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    ‘May I meet you?’ is just the latest in horrible dating advice from billionaires | Arwa Mahdawi

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    Sit down and pay attention, because this column might change your life. I bring you tidings from the Nazi-filled wilderness that is now X, where Maga-adjacent billionaire Bill Ackman has generously decided to dispense romantic advice to the masses. Online culture, Ackman notes, has “destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers”. The antidote to this, he suggests, are four simple words.“May I meet you?”That’s it. That’s the strategy. Ackman used this pickup line throughout his youth and, he says, it served him well. He didn’t even have to put “I’m a billionaire,” in front of the sentence – it was the syntax that women found sexy.“I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness,” Ackman mused. “You might give it a try.” And by “you”, he explains, he means everyone, not just young heterosexual men. “I think it should also work for women seeking men as well as same sex interactions,” Ackman proclaimed.View image in fullscreenA real man of the people, Ackman took time out of his busy billionaire schedule to add a little more context to his advice, which he explains is motivated by concern about the “next generation’s happiness and population replacement rates”. Per Ackman, you should try to be in motion while chatting someone up. This strategy “works much more effectively when you are moving”, he noted. “So on subways, elevators, escalators, airplanes, buses, and even walking down the street, it is most effective.”I have debased myself for numerous columns (just Google “Arwa Mahdawi accidental laxatives” or “Arwa banana”) but I do have my limits. Walking around the streets of Philadelphia asking women who set off my gaydar “may I meet you?” being one of them.But while I haven’t tried the Ackman approach myself, the advice has gone viral and various other people are giving it a whirl. It’s too early to do a quantitative assessment of its effectiveness but I hope that some enterprising social scientists are applying for funding for a future study. It’s perfect material for a future Ig Nobel prize.While we wait for a peer-reviewed analysis to come out, I must confess that I have my doubts that imposing yourself on strangers in the subway is going to do much to help “population replacement rates”. This may be a wild take but it’s possible that not supporting genocidal wars (Ackman has been a big cheerleader of Israel’s actions in Gaza) that have made prenatal care virtually nonexistent and killed an average of a child an hour, might be more effective when it comes to population replacement. That’s assuming we think all populations are equal, of course.Doing something about the exorbitant price of childcare, and the dire state of public schools in affordable areas of the US might also encourage more people to have kids. Since I’m churning out the hot takes over here, it’s also possible that young people might go out on the town more if the cost of living hadn’t become so expensive, and they had more disposable income. In short: solving underlying social issues that wealth-hoarding billionaires have exacerbated might prove more effective than a grammatically interesting pickup line.But what do I know, eh? I’m not a billionaire. Far better if plebs like me keep quiet and listen to our social and economic betters. So, in that spirit, and in the hopes of solving the population crisis, I have put together a few bits of relationship advice from the rich and infamous:1 Putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing: avoid at all costsOnce you have found your future spouse through the May-I-Meet™ method, you should try to hold on to them. According to our great leader Donald Trump that means avoiding a working relationship. “If you’re in business for yourself, I really think it’s a bad idea to put your wife working for you. I think it’s a really bad idea. I think that was the single greatest cause of what happened to my marriage with [first wife] Ivana,” Trump told ABC news in 1994. RIP Ivana, who is now dead and buried under the first hole of Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.2 Sabotage your co-worker’s carFox News host Jesse Watters is not a billionaire like Ackman or Trump, but he lives in a mansion so is still worth listening to. During a 2022 episode of the panel series The Five, Watters boasted that he “let the air out of“ now wife Emma DiGiovine’s tires when he “was trying to get [her] to date” him. “She couldn’t go anywhere. She needed a lift, I said, ‘Hey, you need a lift?’ She hopped right in the car,” Watters recalled. The Fox news host was 43 at the time, by the way, and DiGiovine, who is his second wife, was 29 and an associate producer on his show at Fox News. After some backlash about “Deflategate” he claimed this tactic, which he said “works like a charm”, was a joke.3 Cozy up to a sex offender (DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT)The latest batch of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents to be released reveal that Harvard professor and economist Larry Summers spent years discussing relationship advice with the convicted pedophile. In one 2018 email, Summers forwarded Epstein an email from a woman and asked for advice on when to write back. “Think no response for a while probably appropriate,” Summers said. Epstein agreed: “she’s already beginning to sound needy 🙂 nice.” In another email Summers complained that attitudes to dating had become too woke. The “American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” he wrote to Epstein. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”4 Offer your sperm to strangers over supperIf one is simply concerned with increasing the population rather than meeting a life partner you can always go the Elon Musk route and donate your sperm willy-nilly. According to a 2024 New York Times report, Musk has “offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances”. The same piece notes: “At a dinner party held at the home of a well-known Silicon Valley executive [in 2023] Mr. Musk offered to provide his sperm to a married couple he had met socially only a handful of times.” (Musk has denied this.) Or, if that sounds too exhausting, you can be like Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov and fund free IVF treatments for women who use your sperm. Durov now has more than 100 biological children in 12 countries via sperm donation. Perhaps, in the future, one of Durov’s children will bump into one of Musk’s many children and ask: “May I meet you?” More

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      Ultra-rich media owners are tightening their grip on democracy. It’s time to wrest our power back

