How Many Can Fit on the Rocketship?

“You can’t do anything with five [million dollars], Greg. Five’s a nightmare.” 

Wow, two Succession quotes in one month? Someone cancel her Max subscription!

Look, one day you’re waltzing through life downplaying Kim Kardashian’s private jet purchase (it’s a write-off!); the next you’re asking 180,000 people where we should draw the line on wealth accumulation. Hashtag class consciousness. I wanted to write a follow-up from last week’s “ethical billionaire” riddle and include some of your thoughtful replies. 

My original plan was to tally the numbers and build some glorious data distribution that showed the range of limits, but only one reply quantified an actual limit:

“I vote that $100 million is WTactualF territory. I would definitely be on a plan to give 90% of my net worth away. $10 million is a sanely excessive amount for anyone who still needs to feel set apart from the masses.” 

I extend an honorable mention to the reader who wrote that she and her husband are implementing a “7x” limit within their own business, where the highest paid person can make no more than 7x the lowest paid employee.

What jumped out most when reading your replies, though, was the emphasis on philanthropy; donating our way out of extreme inequality. (One gal wrote in that after a certain limit, we could require people to give a certain percentage to big, society-wide projects, which immediately made me picture a Silicon Valley-adjacent scene in which someone suggests disrupting “government.”)

Someone who works in what I’ll call capital-B, capital-P Big Philanthropy noted that “the next generation inheriting their parents’ wealth is starting to look different. The millennial and Gen Z kids of billionaires are bringing different values to the table. Is philanthropy making a difference at all? Hard to say.”

What an interesting question. *laughs maniacally* 

“I’ve worked for a private family foundation for the last seven years, and boy, do you see a lot of hand wringing and mental gymnastics playing out constantly. One key tension I think about often is between the movement by some billionaires to spend down their wealth to address immediate problems and make big transfers to nonprofits so they can more boldly and securely scale solutions and drive impact (like MacKenzie Scott). On the other side, you have the Rockefellers of the world: Folks who believe they need to keep making more and more to keep their philanthropy going in perpetuity; to endow their efforts and intentions to make the world a better place long into the future.”

Another reader, who’s 70 years old, noted that he and his wife “live frugally, solely on our Social Security and pensions.” They want to “leave money for our children (not too much, as we want them to continue working, although we don’t want them to worry about sending their own children to better schools) and to fund a charitable foundation.”

The timing of these responses—all this talk of philanthropy and charitable foundations—couldn’t be more serendipitous given my most recent read, Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas. Giridharadas said, Oh, y’all want a thought experiment? Buckle up! and proceeded to, in chapter 6, systematically deconstruct our modern view of philanthropy by throwing it all the way back to the robber barons (listen, you’re the ones who brought up Rockefeller…). 

Before reading it, I hadn’t realized how influential people like Andrew Carnegie were in our modern conception of wealth accumulation and charity. In Carnegie’s view, shrewd businessmen (yes, just men, because it was the 19th century) had an obligation to be as ravenously profit-seeking as possible…and a subsequent responsibility to redistribute that wealth in a way that benefited society. Carnegie, if you’ll recall, financed things like libraries and museums for the very people he was (probably) underpaying.

In 1889, he pulled out his glitter gel pen and wrote the following: “The laws of accumulation will be left free, the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor, entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself.” (Emphasis mine, because I think it illustrates that point of view so well: Let us make a ton of money and we’ll do good with it, we promise.)

Rob Reich, a political scientist who writes about the phenomenon of the private foundation, says that we were more skeptical in the early twentieth century of the desire to accumulate massive wealth in order to “administer it for the community far better than it could for itself”: “Big philanthropy is often an exercise of power, the conversion of private assets into public influence. And it is a form of power that is largely unaccountable, often perpetual, and lavishly tax-advantaged,” he writes.

