The billionaire backlash

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Today, Explained — "The Billionaire Backlash"

Podcast: Today, Explained (Vox)
Episode Title: The billionaire backlash
Date: November 14, 2025
Hosts: Noel King, Sean Rameswaram
Guest: Evan Osnos, Staff Writer at The New Yorker and author of "The Haves and the Have Yachts"

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the growing public resentment toward billionaires in the United States—a topic that has rapidly entered mainstream political, cultural, and social discourse. Host Noel King, joined by journalist/author Evan Osnos, investigates why attitudes about extreme wealth have shifted, how billionaires accumulate and spend their fortunes, and what the "abolish billionaires" movement really wants.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Billionaires in Everyday Life and Pop Culture

• Billionaires are increasingly visible and influential in American society, featuring in jobs (Gen Z nannying for billionaires), political scandal, and even in real estate debates.
• Quote: "We are annoyed with billionaires, but we can't escape them. Or can we? Coming up on Today, Explained: the movement to abolish billionaires." – Noel King (00:31)

2. The Growth and Demographics of Billionaires

• The US has seen an explosion in the number and wealth of billionaires: from 66 in 1990 to around a thousand by 2025.
• Quote: "Ten years ago, nobody in the world had $100 billion. But today, there are more than a dozen people like that." – Evan Osnos (03:44)
• The typical billionaire is "a man in his mid-50s who made his money... on a combination of technology, inheritance, and the sheer accumulation of giant numbers," epitomized by Elon Musk (03:21).

3. How the Rich Get Richer: Policy and Politics

• The richest Americans pay roughly half the tax rates they paid 50 years ago, while rates for the bottom 90% have barely changed.
• This shift is driven by the political access wealth affords: being able to influence and “coerce” lawmakers to shape rules in their favor, e.g., expanded loopholes in estate tax law (05:31-07:27).
• Quote: "Only morons pay the estate tax." – Gary Cohn, as quoted by Evan Osnos (06:21)
• Loopholes and sophisticated schemes are available to the ultra-wealthy, helping fortunes persist and grow over generations.

4. The Ultra-Wealthy Lifestyle: Changed Standards and Public Display

• Billionaires are more public and extravagant than ever; the “whale that never surfaces doesn’t get harpooned” has given way to flashy, high-profile events (07:39-10:32).
• Examples: $46 million weddings in Venice (08:33), superyachts costing up to half a billion dollars, celebrities hired for private backyard concerts.
• Quote: "People can afford to have the Foo Fighters come to their backyard on a Thursday." – Evan Osnos (09:33)
• Billionaires are now inventing new ways to spend money simply for the novelty.

5. Public Attitudes Toward Billionaires: Polling and Generational Differences

• A sharp shift in opinion: 67% of Americans say billionaires make society less fair—up 8 points in one year (02:05).
• Historically, Americans tolerated more inequality than Europeans, but that’s changing rapidly, especially with Gen Z.
• Gen Z exhibits “a lower tolerance for dramatic inequality and for the very visible effects of these giant fortunes.” (11:33)
• Pop culture and social media (e.g., TikTok, Instagram) have made resentment and aspiration for billionaire life more palpable and widespread (21:22).
• Quote: "You don't make a billion dollars through hard work. You make a billion dollars through exploitation." – Evan Osnos paraphrasing common sentiment (11:45)
• The “eat the rich” slogan is not aimed at the moderately wealthy but the ultra-rich who “could single handedly end world hunger and yet they choose not to.” (11:58)

6. The "Abolish Billionaires" Movement

• The idea isn't new, but it became explicit in mainstream American discourse around 2019, popularized by politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (15:02-15:54).
• "Every billionaire is a policy failure" has become a progressive rallying cry; policy proposals include wealth taxes and harder limits on inheritance.
• Recent campaigns in New York—like Zoran Mamdani’s—have pushed anti-billionaire rhetoric to the fore in the heart of American finance (16:51).
• Quote: "Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist? I don't think that we should have billionaires because frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality." – Zoran Mamdani (16:43)
• Mainstream public discourse now frequently questions the legitimacy of billionaire status, including pop culture figures (Billie Eilish’s “give your money away, shorties” at WSJ awards). (17:14)