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      The richest man on earth owns X.The family of the second-richest man owns Paramount, which owns CBS, and could soon own Warner Bros, which owns CNN.The third-richest man owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.The fourth-richest man owns the Washington Post and Amazon MGM Studios.Another billionaire owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.Why are the ultra-rich buying up so much of the media? Vanity may play a part, but there’s a more pragmatic – some might say sinister – reason.If you’re a multibillionaire, you might view democracy as a potential threat to your net worth. Control over a significant share of the dwindling number of media outlets would enable you to effectively hedge against democracy by suppressing criticism of you and other plutocrats, and discouraging any attempt to – for example – tax away your wealth.You also have Donald Trump to contend with. In his second term of office, Trump has brazenly and illegally used the power of the presidency to punish his enemies and reward those who lavish him with praise and profits.So perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that the editorial board of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post defended the razing of the East Wing of the White House to build Trump his giant ballroom – without disclosing that Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon is a major corporate contributor to the ballroom’s funding. The Post’s editorial board also applauded Trump’s defense department’s decision to obtain a new generation of smaller nuclear reactors, but failed to mention Amazon’s stake in X-energy, a company that’s developing small nuclear reactors. And it criticized Washington DC’s refusal to accept self-driving cars without disclosing that Amazon’s self-driving car company was trying to get into the Washington DC market.These breaches are inexcusable.It’s much the same with the family of Larry Ellison, founder of the software firm Oracle and the second-richest person in the world. Ellison is a longtime Trump donor who also, according to court records, participated in a phone call to discuss how his 2020 election defeat could be contested.In June 2025, Ellison and Oracle were co-sponsors of Trump’s military parade in Washington. At the time, Larry and his son David, founder of Skydance Media, were waiting for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve their $8bn merger with Paramount Global, owner of CBS News.In the run-up to the sale, some top brass at CBS News and its flagship 60 Minutes resigned, citing concerns over the network’s ability to maintain its editorial independence, and revealing pressure by Paramount to tamp down stories critical of Trump. No matter. Too much money was at stake.In July, Paramount paid $16m to settle Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against CBS and canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, much to Trump’s delight. Three weeks after the settlement was announced, Trump loyalist Brendan Carr, chair of the FCC, approved the Ellisons’ deal, making David chief executive of the new media giant Paramount Skydance and giving him control of CBS News.In October, David made the anti-“woke” opinion journalist Bari Weiss the CBS News editor-in-chief, despite her lack of experience in either broadcasting or news. Earlier this month, it was revealed that CBS News heavily edited Trump’s latest 60 Minutes interview, cutting his boast that the network “paid me a lotta money”.I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News – the home of Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite – was independent of the rest of CBS, and when the top management of CBS had independent responsibilities to the American public.It is impossible to know the full extent to which criticism of Trump and his administration has been chilled by the media-owning billionaires, or what fawning coverage has been elicited.But what we do know is that billionaire media owners like Musk, Bezos, Ellison and Murdoch are businessmen first and foremost. Their highest goal is not to inform the public but to make money. They know Trump can wreak havoc on their businesses by imposing unfriendly FCC rulings, enforcing labor laws against them or denying them lucrative government contracts.And in an era when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals who have bought up key media, with a thin-skinned president who is willing and able to violate laws and norms to punish or reward, there is a growing danger that the public will not be getting the truth it needs to function in this democracy.What to do about this?At the least, media outlets should inform their readers about any and all potential conflicts of interest, and media watchdogs and professional associations should ensure they do.A second suggestion (if and when the US has a saner government) is that anti-monopoly authorities not approve the purchase of a major media outlet by someone with extensive businesses that could pose conflicts of interest.Acquisition of a media company should be treated differently than the acquisition of, say, a company developing self-driving cars or one developing small nuclear reactors, because of the media’s central role in our democracy.A third suggestion is to read and support media such as the Guardian, which is not beholden to a wealthy owner or powerful advertiser and does not compromise its integrity to curry favor with the powerful.To the contrary, the Guardian aims to do what every great source of news and views should be doing, especially in these dark times: illuminate, enlighten and elucidate. This is why I avidly read each day’s edition and why I write a column for it.As the Washington Post’s slogan still says, democracy dies in darkness. Today, darkness is closing in because a demagogue sits in the Oval Office and so much of the US’s wealth and media ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few people easily manipulated by that demagogue.We must fight to get our democracy back. Supporting the Guardian is one good place to begin.You can support the Guardian’s year-end appeal here. All gifts are gratefully received, but a recurring contribution – even a small monthly amount – is most impactful, helping sustain our work throughout the year ahead. It takes just 37 seconds to give. Thank you. More

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      Top 10 US billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year – report

