Apparently, American innovation and capitalism is destroying us. On Tuesday morning’s episode of CBS Mornings Plus, hosts Tony Dokoupil and Adriana Diaz had a painfully out of touch conversation with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker– a magazine known for their in-depth commentary on real, pressing issues, like the lack of gay children's books in American preschools– about his latest book, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches On The Ultrarich.
Osnos detailed how America was wealthier than ever before, but only a small percentage of Americans actually held this wealth, which was somehow a problem that should be causing uproar everywhere. According to him, today’s America was somehow worse than the Gilded Age (Click “expand”):
TONY DOKOUPIL: We are back. Super yachts, survivalist compounds. If you're a rich person, you love being a rich person and you love spending that money. The number of American billionaires has skyrocketed. A lot more rich people out there from just 66 back in 1990 to more than 800 today. (...) Billionaires. They are multiplying. I guess the market's doing that. Is that what happened here, and why is it a problem?
EVAN OSNOS: You know, the good news, in some level, is that this country has never been wealthier by many metrics. The bad news, of course, is that half of American adults will tell you that they couldn't absorb a $1,000 emergency expense. So, what's going wrong? Part of the problem is that so much of the money today has gotten concentrated into the hands of so few. It's actually even more than it was in the Gilded Age. I mean, the – America's richest people today have a larger share of our nation's overall wealth than the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Rockefellers did.
Dokoupil asked the question we’re all wondering: why is that a bad thing? Won’t more wealth in the economy generate more companies, more investments, more jobs? Won’t it bolster the markets?
What Osnos didn’t understand was that the American economy had obviously grown exponentially since a hundred years ago, and was currently sitting at about $28 trillion GDP, about 825 times more than the GDP in the Gilded Age.
Those facts, coupled with the fact that the number of American billionaires has blossomed from around 60 to over 800 in the past 35 years alone, should be a good thing. It’s good that the billionaire club has expanded, and that they are making more money than ever before. The American economy was also flying past its rivals at a never before seen rate, that’s not to mention that technological advancements meant that modern average Americans had wonders the wealthy of the Gilded Age didn’t.
According to Osnos, the fatal flaw of our modern billionaires was supposedly that they weren’t giving back to society like they used to. He cited Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt as billionaires who contributed something to society instead of just buying things with their wealth.
He pointed to the libraries, universities, and other foundations they founded with their wealth, and implied that today’s billionaires don’t contribute the same way, if at all, but rather spend their time on doomsday survivor forums on the internet and spend millions to prepare for the end of the world, and should instead should pay for people's mortgages (Click “expand”):
DIAZ: You talk about visiting survivalist compounds and how the ultrarich, some of them, are basically not necessarily doing what you're what you've just described, but using their money to withdraw from society to prepare for the worst. What – what did you experience?
OSNOS: Yeah, I remember a Silicon Valley CEO said to me, I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have a bunker in my house with an air filtration system.
I went to New Zealand to visit some of these places for this book. I think what happens is when you get so high in the social and the income scale, it's like a kind of vertigo. You begin to feel vulnerable. You're sort of exposed and also, curiously enough, you're using the very platforms that you've built, things like Reddit, things like other social media platforms, are giving you a sense of the social distress. You hearing people complain that they can't get a mortgage to get that starter home, and so you come away with a very pronounced sense of social fragility.
What I heard from some other CEOs in Silicon Valley was, I hope that my peers begin to say, let's spend less money on our own bunkers and more money on protecting the most vulnerable, because that might diffuse the tension.
He was, by virtue, implying that people like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk were selfish billionaires, who just sit on their pots of gold and don’t contribute anything to society, and that’s clearly why America was doomed.
Let’s do a reality check.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, which revolutionized not only the internet but modern communication, and opened up avenues for information to be shared in a never before done way. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, created his business as a way to sell college textbooks. Elon Musk founded Tesla, the first mass producer of electric vehicles, and has entirely changed the space exploration industry by privately funding and creating the first privately owned space technology company to launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft.
Not to mention how many jobs these companies alone create, which in turn grows the economy.
The entire interview felt incredibly out of touch, trying to form a narrative to make an abstract point on how capitalism was selfish, and there needs to be some type of equal distribution of wealth– which sounds an awful lot like another book (enter Karl Marx).
The entire transcript is below. Click "expand" to read.