7. Politics, Policy, and the Rising Power of Billionaires

• The Trump administration, especially during his second term, brought billionaire power to the forefront, filling both the inaugural stage and the Cabinet with the ultra-rich (18:50-19:06).
• Major policies—like the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—were characterized as historic upward redistributions of wealth (20:09).
• Quote: "We've never had a moment in which the actual levers of government have been handed over to some of the richest people in the world. This is not an abstraction. It's just a literal fact." – Evan Osnos (19:06)
• Trump, instead of hiding wealth, flaunts it, further amplifying the backlash. (19:48-21:22)

8. The Myth of American Mobility and a Coming Reckoning

• America’s self-image as a place of social mobility is breaking down: today’s children have less than a 50% chance of outearning their parents, compared to 90% for those born in 1940 (22:23).
• The “hollowness” of the American dream is fueling both frustration and a gradual shift—away from seeing vast fortunes as proof of opportunity, and toward seeing them as a threat to democracy.
• The episode ends with historian Ramsay MacMullen’s succinct warning from the fall of Rome: "Fewer had more." (24:00)
• Quote: "[C]ondense [the fall of Rome] into a very concise explanation. He said: 'Fewer had more.' ...That pendulum, in all the ways we've talked about today, it feels as if it is beginning, perhaps, to swing in the other direction." – Evan Osnos (24:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Time (MM:SS) | Quote & Attribution | |--------------|---------------------| | 00:31 | "We are annoyed with billionaires, but we can't escape them. Or can we? Coming up on Today, Explained: the movement to abolish billionaires." — Noel King | | 03:44 | "Ten years ago, nobody in the world had $100 billion. But today, there are more than a dozen people like that." — Evan Osnos | | 06:21 | "Only morons pay the estate tax." — Gary Cohn, as quoted by Evan Osnos | | 09:33 | "Now people can afford to have the Foo Fighters come to their backyard on a Thursday." — Evan Osnos | | 11:45 | "You don't make a billion dollars through hard work. You make a billion dollars through exploitation." — Evan Osnos paraphrasing popular sentiment | | 16:43 | "Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist? I don't think that we should have billionaires because frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality." — Zoran Mamdani | | 17:14 | "If you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate. But yeah, give your money away, Shorties." — Billie Eilish, as recounted by Noel King | | 19:06 | "We've never had a moment in which the actual levers of government have been handed over to some of the richest people in the world. This is not an abstraction. It's just a literal fact." — Evan Osnos | | 24:00 | "[C]ondense [the fall of Rome] into a very concise explanation. He said: 'Fewer had more.'" — Evan Osnos quoting Ramsay MacMullen |

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:01-02:05: Introduction, recent billionaire-related news, polling about billionaire resentment
• 02:28-05:31: Evan Osnos on who billionaires are, their rise, and growing share of wealth
• 05:33-07:27: How billionaires influence policy, avoid taxes, and perpetuate fortunes
• 07:39-10:32: How billionaires spend their money; shift toward public lavishness
• 10:32-12:20: Historical and new attitudes about billionaires, especially among Gen Z
• 14:30-16:51: The roots and recent rise of the "abolish billionaires" movement
• 17:38-21:22: Billionaire power in politics—Trump, Cabinet picks, symbolic and literal domination
• 21:22-24:45: The myth of American economic mobility, prospects for a social reckoning

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Tone & Language

• The podcast maintains a conversational, slightly irreverent, but informed and analytical tone, mixing policy and cultural analysis with humor and accessible examples.
• Speakers frequently use pop culture references, social media anecdotes, and vivid metaphors to make economic and political concepts relatable.

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Summary

Anyone interested in understanding why the American mood toward extreme wealth is shifting—and what might come next—will find this episode insightful. It situates present-day resentment against billionaires in a longer historical arc of policy changes and cultural mythologies, illustrates it with both data and vivid anecdotes, and connects it to political developments, especially the increased power of billionaires in American government. The episode ultimately contends that, for perhaps the first time in modern US history, public patience with extreme inequality is running out, and the nation may be nearing a turning point.