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      The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide.The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap.Using Federal Reserve data from 1989 to 2022, researchers also calculated that the top 1% of households gained 101 times more wealth than the median household during that time span and 987 times the wealth of a household at the bottom 20th percentile of income. This translated to a gain of $8.35m per household for the top 1% of households, compared with $83,000 for the average household during that 33-year period.Meanwhile, over 40% of the US population, including nearly 50% of children, are considered low-income, with family earnings that are less than 200% of the national poverty line.When pitting the US against 38 other higher-income countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US has the highest rate of relative poverty, second-highest rate of child poverty and infant mortality, and the second-lowest life expectancy rate.“Inequality is a policy choice,” said Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic justice at Oxfam America. “These comparisons show us that we can make very different choices when it comes to poverty and inequality in our society.”The report outlines the way that systems in the US, including the tax code, social safety nets, and worker’s rights and protections, have been slowly dismantled, allowing concentrated wealth to turn into concentrated power.Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill”, passed by Congress in May, has been one of the “single largest transfers of wealth upwards in decades”, according to the report, by cutting tax for the wealthy and corporations.But over the last few decades, Republicans have not acted alone.“Policymakers have been choosing inequality, and those choices have had bipartisan support,” Riddell said. “Policy reforms over the last 40 years, from cuts to taxes and the social safety net, to labor issues and beyond, really had the backing of both parties.”Policy recommendations outlined in the report fall into four categories: rebalancing power through campaign finance reform and antitrust policy; using the tax system to reduce inequality through taxes on the wealthy and corporations; strengthening the social safety net; and protecting unions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThese solutions can be tricky to carry out politically because of long-term stigmatization, particularly of social safety nets and taxation. The report refers to the concept of the “welfare queen” popularized during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, while taxation has always been seen as repressive for all rather than as a tool for addressing inequality.“What’s really needed is a different kind of politics,” Riddell said. “One that’s focused on delivering for ordinary people by really rapidly reducing inequality. There are sensible, proven reforms that could go a long way to reversing the really troubling trends we see.”The report features interviews with community leaders who are actively working to reduce inequality, even as progress has seemingly stalled on the national stage. In one interview in the report, union representatives for United Workers Maryland said the current moment seems ripe with opportunity because many Americans are starting to see how the current set-up isn’t working for them, but only for the people at the very top.“I think it’s brilliant that they see this as an opportunity,” Riddell said. “I love thinking about this moment as an opportunity to look around us and realize our broader power.” More

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      The luxury gap: Trump builds his palace as Americans face going hungry

