A CBS News documentary blasted America’s supposed transition to a so-called “Gilded Age” of oligarchs to attack President Trump and the tech leaders who stood with him at his inauguration. As if CBS stood for Channeling Bernie Sanders. The problem: The documentary conveniently excluded any mention about the most notorious left-wing billionaires in U.S. politics that have used their cash to either try to buy elections or drastically overhaul U.S. policy over the years.
Coincidence? We think not.
The CBS documentary released June 28, “Is America in a New Gilded Age? Wealth, Power and Democracy,” relied mostly on whiny anti-capitalist commentary from radical talking heads like millionaires Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Clinton stooge Robert Reich to slam American capitalism as the culprit for Trump’s return to the White House, and by extension X owner Elon Musk’s tenure as the overseer of DOGE.
“[A]fter the last presidential election, tensions over wealth, power and democracy have only heightened,” sensationalized CBS senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent. She admitted during a CBS Mornings appearance the day prior to her documentary’s release that her work was inspired by millionaire President Joe Biden’s farewell address warning about a rising “oligarchy.” See where this is going?
Kent propped up Sanders and like-minded leftist legislators like fellow socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who “began the Fighting Oligarchy tour, holding rallies around the country to push back against what he argues is a corrupting influence of billionaires on U.S. politics.” But for all Kent and others’ grumbling over figures like Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Kent completely bypassed the ungodly political influence of other lefty billionaire titans who have built empires on the amount of political power they’ve gained during their lengthy careers.
WATCH: CBS News Reporter Jo Ling Kent Hawks Her Anti-Billionaire Documentary on CBS Mornings (June 27, 2025).
These include George Soros (and now his son Alex by extension) who has spewed $32 billion into his Open Society Foundations to foment racial strife, buoy climate change fanaticism, stoke LGBTQ political furor, push for open borders and undercut American sovereignty on the world stage. In addition, Soros spent hundreds of millions collectively on electing extremist political candidates and soft-on-crime prosecutors in order to shape politics to be the mirror reflection of his unhinged, anti-American worldview. His son Alex, who now controls his father's empire, openly promotes his enormous political pull with America's and the world's most powerful leaders on social media, including Biden.
(Left to right: Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Reid Hoffman)
Other high-profile billionaires missing from the documentary included Michael Bloomberg, who spent over $1 billion trying to buy the 2020 election, pledged another $1 billion at least to wipe out the U.S. coal industry, and spent $47 million during the 2024 election alone to elect Vice President Kamala Harris and help Democrats maintain control over the House; and deranged LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman who spent millions to elect Harris in 2024 and who personally bankrolled the highly politicized sexual abuse lawsuit against Trump brought by leftist E. Jean Carroll.
Reid Hoffman was specifically part of a cohort of left-wing billionaires like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, philanthropist Laurene Powell-Jobs and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz who spent fortunes on secretive political machines to help Biden get elected in 2020. These weren’t mentioned by Kent either, which is even more telling given she also cited leftist anti-Trump author Andrea Bernstein who chirped, “What are you going to do if you’re wealthy and you have a lot of money? You’re going to put some of that into the political system to try to influence outcomes so that you can hang on to even more money. That’s the way the system works.” Ironic.
To Kent’s credit, she did interview four guests who rebuffed the idea that America was reentering a Gilded Age (including Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley and Competitive Enterprise Institute President Kent Lassman), but these were largely dwarfed by another eight commentators who were just attacking and smearing the billionaires who have coalesced around Trump. For example, Kent tee’d up Dartmouth Sociology Professor Brooke Harrington, whose antagonistic term “broligarchs” she defined as rich people who “decide that they get to keep all the money and that they’re not going to pay any of their fair share of the costs of the society that made them prosperous.” Harrington then used this term to go after Musk and his businesses, but not other powerful billionaires who share her anti-capitalist views, such as Soros.
Hypocritically, Kent didn’t bother to mention the enormous ESG asset manager giants that represent three of the top four institutional shareholders of her parent company Paramount Global and her liberal competitor networks at NBC, ABC, and CNN: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which manage over $26 trillion in assets. Sounds pretty oligarchy-adjacent, but apparently not for Kent.
She had the audacity to cherry-pick Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post and Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of social media giant Twitter as examples of the inherent problems in business tycoons owning media. “One of the real dangers of great concentrated wealth is that not only does it exert influence politically, but it also exerts influence through its ownership of the media,” Reich complained to Kent. The CBS journalist followed up by referring back to how “in the Gilded Age, the ultra-wealthy could buy almost anything. And one prize for many was the means to influence public opinion.” Pretty sure the C-suites at BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street were just tickled pink over that, eh Jo?
“Owning a media company has always been viewed as an accessory for the very powerful,” pontificated Bloomberg Businessweek editor Brad Stone, who along with Kent apparently forgot that eco-activist Michael Bloomberg, worth $104 billion, owns his magazine. But Kent sure let him get in some digs at Bezos for daring to exercise his authority as The Post owner to shift the Opinion Page to a more free market position and ban the editorial board’s objectivity-wrecking tradition of endorsing political candidates.
Riley, in one of his brief appearances in the documentary, slammed the hypocrisy of the left in fixating on billionaires when they seem to be oblivious to the special interests financing their own side. “Are people on the left complaining that other wealthy individuals decide to spend their money on electing people who want to go soft on criminals that are raising hell in low income communities?” He continued: “If you’re spending your money a certain way, you’re okay. If you’re spending it on free market ideas and principles — if you want lower taxes, if you want smaller government and so forth — somehow you are villainous.”
Kent conceded that 80 billionaires donated to Harris’s campaign in 2024, while just over 50 billionaires did the same for Trump. But her documentary was clear in its implication that the only titans that matter to her and the CBS media giant are the ones that curry favor with Trump, while ignoring other, more dangerous political players on the left, including her own shareholder bosses.
Watch the entire CBS documentary slamming billionaires by clicking on this link.