Transcript

[Noel King]

Billionaires are everywhere. Just this week, the Guardian reported that Gen Z's hottest job is nannying for billionaires. President Trump pardoned a British billionaire who was convicted of fraud so he can visit his grandbabies in America. A billionaire investor threatened on CNBC to leave New York because housing is too expensive.

[Evan Osnos]

It's super expensive because of the unions. Other developers have tried to cut deals with the unions, but they rule New York.

[Noel King]

Then he said, mamdani's gonna turn New York into Mumbai. These stories are annoying. We are annoyed with billionaires, but we can't escape them. Or can we? Coming up on Today, explained the movement to abolish billionaires. No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties. Love you guys. Thank you so much.

[Evan Osnos]

You get a, you get a. You get a. You get a, you get a. Get a. Every story you love, Every invention that.

[Noel King]

Moves you Every idea you wished was.

[Evan Osnos]

Yours all began as nothing, Just a blank page with a blinking cursor asking a simple question. What do you see? Great ideas.

[Noel King]

Start on Mac.

[Evan Osnos]

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[Noel King]

All right, so 67% of Americans say billionaires are making society less fair, according to some brand new survey data. That's up eight points from a year ago. And so we called Evan Osnos. He's a staff writer at the New Yorker. He wrote a book about the 3 comma club called the haves and have Yachts. That's a little New Yorker humor. Evan, what are the best and worst parts of hanging out with billionaires?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, unfortunately, the best part is that it is awfully tempting. You begin to realize just how delicious the fresh squeezed juice really is. The worst part is that you also begin to wonder about some big questions about the democratic health, small d democratic health of the country. So it sends you back into history in ways that can be both kind of funny and thrilling and also quite disconcerting at times.

[Noel King]

So if you say billionaire to me, I think Oprah like, that is where my mind goes. But Oprah would not be a typical billionaire. Demographically, she's simply not. She's an older black woman. Is there a typical person who sort of represents what a billionaire is?

[Evan Osnos]

The median billionaire, in a sense, the one that the statistics would generate. If we were trying to imagine everything we know about who they are and where they come from, they would look a lot like Elon Musk. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy, which is to say he is a man in his mid-50s who made his money, in his case, on a combination of technology, inheritance, and the sheer accumulation of giant numbers. Ten years ago, nobody in the world had $100 billion. But today, there are more than a dozen people like that. I mean, Elon Musk, for instance, 10 years ago, he didn't have more than $20 billion, and today he has around 400 billion. So the numbers have gone through the roof. Right now, worldwide, there are more than 3,000 billionaires. And you see the growth most sharply in the United States. I mean, in 1990, there were about 66 billionaires. In this, there are close to a thousand. So it's grown by 10 or 15 times what it was just a generation ago. I think that really, even more astonishing than that simple number is that the share of wealth that's controlled by billionaires has also soared. It used to be that the 0.1% of Americans controlled about 7% of all the wealth in the country. But today it's gone up to 18%. And why? The answer, as you can imagine, has a lot of factors. But the key one, really at the heart of it, is that we've changed the rules over the last century to make it much easier for big fortunes to grow, mostly by reducing the taxes that would chip away at them over time. So by one measure, the average tax rate for the top, let's say, 400 richest Americans is now about half of what it was 50 years ago, while the tax rates for the bottom 90% of American had really not budged much at all.

[Noel King]

Why is that?

[Evan Osnos]

The answer is that wealth, as we all know, can buy you political access. And political access means that you're able to then influence, compel, maybe even coerce political decision makers, people in Congress, people elsewhere in the government who have tremendous power to make the rules better for you. So I'll give you an example. I mean, take something like the estate tax, which used to apply to a huge number of Americans. It meant that at the time that you died, you were not able to pass along all of your inheritance to your kids without them paying a lot of it in taxes. But over the course of the last generation or two, we've systematically pared back the estate tax to the point that a relatively small number of Americans now pay it. Meaning, as one of the advisors to Donald Trump in his first administration, Gary Cohn, he was quoted as telling a member of Congress, quote, only morons pay the estate tax. What he meant was, they've created so many loopholes now that it's very easy by moving your money to one place or another, to avoid paying the kinds of taxes that were intended to make sure that it didn't just concentrate over time in the hands of a very small number of people, but was, in fact, available for public usage so that you can build roads and schools and other public purposes. And so there's become a kind of arms race among wealthy Americans and tax advisors about how to figure out all of the possible ways of avoiding taxes. And so it's produced a toolbox that is, frankly, available to people who have the money to spend on the most advanced esoteric tax advice.