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      It was a feast fit for a king – and any billionaire willing to be his subject. From gold-rimmed plates on gold-patterned tablecloths decorated with gold candlestick holders, they gorged on heirloom tomato panzanella salad, beef wellington and a dessert of roasted Anjou pears, cinnamon crumble and butterscotch ice-cream.On 15 October, Donald Trump welcomed nearly 130 deep-pocketed donors, allies and representatives of major companies for a dinner at the White House to reward them for their pledged contributions to a vast new ballroom now expected to cost $300m. That the federal government had shut down two weeks earlier scarcely seemed to matter.But two weeks later, the shutdown is starting to bite – and throw Trump’s architectural folly into sharp relief. On Saturday, with Congress still locked in a legislative stalemate, a potential benefit freeze could leave tens of millions of low-income Americans without food aid. Democrats accuse Trump’s Republican party of “weaponising hunger” to pursue an extreme rightwing agenda.Images of wealthy monarchs or autocrats revelling in excess even as the masses struggle for bread are more commonly associated with the likes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of France, who spent lavishly at the court of Versailles, or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, who siphoned off billions while citizens endured deepening poverty.But now America has a jarring split-screen of its own, between an oligarch president bringing a Midas touch to the White House and families going hungry, workers losing pay and government services on the brink of collapse.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen“Are you fucking kidding me?” exclaimed Kamala Harris, the former vice-president, during an interview on Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central podcast The Weekly Show. “This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that babies are going to starve when the Snap benefits end in just hours from now.”For years Trump has cultivated the image of a “blue-collar billionaire” and, in last year’s presidential election, he beat Harris by 14 percentage points among non-college-educated voters – double his margin in 2016.Yet he grew up in an affluent neighbourhood of Queens, New York, and joined the family business as a property developer, receiving a $1m loan from his father for projects in Manhattan. He attached his name to luxury hotels and golf clubs and achieved celebrity through the New York tabloids and as host of the reality TV show The Apprentice.View image in fullscreenAs a politician, however, Trump has successfully branded himself as the voice of the left-behinds in towns hollowed out by industrialisation. His formula includes tapping into grievance, particularly white grievance, and into “Make America Great Again” nostalgia . His speeches are peppered with aspirational promises that his policies will guarantee his supporters a share of the nation’s wealth.This has apparently given him leeway with Trump voters who, despite their own struggles, turned a blind eye to the largesse of his first term and how it might benefit his family. But it was clear from his inauguration in January – when he was surrounded by the tech titans Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg – that part two would be different.Trump has made a personal profit of more than $1.8bn over the past year, according to a new financial tracker run by the Center for American Progress thinktank, which says the lion’s share came from launching his own crypto ventures while aggressively deregulating the industry. Other sources of income include gifts, legal settlements and income from a $40m Amazon documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump.There have been brazen “let them eat cake” moments. In May, Trump said he would accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One despite concerns that it could violate the US constitution’s emoluments clause. In October, it was reported he was demanding the justice department pay him about $230m in compensation over federal investigations he faced that he claims were politically motivated.View image in fullscreenLarry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There is a glaring gap between the life of Donald Trump, which is gold-plated and luxurious, and the life of so many Americans who are now being hit by the government shutdown.“You have to go back in history to examples in the 1920s or the Gilded Age in the late 19th century to find this kind of opulence that’s not just going on but being advertised. That goes along with all the other efforts to enrich Donald Trump and his family and his friends. It’s a shocking display of the use of public power for private gain.”It is hard to imagine a more resonant symbol than the ballroom. Last month, Trump left presidential historians and former White House staff aghast by demolishing the East Wing without seeking approval from the National Capital Planning Commission, which vets the construction of federal buildings. He also fired all six members of the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent agency that had expected to review the project.He claimed the destruction was a necessary step towards building a long-needed ballroom which, at 90,000 sq ft, would be big enough to hold an inauguration and dwarf the executive mansion itself. It will be funded not by the taxpayer but the new masters of the universe.Among the companies represented at the 15 October dinner were Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton, Coinbase, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms and T-Mobile. The Adelson Family Foundation, founded by the Republican mega-donors Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, also had a presence.The oil billionaire Harold Hamm, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler and her husband, Jeff Sprecher, and crypto entrepreneur twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss – who were portrayed by the actor Armie Hammer in the film The Social Network – were all on the guest list.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEthics watchdogs condemned the dinner as a blatant case of selling access to the president with the potential for influence peddling and other forms of corruption. Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist, said: “It’s par for the course for Donald Trump. Millionaires and billionaires wine with him and dine with him and everything is fine with him. There’s a cost and there’s consequences.