Because democracy is supposed to be a one person = one vote affair, Giridharadas and Reich argue, individuals amassing a ton of wealth usually means gaining a commensurate amount of influence over what problems get prioritized and, more importantly, how they get solved. (Read: often in a way that does not meaningfully diminish the ability to keep the profit party rolling.)

Other readers pointed out that the entire thought exercise is premised on the idea that if some have more, others will have less, and critiqued that as untrue: “It operates from an incorrect zero-sum standpoint. It assumes that every dollar one person has is a dollar someone else doesn’t have. Money is not finite. We rarely make our money at the ‘expense’ of someone else not making money. Billionaires’ money is constantly being used to finance growth, credit, loans, etc.”

All of this generally amounts to the idea I alluded to last week: the argument that there’s an indirect societal benefit to allowing individuals to accumulate endless wealth, or at the very least, no direct harm done.

One of these respondents argued our government is incapable of effectively helping the poor, that this is better left to private donors. Another pointed out that the estate tax (which limits intergenerational wealth to a measly $27 million tax-free per couple and will cut the rest by ~40%) is, in some ways, a limit on wealth accumulation. 

Still, I can’t help but think about Desmond Tutu’s sentiments on the subject: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

Philanthropy is great for relieving the pain that poverty creates, sure, but at some point, it’s worth asking why there’s still so much poverty in the first place. 

As one reader wrote, “I’m currently working on my graduate studies soon to be equipped with a Masters of Environment and Business, and we talk a lot about the external costs of business on society and environment. My theory is that the only way a company gets this rich is through externalizing the costs. If they were to run a business that truly took care of people and the planet, you wouldn’t accumulate that kind of excess.” 

If Carnegie were here, he’d probably say that by paying workers as little (and working them as hard) as possible, he was able to multiply wealth and make it a more “potent” force than if he had just “distributed [the money via wages] in small sums to the people themselves.” 

There’s a sense of the “we”—however strained—in Carnegie’s conception of his responsibility to humanity as one of the wealthiest men on Earth. He clearly views himself as superior in his abilities to “multiply wealth,” but you don’t get the sense that he lives on an entirely different planet from the people for whom he’s funding libraries.

The human (and optimist!) in me wants to believe that there’s something to this claim of #synergy, but my friend, writer Caroline Burke, pointed out how fundamentally strange it is that we, the masses, aren’t more alarmed watching the billionaires of today plainly preparing for earth to be imminently uninhabitable, either by building rocket ships or spending $270 million on off-the-grid bunkers (“I mean, it’s not like they’re taking us with them…?” she asked, though it wasn’t a question).

It’s also worth remembering that while the richest .1% of Americans collectively control around 20% of the country’s wealth (those with average net worths between $100 million and $500 million), the top 10%-minus-the-richest-.1% (those with an average wealth of between $2 million and $10 million) collectively control around 51% of the country’s wealth. That is to say: If a large enough coalition of moderately rich people decided to band together, it would amount to an even bigger (and, on that note, more democratized) impact.

Still, the chill that ran down my spine when I realized the people with the most access, money, and information in the world are currently spending nine or 10 figures apiece on elaborate planetary exit strategies is…well, it’s certainly something.

(In talking this through with a few others in the next few days, we decided it’s likely that today’s billionaires would probably say that their rockets and the like are their version of libraries and museums.)

Carnegie’s notion that the richest among us are mere vessels for shepherding society’s wealth wisely (and that inequality is the brief transitional period between accumulation and sharing) functions only if the richest among us still see themselves as one of us. 

Sometimes I wonder if achieving even moderate wealth (call it seven figures) can function in a similar way, creating an illusion of insulation. We get a little nest egg, move to a nice spot in the suburbs, and feel removed enough from economic precarity that it’s easy to forget we don’t have bunker money to save us from the consequences that we’ve so far managed to evade.

But when you’re bunker rich, you don’t actually have to suffer the consequences of the world your decisions have wrought. You don’t live in that world anymore. You’re already floating away on your rocketship to somewhere else.