and yachts as lifeboats. Yet it would be dishonest to pretend they all fit the caricature. There are others, (who seem to be the exception rather than the rule) who understand that wealth can build, and heal, and transform and is not just a golden parachute.
Think of MacKenzie Scott, whose billions have been quietly fire-hosed into community colleges, food banks, and grassroots organizations with an almost reckless generosity. Or Warren Buffett, who has pledged away most of his fortune through the Giving Pledge while reminding us that dynastic wealth is corrosive to democracy. Or Bill Gates, for all his flaws, who has arguably saved more lives through vaccine programs than most governments have managed in a century. Even George Soros, the favorite boogeyman of conspiracy theorists, has put billions toward building democratic institutions and defending human rights in fragile places.
These are not perfect people, and philanthropy is not a substitute for fair taxation. But when the alternative is tech moguls buying bunkers in New Zealand or commissioning rockets to Mars, it matters whom we celebrate. It matters to elevate the billionaires who lean into responsibility, not the ones who lean on the escape hatch.
Because in the end, we are what we celebrate. If we continue to throw our applause at yachts and bunkers, then we’ll get more yachts and bunkers—and fewer bridges, schools, and vaccines. If instead we celebrate the wealthy who put their fortunes back into the bloodstream of society, we might just remind ourselves that shared survival is worth more than private escape. And the mega wealthy might just keep the pitchforks from invading the castle.
The choice is still ours: to have, or to have yachts.
Be safe out there everyone. When the apocalypse comes, I will meet you in the pub!
Brad out.
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