“They’re not donating this money because it’s a nice thing to do. Certainly there’s some sort of benefit to them and it could be the largest wealth transfer in American history with the big ugly bill [the Working Families Tax Cut Act] just a few months ago.”View image in fullscreenThat legislation delivers tax cuts for the rich while reducing food assistance and making health insurance more expensive for working families. The mood is only likely to darken as the second-longest government shutdown in history threatens to rip the social safety net away from millions of people. John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, warned on Wednesday: “It’s going to get ugly fast.”A number of essential public services are approaching the end of their available funds, a situation likely to be felt directly in households, schools and airports from this weekend.The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), also known as food stamps, is set to lapse for 42 million people, raising the spectre of long queues at food banks. On Friday, two federal judges ruled that the Trump administration must continue to fund the programme with contingency funds. But the decisions are likely to face appeals. It was also unclear how soon the debit cards that beneficiaries use to buy groceries could be reloaded.Schemes that provide early years’ education for low-income families and subsidised air travel to remote communities are also set to run aground. At the same time, thousands of federal employees will soon miss their first full paychecks since the shutdown began, raising the prospect of staffing shortages in areas such as airport security and air traffic control.The timing is awkward because Saturday also marks the start of open enrolment for health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. Premiums are expected to soar, reflecting insurers’ doubts that Congress will renew enhanced tax credits before they lapse at year’s end – one of the key points of contention in the current standoff.Trump can often appear immune to political crises. But in a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos opinion poll released on Thursday, only 28% of Americans say they support the ballroom project, compared with 56% who oppose it. The same survey found that 45% blame Trump and Republicans for the government shutdown while 33% hold Democrats responsible. Notably, independents blame Trump and Republicans by a 2-1 margin – handing Democrats an opportunity.View image in fullscreenJohn Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “For the first time in a while, they have an opening with rural voters. Medicaid and Snap are infrastructural necessities in the poorest counties. Without programmes like this being funded, you’re not just talking about hurting poor people or rural people who are invisible; you’re talking about shutting down hospitals and clinics, and that matters to people. Democrats should be fanning out in rural areas and people should be telling their stories.”It is safe to assume that, had Barack Obama or Joe Biden built a ballroom during the crippling austerity of a government shutdown, Republicans and rightwing media would have gone scorched-earth against them. Trump’s ostentatious display of wealth and cronyism comes against a backdrop of widening social and economic inequality. Democrats, however, are often accused of lacking a killer instinct.Joe Walsh, a former Republican representative aligned with the conservative Tea Party who four months ago became a Democrat, said: “Democrats don’t know how to fight and I can see they’re already squirming on this ballroom issue. We’ve got a guy in the White House who every day is taking a blowtorch to this country and most Democrats don’t understand the moment. He ploughs ahead and tears down the East Wing because he knows he can get away with it.”Walsh believes that the next Democratic president should commit to demolishing Trump’s ballroom. “This is somebody who’s a tyrant who believes he can ignore all laws, rules, norms and processes,” he added. “You have to draw the line on that. No, he cannot unilaterally demolish the East Wing and build a big old ballroom. This guy has no clue what America is. We don’t have palaces in America.” More

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      Trump backer Timothy Mellon identified as donor of $130m for US troop pay during government shutdown

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      A reclusive billionaire, anti-tax crusader and major financial backer of Donald Trump has been named as the anonymous private donor who gave $130m to the government to help pay US troops during the federal shutdown that is now in its fourth week, according to the New York Times.Timothy Mellon, heir to the gilded age industrialist and former treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, is the secret donor whom Trump has described as a “friend”, “great American” and “patriot”, but has refused to name, the Times reported on Saturday, citing two anonymous sources familiar with the arrangement.Trump first announced the secret, legally controversial donation on Thursday amid growing clamor about the potential financial hardship being caused by the ongoing federal shutdown on the 1.3 million active duty military troops.​​“He doesn’t want publicity,” Trump said on Friday as he headed to Malaysia. “He prefers that his name not be mentioned, which is pretty unusual in the world I come from, and in the world of politics, you want your name mentioned.”​​The Pentagon told the Times that the donation was accepted under the “general gift acceptance authority”.“The donation was made on the condition that it be used to offset the cost of service members’ salaries and benefits,” said Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, in a statement.Still, the donation, which equates to about $100 per service member, appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending funds in advance or in excess of congressional appropriations – and from accepting voluntary services “except in the case of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property”.Potential penalties for violations include both administrative and criminal sanctions such as suspension or removal from duty, fines and imprisonment.A White House spokesperson referred the Guardian to the treasury department, which has been contacted for comment.Mellon, 80, pumped over $165m to back Trump, Robert F Kennedy and other Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle, making him the top donor fueling outside spending groups last year, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets. This included $125m to the Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc, which supported Trump, according to Federal Election Commission documents. Mellon has also given money to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense.Mellon, a retired railroad magnet who lives mostly in Wyoming, is a relatively new player in campaign financing, donating just $32,000 in the 2016 election cycle when Trump first ran for office. This jumped to $10m in 2016 and $60m in 2020, when in a rare interview with Bloomberg the recluse said he believed Trump had delivered on what he’d said on the stump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2021, the Texas Tribune reported that Mellon had donated $53m to Texas governor Greg Abbott’s fund to build a wall on the state’s border with Mexico.Mellon’s wealth and anti-tax leanings can be traced back to his industrialist grandfather, who made his money in banking and investments in startups before serving as treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932.The Mellon family remains one of the country’s richest with a combined net worth of $14bn in 2024, according to Forbes. Timothy Mellon’s individual wealth is unclear, with reported estimates ranging from $700m to $4bn. More