[Noel King]

All right, so you make the money, or you inherit the money, and then the tax code benefits you in a lot of ways, and so you keep the money. How do you spend the money? What are billionaires buying?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, it's become much more visible in our lives. It used to be that there was an expression that went around among the very wealthiest advisors to the rich, which was that the whale that never surfaces doesn't get harpooned. In other words, if you keep yourself out of sight, then you stand less chance of attracting public outrage or attracting the taxman. But these days, the, you know, the style has changed, the mores have changed. You see the kind of wedding that Jeff Bezos is having in Venice, which is kind of visible for the whole world to see.

[Noel King]

Well, it's being described as one of the most lavish weddings extravaganzas of all time. Spotted today.

[Evan Osnos]

Bill Gates, The Kardashians, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom.

[Noel King]

Brady, even Usher has arrived in the.

[Evan Osnos]

Lagoon City along with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

[Noel King]

The events reported to have cost around $46 million. It was relocated from the city center.

[Evan Osnos]

After protests from Venetians. Or take, for example, the world of the super yacht. These are machines that are, in a sense, the most expensive objects that humans have ever figured out how to own. These are the giant super yachts that cost about a half a billion dollars in some cases. And, you know, I think there are also ways that people are figuring out how to spend their money. That simply were not possible a generation ago. It used to be if you had a huge amount of money and you wanted to see your favorite artist, you might buy a front row ticket at the arena or maybe a skybox. Now people have so much money, as one musician put it to me, he said, now people can afford to have the Foo Fighters come to their backyard on a Thursday. And we see that. And you see pop stars are now available for hire. Whether it's the biggest names in the world like Beyonce, I just might be a black Bill Gates in a Mate, or the Rolling Stones or just about anybody you want. One thing that's very clear now is that the numbers have gotten so big that people are actually struggling to figure out how to spend it. I spoke to a consultant who works in the yacht industry who caters to what he himself calls the board billionaires. And he said, look, I can come up with ways of people spending their money that they didn't know was possible. So he'll build a restaurant, for instance, on a sandbar in the Maldives, and it'll be made out of 3D printers, and they'll have dinner together, and then it'll be washed away, and nobody will ever be able to eat in that particular place in that way again. That, he said, is the kind of thing that you eventually end up spending your money on once you've bought everything else.

[Noel King]

You spent a decade reporting on billionaires. I wonder what you found about what non billionaires think of billionaires. What are our overarching attitudes toward these people?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, historically, Americans have actually been more permissive, more accommodating of inequality than other countries. Compared to Europeans, for instance, we tend to be more willing to believe that inequality is the natural outgrowth of capitalism. But that number is changing, and it's changing in important ways. What you notice is that today there's an almost equal number of Americans, according to polls, who will tell you that billionaires are, as they say, bad for society. They create unfairness. And the same number of Americans who want to become billionaires themselves. But what's notable is that these numbers are different among younger people. So Gen Z, for instance, has a lower tolerance for dramatic inequality and for the very visible effects of these giant fortunes than their parents and grandparents did.

[Noel King]

The billionaire companies who are paying less.

[Evan Osnos]

In taxes than me in Arkansas, that's the problem. You don't make a billion dollars through hard work. You make a billion dollars through exploitation. When people say eat the rich, they are not talking about your uncle who has a lakefront property and a goldendoodle. Okay, we are talking about people who could single handedly end world hunger and yet they choose not to. And this is a reflection of exactly the changes over the last generation that we've been talking about.

[Noel King]

Evan Osnos of the New Yorker Coming up, the proletariat sharpens its pitchforks and Evan's coming back.