CBS Mornings Plus
June 3, 2025
9:44:30 PMTONY DOKOUPIL: We are back. Super yachts, survivalist compounds. If you're a rich person, you love being a rich person and you love spending that money. The number of American billionaires has skyrocketed. A lot more rich people out there from just 66 back in 1990 to more than 800 today. Where are they partying together? There was a row of them, tech billionaires mostly, at President Trump's inauguration, proof of their growing influence in and on government. The New Yorker writer Evan Osnos has explored the lives of the wealthy and the role they play in our society. He does it in a new book, a collection of essays. It's called The Haves and The Have-Yachts: Dispatches On The Ultrarich. Evan, Good morning.
EVAN OSNOS: Thanks, Tony.
DOKOUPIL: Billionaires. They are multiplying. I guess the market's doing that. Is that what happened here, and why is it a problem?
OSNOS: You know, the good news, in some level, is that this country has never been wealthier by many metrics. The bad news, of course, is that half of American adults will tell you that they couldn't absorb a $1,000 emergency expense. So, what's going wrong? Part of the problem is that so much of the money today has gotten concentrated into the hands of so few. It's actually even more than it was in the Gilded Age. I mean, the – America's richest people today have a larger share of our nation's overall wealth than the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Rockefellers did. So the question is, what do we do now, right? We're at this kind of fork in the road. Part of the reason to write a book like this is to say, let's take something abstract that we kind of feel around us, a little bit like climate change, and actually, let's put some numbers on it so that people can make choices before it's too late.
ADRIANA DIAZ: So how limited is the money that circulates in the economy? Money can always be printed, but as the wealthy are getting wealthier, does that mean other people are getting poorer?
OSNOS: Well, I mean, in an ideal scenario, it lifts all boats, right? And we've had moments in our history in the 20th century, particularly after World War II, when you had this surge of innovation, and you had factories being built, and it was, in fact, what they call The Great Compression. That's when inequality actually declined. That period ended in the late 70s, early 80s, and we are now at some of the highest levels of inequality that have ever been recorded. And, guys, it's not just in the United States. I talked to archeologists for this book to say, put this in context for me. And they said, well, the people who built the pyramids were living in a less unequal society.
DIAZ: Wow.
DOKOUPIL: Okay, but so – are rich people – the ultrarich a problem if they are using their money to invest, and those investments become businesses, and those – those businesses employ people and juice the economy? In other words, a defense of rich people would include they are lifting through their largesse, so many other people. And, this being America, we all have a chance to be that guy.
OSNOS: Absolutely. Look, that's an essential piece of the American story. And I think if you actually look at American attitudes, we're pretty ambivalent about big money. 59% of Americans last year in a poll said they want to become a billionaire. And, the – almost identical share of Americans– 60% said billionaires are making the country less fair. We're both cynical and aspirational at the same time. Those numbers are getting a little more concerning over time because the fact is, we do need people who prosper, who innovate, who take big risks – this is essential to making America a stronger economy – but as we've seen in our own history, we also need people like the John D. Rockefellers of the world who said, you know, I'm going to use some of my winnings to start the University of Chicago. Andrew Carnegie said, I'm going to take my fortune and I'm going to start putting libraries in every small town in this country, and people are still going to libraries today with the Carnegie name on it. So part of this is about saying to people, there are a lot of different ways to be ultrarich, and there are some great lessons and some not great lessons.
DIAZ: You talk about visiting survivalist compounds and how the ultrarich, some of them, are basically not necessarily doing what you're what you've just described, but using their money to withdraw from society to prepare for the worst. What – what did you experience?
OSNOS: Yeah, I remember a Silicon Valley CEO said to me, I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have a bunker in my house with an air filtration system. I went to New Zealand to visit some of these places for this book. I think what happens is when you get so high in the social and the income scale, it's like a kind of vertigo. You begin to feel vulnerable. You're sort of exposed and also, curiously enough, you're using the very platforms that you've built, things like Reddit, things like other social media platforms, are giving you a sense of the social distress. You hearing people complain that they can't get a mortgage to get that starter home, and so you come away with a very pronounced sense of social fragility. What I heard from some other CEOs in Silicon Valley was, I hope that my peers begin to say, let's spend less money on our own bunkers and more money on protecting the most vulnerable, because that might diffuse the tension.
DIAZ: The inequality is wild. Just one statistic before we go, 25 hedge fund managers. This is from your book, make more money than all kindergarten teachers in America combined. Just shocking.