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      Boom time for US billionaires: why the system perpetuates wealth inequality

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      To many Americans, the economy of the past five years has been rough. Prices have soared yet pay remains stagnant. High mortgage rates have made buying a home a dismal prospect. The unemployment rate has been creeping up.Most people have indicated they are delaying major life decisions, including having kids or switching jobs, because of the instability. But for a very small group of people, the last five years couldn’t have been any better.The wealth of the world’s billionaires grew 54% in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. And even amid all the economic instability, the stock market has only continued to grow. This growth has largely benefited just a small number of Americans: 10% of the population owns 93% of stock market wealth.As uneven as this distribution seems, it’s the system working as it is currently designed.In his new book Burned by Billionaires, inequality researcher Chuck Collins argues that the system that perpetuates wealth inequality is purposely opaque to most Americans.“[The wealthy] have bought their jets, they’ve bought their multiple houses and mansions, but now they’re buying senators and media outlets,” Collins told the Guardian in an interview. “We’re now entering this other chapter of hyper-extraction where the wealthy are preying on the system of inequality.”Collins, a director at the Institute for Policy Studies, is no stranger to wealth. A great-grandson to Oscar F Mayer, the founder of the meat processing brand, he is a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, a non-partisan group of wealthy Americans who advocate for higher taxes for the rich and higher wages.To help others understand what exactly it means to be “wealthy” in the US, Collins borrows a concept from journalist Robert Frank who, in a 2007 book on the rich, imagined the different levels of wealth as “Richistan” villages: Affluent Town, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan and Billionaireville.To modernize the concept, Collins categorizes these “wealth villages” based on income levels. At the lowest tier, Affluent Town, are the 10 million Americans who have a household income of at least $110,000 and an overall wealth of over $1.5m. The villages get more exclusive as wealth goes up: Lower Richistan has 2.6 million households who have wealth between $6m and $13m; Middle Richistan has 1.3 million households who have assets worth an average of $37m; while Upper Richistan, made up of 130,000 Americans (roughly the size of a small city) has between $60m to $1bn in wealth.Altogether, the residents of these villages make up the top 10% of the wealth income distribution, about 14 million Americans altogether, though their experiences vary dramatically.“You could be in Lower Richistan, and you’re still sitting in the coach section of a commercial plane,” Collins said. “Whereas in Upper Richistan, you’re flying in a private jet. That’s a really different cultural experience. You fly private, you have no stakes in the commercial aviation system. You don’t care if the whole system shuts down – you’re set.”The highest hill in “Richistan” is Billionaireville, which is made up of about 800 American billionaires who are some of the world’s wealthiest. The power that this group has far surpasses those who are simply affluent, let alone the average American who doesn’t reside in “Richistan” at all.But Collins thinks the progressive slogan “billionaires shouldn’t exist” or “abolish billionaires” misses the point and has a “whiff of exterminism” to it.“It’s the distinction between individual behaviors and a system of rules and policies,” Collins said. “We should be concerned about an economic system that funnels so much wealth upward to the billionaires.”In other words, it’s not about the billionaires themselves, but about the system that allows them to have an enormous amount of influence and control over society today.To understand how wealth at the billionaire level works, Collins breaks it down into four parts: getting the wealth, defending the wealth, political capture and hyper-extraction.When many Americans think about wealth, they usually think solely about the first step, Collins said. People can create a modest amount of wealth through starting or running a successful business, which could get them residency in Affluent Town.But getting to Billionaireville requires serious investment and strategy in those next three steps. Collins describes what he calls the “wealth defense industry”: the tax layers, accountants and wealth managers who use their expertise to ensure that the super rich are being strategic about their taxes.“Wealth defense professionals use a wide variety of tools such as trusts, offshore bank accounts, anonymous shell companies, charitable foundations and other vehicles to hold assets,” he writes.To further a wealth defense strategy, a family needs political support. Wealth of over $40m translates to political power, Collins says, and can be used to defend wealth and protect its accumulation. He notes that the 2010 landmark supreme court decision Citizens United v Federal Election Commission allowed the wealthy to pump a seemingly unlimited amount of money into elections, which has dramatically increased the power the ultra-wealthy have on politics.The last stage is a different kind of wealth accumulation, one that Collins calls “hyper extraction”, to describe how the wealthy have come to touch nearly every single part of an Americans’ everyday life largely through private equity, which allows wealthy individuals to invest in private companies.“Private equity is looking for those corners of the economy where they can squeeze things a little bit harder,” Collins said. “One thing I don’t think people understand is these billionaire private-equity funds are what happens when so much wealth is parked in so few hands, and they can kind of turn around and say, ‘Where else can we squeeze money out of the economy?’ Healthcare? Great. Mobile home parks? These people can’t go anywhere, [so] you can raise their rents.”Collins writes about the Mars family, best known for their dominance in the confectionary market, with M&Ms, Snickers and Skittles, but who have also cornered the pet industry. Along with being the biggest owner of pet care products in the US, the Mars family owns more than 2,500 pet care facilities across the US.The effects of this inequality go beyond the wealth getting wealthier. It’s about people paying more for their healthcare, rent and vet bills without seeing any meaningful wage increases. And Collins said the pain and frustration of this kind of society can lead to deep discontent.“The most powerful oligarchs understand people are being left behind [and] are economically suffering,” Collins said, adding that Republicans have been good at tapping into a potent “phony populism”.“They can basically project this message that actually, Democrats are elitists. They just care about rich Hollywood executives and woke politics, and the people who care about you are over here. They’re the Donald Trumps of the world. They hear your pain, they feel your pain,” he said.The irony, Collins points out in his book, is that Trump has appointed a string of billionaires to his cabinet. Along with Elon Musk, who had a brief but powerful role as head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, which oversaw massive cuts to the federal workforce, Trump’s secretaries for commerce, treasury, education and the interior are also all billionaires.His cabinet, along with help from Republicans in Congress, helped him pass his huge tax bill, which will make permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.While Republican continue to argue that immigration and bad trade agreements are the source of everyone’s economic problems, “the question becomes: Will the Democratic party, which has also been captured by the billionaires and big money, be able to meaningfully address the underlying harms?” Collins said.Democrats, he argues, know what policies are needed to “reverse the updraft of wealth”, including deep changes to the tax system, increasing the minimum wage and strengthening unions.Collins recalled four years ago, when the Democrats were in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. The Democrats introduced the $4.3bn Build Back Better bill, which would have seen deep investments in the climate crisis, Medicaid, housing and childcare, among other things. The bill was going to be partially funded through changes in the tax system, including higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy and closing out tax loopholes.But while the bill passed the House in November 2021, it ultimately died in the Senate because two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, blocked it. Both Manchin and Sinema have since both left their Senate seats.“It was so, so close, and the bill really did reflect the will of the majority of people who really want lawmakers to solve some of these urgent problems,” Collins said. “Oligarchic power is not about creating so much as blocking. It’s easier to block than it is to make something meaningful happen, but the muscle memory is there. We know what that looks like.”Collins is optimistic that there can be change, but said it would require sustained political momentum.“It may be before we know it that the pendulum swings back, and then it really is about maintaining a sustained really popular movement to make progress on this extreme inequality we’re living in,” he said. “We can fix this. It is fixable.” More