[Evan Osnos]

Every story you love, every invention that.

[Noel King]

Moves you, every idea you wished was.

[Evan Osnos]

Yours, all began as nothing, just a blank page with a blinking cursor asking a simple question. What do you see? Great ideas. Start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com Mac this.

[Noel King]

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[Evan Osnos]

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[Noel King]

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[Evan Osnos]

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[Noel King]

This is today, explained Evan Osnos of the New Yorker. Good day to you. Recently as a result of, I don't know, I'm just gonna pick a name out of a hat. Zoran Mamdadi we have all been starting to hear about a sort of anti billionaire sentiment that goes something like this. To keep it short, abolish billionaires or.

[Evan Osnos]

There shouldn't be billionaires.

[Noel King]

Talk to me about where this abolished billionaires push comes from and where it begins.

[Evan Osnos]

Well, as a general idea, this has been around since the Russian Revolution in 1917, but in recent years it's become much more explicit. It was really around 2019 that we began to hear that idea. This was in the latter moments of the first Trump administration and Bernie Sanders was running for president and he was talking about the idea that, as he said at the time, very clearly in his mind, billionaires shouldn't exist. We cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working families of this country for 45 years. And then you had Elizabeth Warren talking about a policy platform that would involve a wealth tax.

[Noel King]

Taxing income is not going to get.

[Evan Osnos]

You where you need to be the.

[Noel King]

Way taxing wealth does. The rich are not like you and me.

[Evan Osnos]

The really, really billionaires are making their.

[Noel King]

Money off their accumulated wealth and it just keeps growing.

[Evan Osnos]

So you follow that up to the present and the idea has become now much more broadly felt in progressive policy circles that, to borrow a phrase, every billionaire is a policy failure. That is where it's come. And Zoran Mamdani's campaign was, in a sense, the most dramatic example of that, because it was, after all, unfolding right there in the financial capital of the United States, New York City. Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist? I don't think that we should have billionaires because frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality. And ultimately what we need more of is equality across our city.

[Noel King]

Yes, you're right. It happening in New York City in the way that it was, made it feel very mainstream. Not long ago, the singer Billie Eilish got a. Got an award from the Wall Street Journal of all publications, and she stood up and she said, love you all, but there's a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. And if you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate. But yeah, give your money away, Shorties. Love you guys. Thank you so much. And it made me wonder whether we're seeing more of this kind of conversation in 2025, or whether it's happening in different quarters or whether this is just sort of a continuation of the last, I don't know, five, 10 years.

[Evan Osnos]

I think it's pretty clear that it's actually now in a crescendo. It's becoming much more a part of everyday conversation. The example you gave of Billie Eilish talking about this, coming from a pop culture perspective is really Noticeable, and it's for a few reasons. One, I think we're living through a time now where the fusion of economic power and political power has never been as obvious. We all saw that scene on January 20, the inaugural inauguration of the second Trump presidency, in which the crowd was full of billionaires front and center at President Trump's inauguration, a lineup of billionaire tech titans, the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, who's there, as well as Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and Elon Musk from X. Many of his biggest political supporters were the richest people in the country and the richest people in the world. In fact, so many were on that stage beside him that there wasn't even room for the leaders of Congress who were relegated to the audience. That was a new thing. We hadn't seen that before. Trump went on to then staff his administration with at least a dozen billionaires. President elect Donald Trump assembling now what.

[Noel King]

Could be the wealthiest administration in history.

[Evan Osnos]