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      Trump sets sights on liberal mega-donor George Soros: ‘A chilling message to other donors’

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      Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, said “everything is on the table” and left it there. But Donald Trump threw discretion to the wind and was far more specific about his choice of enemy to go after.“If you look at Soros, he’s at the top of everything,” the US president said.The gathering with reporters took place in the Oval Office last month as Trump ordered a crackdown on “leftwing terrorism” and threatened to investigate and prosecute those who financially support it.There is no evidence linking George Soros, a 95-year-old billionaire who has supported democratic causes around the world, or Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal and the networking site LinkedIn, to terrorism. But both are top donors to the Democratic party. And both were named by Trump as potential participants in a vast conspiracy to finance violent protesters against the government.It is no coincidence, critics say, that the president is intensifying his attacks on Soros little more than a year before the midterm elections for Congress. The billionaire has reportedly contributed more than $170m to help Democrats during the 2022 midterm cycle. A justice department investigation could deter both Soros and other would-be donors in 2026.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Anyone who contributes to the Democrats can expect Soros treatment if they’re giving a large amount of money. We’ve seen Trump quite skillfully using intimidation and threats to bring prominent law firms, major universities and others to their knees. This is another effort to cower opposition. The point here is to make it harder for Democrats to raise money.”Soros has long been a go-to bogeyman for the right. He was born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930 and emigrated to London after surviving the Nazi occupation of his home country. He moved to New York and, in 1970, founded Soros Fund Management, which grew into one of the most successful hedge funds in history. In 1992, he was dubbed the “man who broke the Bank of England” after short-selling $10bn worth of British pounds during the UK’s currency crisis.View image in fullscreenSoros began philanthropic work in the late 1970s, funding scholarships for Black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he provided support to dissidents and pro-democracy groups in communist eastern Europe. This work evolved into the Open Society Foundations (OSF), now one of the biggest funders of groups that support human rights, government transparency, public health and education in more than a hundred countries.Soros has donated more than $32bn to the OSF but in 2023 handed over its stewardship to his son Alex, who this summer married Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton and herself the target of rightwing conspiracy theories. Within the US, the OSF has supported groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Equal Justice Initiative, Indivisible, MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, the National Immigration Law Center and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.Patrick Gaspard, who was president of the OSF from 2017 to 2020, coinciding with Trump’s first term, said: “It’s hard to believe but at one point George’s work had bipartisan support. Republican senators and Congress members would meet with George Soros regularly, openly. They would tout his work in helping to bring down the iron curtain and help instill democracy in western Europe. They were proud to have the association.”That changed in 2004, when, disenchanted by the Iraq war, Soros emerged as a major backer of Democratic candidate John Kerry during his unsuccessful presidential campaign against George W Bush. He has since been a major donor to Democrats, giving $125m to one liberal Super Pac in 2021, according to the campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.Republicans have megadonors of their own, including Miriam Adelson, Charles Koch, Timothy Mellon and Elon Musk, whose donation of more than $270m to Trump’s presidential campaign dwarfed Soros’s input. Even so, Soros’s influence has made him a frequent target of criticism and conspiracy theories, especially from rightwing groups and authoritarian governments.Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia, posted on the X social media platform in 2023: “No other person has undermined our democracy more than George Soros. Why is [he] still allowed to maintain his citizenship?”The critiques often play on antisemitic tropes. Emily Tamkin, author of The Influence of Soros, said: “You couldn’t imagine a more perfect cartoon villain than Soros because he’s a foreigner, he works in finance, he lives in New York and, I would say most saliently, he’s Jewish, which means that you can have all sorts of stereotypes and conspiracies take hold without ever saying the word ‘Jewish’.”When Trump ally Viktor Orbán of Hungary was running for re-election in 2018, he targeted Soros with antisemitic dog whistles, saying: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.”View image in fullscreenTamkin added: “This idea of the rootless cosmopolitan or the greedy New Yorker obsessed with money. ‘Globalist’ is one you’re hearing a lot. I don’t ever need to say the word ‘Jew’ for antisemitic synapses to light up, which helps these conspiracies travel extremely effectively. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now in the United States and we should be clear about that.”Soros has long been considered a villain by Trump and his conservative base. In August, the president said without evidence that Soros and his son should be charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico, because of their alleged support for violent protests.Last month, the New York Times reported that the justice department has directed prosecutors to consider possible charges against the Open Society Foundations. Soros’s office sent a letter to “friends and colleagues” stating: “Allegations that George or OSF are in any way engaged in unlawful activity or in fomenting or promoting violence are 100% false.”Then, in the wake of charges against former FBI director James Comey, came Trump’s remarks in the Oval Office, suggesting that Soros and Hoffman could be prosecuted for sponsoring “professional anarchists and agitators”. There is no evidence to support these claims.Gaspard is not surprised that Trump is once again seeking to demonise George and Alex Soros. “Everyone knows – you can set your clock to it – that when the midterm elections come, when the presidential elections come, that family is going to be involved in some fashion in politics with capital ‘D’ Democrats,” he said.“Trump and those around him are interested in making the name toxic, the investments toxic, and to then find ways to destabilise what should be a source of strength for progressives and the centre left. Then this thing happens where the work of the philanthropy gets conflated with the rights of the individual to participate in American politics and to invest in national politics. That conflation is dangerous.”The move against Soros comes as Republicans face an uphill battle in next year’s midterms, when the party that holds the White House traditionally suffers losses. The jobs market is showing significant signs of weakening, consumer prices remain stubbornly high and this week the federal government shut down.But Trump has already intervened to protect his allies in Congress by pushing for the redrawing of congressional district maps, seeking to purge voter rolls, taking aim at mail-in voting and ordering the justice department to investigate ActBlue, the Democrats’ prime fundraising tool. The assault on Soros could be aimed at choking off money from bigger donors.Rick Wilson, a cofounder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Right now Trump’s in a lot of trouble across the board politically: the job situation is terrible, the economy is crashing out, the Epstein files are still dividing the party. All these things have led to a moment where they need some bait and they need some distraction out there.“Soros is a great target for that and I’m sure it’s also trying to send a chilling message to any other Democratic donor that they should watch out or he’ll go after them. If they don’t avoid transgressing against Trump, they’ll be in the same spot that Soros finds himself in.”Wilson, a former Republican strategist, added: “It’s absolutely about scaring people and freaking people out and causing fear and suppressing free speech. They do not want people to fund campaigns or Super Pacs or organisations that oppose Trump or Trumpism or their movement and so they’re going to seek to punish people and scare them off.” More

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      The American system is badly broken | Bernie Sanders

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      Let’s take a deep breath and, for one moment, forget about Donald Trump, Jimmy Kimmel, the UN, Charlie Kirk, Gaza, a government shutdown and the other crises that we face.Let’s talk instead about the reality which the corporate-controlled media and the corporate-controlled political system don’t talk about very much.What we are witnessing right now is the rise of two Americas. One for the billionaire class. And one for everybody else.In one America, the richest people are becoming obscenely richer and have never, ever had it so good. That America is overflowing with unimaginable wealth, greed and opulence that makes the Gilded Age seem very modest.And then there is a second America – an America where a majority of people live paycheck to paycheck, struggling to secure the very basic necessities of life – food, healthcare, housing and education.The simple truth is that never before in our history have so few had so much wealth and power while so many live in economic desperation.In the first America, one man – Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, worth more than $480bn, owns more wealth than the bottom 52% of American households. After spending $290m to put Trump back into the White House, Musk has become more than $180bn richer since election day. That’s a pretty good return on his investment.But that’s apparently not good enough for Musk. In order to keep him “motivated” as CEO, Tesla’s board proposed giving him a $1tn pay package if he meets certain goals. A trillion dollars.Jeff Bezos, the fourth wealthiest person in the world, has a fortune of $233bn. He can sail to Venice on his $500m yacht for his reported $50m wedding, where he gave his wife a $3m-$5m ring – because, among other things, his effective tax rate is just a reported 1.1%.Mark Zuckerberg, the third richest person in the world, is worth $258bn. He has spent $110m to buy 11 homes in Palo Alto, California, to create his own private compound, and another $270m for more than 2,300 acres in Hawaii with a 5,000 sqft underground bunker and three yachts reportedly worth more than $530m.Larry Ellison, the second wealthiest person in the world – worth $377bn – recently became nearly $100bn richer in a single day. He owns a private island in Hawaii and a fleet of jets, and now he’s reportedly trying to buy up major media companies such as Warner Bros and CNN.Together, these four men alone are worth more than $1.3tn. But it’s not just them. The top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%.The 1% lives in a world completely removed from ordinary Americans. They don’t ride overcrowded subways to get to work or sit in traffic jams to get home. They fly on private jets and helicopters they own. They live in mansions all over the world, send their kids to the most elite private schools and vacation on their own islands. And, for fun, some spend millions to fly off into space on their own rocket ships.And then there is the other America, where the vast majority of our people live. For them, the economy is not just broken, it is collapsing. In this America, despite a massive increase in worker productivity, real weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were more than 52 years ago.In this America, people are unable to afford a doctor’s visit (if they’re lucky enough to find one); are paying over half of their limited incomes on rent or a mortgage; and are unable to afford the outrageous cost of childcare or send their kids to college. In this America, the price of vegetables, fruit and other healthy foods is beyond the budget for many.For most Americans, the system is not just broken, it is collapsing and is increasingly resembling life in the third world.Everyone needs healthcare. Yet today, more than 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured – a number that will rise by at least 15 million under Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill.Everyone needs housing. Yet today, nearly 800,000 Americans are homeless and more than 20m households pay more than 50% of their limited incomes on rent or a mortgage. Since 2000, average rents have more than doubled and the median price of a home has soared to more than $435,000.Everyone needs a decent education. Yet today, our childcare system is broken and wildly expensive. Many of our public schools are dilapidated with teachers underpaid and underappreciated, and American students are falling behind in math, science and reading compared with their international peers. College education is unaffordable for millions and vocational schools fail to train the workers we desperately need.Everyone needs a secure retirement. Yet, nearly half of older workers have no retirement savings and no idea how they will ever retire with any shred of dignity or respect. Meanwhile, 22% of seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $15,000 a year.Enough is enough.As supreme court justice Louis Brandeis said in 1933: “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.”That warning is even more relevant today.In this pivotal moment in American history, we must create a government and an economy that works for all, or we will continue sliding into oligarchy – where the billionaire class controls our government, our economy and our future.Let me say to my fellow Americans: I know day-to-day life can take a toll, but we must not allow ourselves to fall into despair. If we do not allow ourselves to be divided up by Trump and his oligarch allies, we can change the path we are on.The choice is clear. Let’s stand together for democracy and justice. More

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      Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans | Robert Reich

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      Draw a circle around all the assets in the US now devoted to artificial intelligence.Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the US military.A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans.And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the US away from a democracy into a dictatorship led by tech bros.Where do the four circles intersect?At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.In JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a “palantír” is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantír falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive.Palantir Technologies bears a striking similarity. It sells an AI-based platform that allows its users – among them, military and law enforcement agencies – to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals.In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies.Palantir is now poised to combine data gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Meanwhile, the administration wants access to citizens’ and others’ bank account numbers and medical claims.Will the Trump regime use an emerging super-database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it easier for Trump to spy on and target his ever-growing list of enemies and other Americans? We’ll soon find out.Thirteen former Palantir employees signed a letter this month urging the corporation to stop its work with Trump.Linda Xia, who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse,” she told the New York Times.Even some Republicans are concerned. Representative Warren Davidson, a Republican of Ohio, told Semafor such work could be “dangerous”: “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”Last week, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir, asking for answers about huge government contracts the company got. The lawmakers are worried that Palantir is helping make a super-database of Americans’ private information.Behind their worry lie several people who are behind Palantir’s selection for the project, starting with Elon Musk.Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) was behind Palantir’s selection. At least three Doge members had worked at Palantir, the Times reported, while others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake in it.Thiel has worked closely with Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump re-elected and then, as head of Doge, helped eviscerate swaths of the government without congressional authority.Thiel also mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel subsequently bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later helped Vance become his vice-presidential pick.Thiel also mentored the billionaire David Sacks, who also worked with Thiel at PayPal. As a student at Stanford University, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Review, the rightwing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate there in 1987. Sacks is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar”.The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPalantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8bn in “compensation actually paid” in 2024 (you read that right) – making him the highest-paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the United States.A former generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.But this group – Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp and Vance, among others – doesn’t seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including social security, civil rights and even women’s right to vote.As Thiel has written:
      The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.
      Hello?If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the US had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If the US learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power – as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp and other oligarchs have put on full display – which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.The danger inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super-database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions.Had you walked to the end of Trump’s military-birthday parade and gazed above the president’s reviewing stand, you’d have seen on a giant video board an advertisement for Palantir – one of the chief sponsors of the event.Tolkien’s palantír fell under the control of Sauron. Thiel’s Palantir is falling under the control of Trump. How this story ends is up to all of us.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More