So that includes billionaires Howard Lutnick, his choice to be Commerce Secretary, Linda McMahon as Education Secretary, and Scott Besant as Treasury Secretary. The billionaires on the official Cabinet will have a combined net worth of over $13 billion. Now, that is not including, of course, Elon Musk or Trump's new billionaire ambassadors. We've never had a moment in which the actual levers of government have been handed over to some of the richest people in the world. This is not an abstraction. It's just a literal fact. And you see that then reflected across the decisions that the government makes. So, for instance, the big fiscal bill that passed earlier in the year, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, was often characterized and calculated to be the single largest transfer of wealth ever in American history, simply by the way that it closed off avenues for subsidies and support for poorer Americans by, in fact, creating opportunities for the wealthiest Americans to hold on to more of their money. So that fact is it's just no longer an abstraction in the background. It feels to people like it's right there, front and center on stage, for lack of a better term. For a long time, politicians would try not to look like they were too wealthy. Trump obviously goes in completely the other direction. He luxuriates in the idea that he is surrounded by money. You look at the fact that he threw a Great Gatsby party at a time when a lot of Americans were struggling with the fact that SNAP benefits, nutritional assistance had been cut off because the government was shut down, or he's posting photos on social media of renovating his bathroom in the White House or of building a giant ballroom. This is going to be probably the finest ballroom ever built. So in some ways, it feels like Trump is still reading from a cultural playbook from the 1980s in which we were all kind of cheering for these emblems of big wealth, when in fact, the public attitudes, as shown in polls, are pretty clear that people are not laughing along with him.

[Noel King]

I remember during. In the years after the financial crisis, I was a beat reporter covering wealth and poverty. And I remember everyone said, this is like 2013. Everyone said, @ some point there is going to be a class war in the United States. People are fed up and they're frustrated, and it's right in our faces. And the thing that strikes me is a decade later, it is so much more right in our faces. Social media is so much more a part of people's lives. Not just Twitter, but there's TikTok, there's Instagram, where you get to see people's nice stuff and nice lives. Come spend the day with me. As a lazy millionaire in Los Angeles, I started off the day with a slow flow yoga class. And then I made my money. I look cute. I've got my Matcha. I've done my workout for the day. What do I do for the rest of my day?

[Evan Osnos]

Money cannot buy happiness, but a lot of money can.

[Noel King]

But I do wonder where you think American attitudes on this go as we go forward into something that feels like more billionaires and more billionaire control.

[Evan Osnos]

Well, for a long time, I think that Americans tolerated and in fact, in some cases celebrated inequality or these giant fortunes at the top because they felt like they were the emblems of opportunity. They kind of substantiated the myth that really is important to the American idea, the idea that you can go from the bottom to the top. You know, the kind of thing that you still do hear from cab drivers on the other side of the world when they hear that you're an American. But the numbers here at home are very different than what that myth suggests. I mean, the simple fact is, if you're a person who was born in 1940 in this country, you stood a 90% chance of outearning your parents. But you fast forward to today, and a child who's coming of age today stands less than half that chance of outearning their parents. And as a result, there is a feeling of hollowness and of frustration about that mythology. And so it feels as if this is no longer just a part of the usual ebb and flow of opportunity. And fortune of money concentrating into the hands of a few and then dispersing out more broadly. And the history on this suggests that at a certain point, people do get frustrated to the point where they don't accept it anymore. It can feel as if we're approaching some reckoning point. There's a great historian named Ramsay McMullen who studied the fall of Rome, and what he said was the fall of Rome took 500 years, but you could condense that history into a very concise explanation. He said fewer had more. And in a way, I think that feeling, that recognition that we're beginning to monkey around with the very foundation of America's democratic sustainability has bled out into the broader population to such an extent that that willingness to celebrate giant fortunes as emblems of opportunity rather than as signs of distress is changing. And that pendulum, in all the ways we've talked about today, it feels as if it is beginning, perhaps, to swing in the other direction.

[Noel King]

Evan Osnos of the New Yorker, his latest book is the Haves and have Yachts. Abishai Artsy produced today's show. Jolie Meyers edited. Laura Bullard is our senior researcher. Patrick Boyd and Adrienne Lilly engineered the rest of Us, the Best of Us. Danielle Hewitt, Hadi Moag D, Ariana Espudu, Peter Ballinan Rosen, A. Stead Herndon, Amina El Saadi, Miranda Kennedy, Miles Bryan and Kelly Wessinger. They say daughters steal your beauty. I saw Sean this week and it checks out. We use music by Breakmaster. Cylinder Today Explained is distributed by wnyc, and the show is a part of the Vox media Podcast Network. Podcast.voxmedia.com I'm Noel King. It's Today Explained.

[Evan Osnos]

Sam.