Other people could tally the dead. Steve Schwarzman was too busy counting the money.
“Blackstone was a huge winner coming out of the global financial crisis,” Schwarzman boasted during a virtual gathering in December 2020, as the pandemic’s worldwide death toll neared 2 million. “I think something similar is going to happen now.”
Schwarzman’s own winnings were already in hand. He took home more than $610 million in compensation over the course of the year—a 20 percent increase from 2019—in a testament to the enriching powers of a public health catastrophe.
Blackstone was deriving half of its earnings from real estate. At a time when ordinary people were struggling to make their housing payments, and as businesses fell behind on commercial leases, Schwarzman was crowing about the riches that flowed from jacking up rents in a pandemic.
“We pick the good neighborhoods, if you will,”1 Schwarzman said, singling out his major purchases of warehouses. “We’re the largest owner of real estate in the private world, and that asset class has boomed, with huge increases in rents.”
Even the bad news had a way of yielding fresh riches. As Biden pressed to increase capital gains taxes—no doubt, a bummer—many business leaders were eager to sell their assets to get out ahead of higher payments to the government. That meant that Blackstone was presiding over a buyer’s market.
“It’s really like an avalanche2 now of opportunities,” Schwarzman said at another virtual gathering. “People want to sell things before their taxes are much higher.”
Benioff capped off 2020 with the $28 billion takeover of Slack, a messaging platform for businesses. It was all about laying down the infrastructure that allowed employees to work from anywhere—a status enhanced by the pandemic.
“Wow, what a quarter3,” he declared as he returned to Jim Cramer’s TV show in December 2020. “I feel very excited and motivated on everything that we need to do to double the company once again.”
Thanks to taxpayer-financed rescues that were initially designed to bolster financial assets, Jamie Dimon was again positioned to emerge from a disaster in a stronger position. His bank’s revenues from trading were on track to reach nearly $6 billion over the last three months of the year—a record pace—supplying him cash to take over other companies.
“It might be software,”4 he said. “It might be something overseas. We’re open-minded.”
He was in the process of opening a new headquarters in Paris stocked with bankers moved from post-Brexit Britain. This movement of high-finance refugees amounted to a victory for Macron.
Dimon’s board soon gave him approval to resume buying back stock, approving some $30 billion for that purpose.
“Our cup runneth over,”5 he told stock analysts in April 2021. “We’re earning a tremendous sum of money.”
What was striking about the exultations of Davos Man was how they came uncut by acknowledgments of the contrast between his overflowing coffers and the surrounding calamity. The billionaires appeared to have internalized their own propaganda—the story of trickle-down and stakeholder capitalism, and their dedication to Improving the State of the World.
A year into the pandemic, the coronavirus had killed6 more than half a million Americans, while more than 78 million people had lost jobs. Over the same period, American billionaires—a group numbering fewer than seven hundred people—had gained a collective $1.3 trillion7 in wealth. This was in large part because stock markets had ended 2020 at record highs.
“I think we’re going to8 continue to see the market be strong in 2021,” Larry Fink declared, as BlackRock revealed that managed assets had ballooned past $8.6 trillion.
In Britain, George Osborne, the Davos Man collaborator who imposed austerity, quit his consulting gig at BlackRock to take a position at a London investment bank. The firm had tallied profits of £17.9 million in 2020, while paying zero in taxes. “I’m proud to be joining9 this first-rate team,” Osborne said.
Celebrations of robust earnings had failed to translate into the selfless giving for which the billionaire class so enthusiastically congratulated itself. Over the course of 2020, philanthropic contributions had totaled about $2.6 billion10, the smallest figure since 2011.
Jeff Bezos stood alone. He had earned enough money to transcend the ordinary constraints of living on planet Earth.
On a Tuesday morning in July 2021, only a few weeks removed from handing over day-to-day control of Amazon to his successor, Bezos climbed aboard a rocket ship in a tiny town in West Texas and blasted into space.
He was not the first billionaire to reach the heavens. Richard Branson, the famously adventurous overseer of the Virgin airline and entertainment empire, had beaten him there by nine days. Even so, Bezos’s eleven-minute inaugural journey represented both the realization of his boyhood fantasy and the culmination of his obsession to construct a private space company.
He was savoring the milestone. After returning to Earth, still sporting his blue space suit, Bezos donned an absurdly oversize cowboy hat as he addressed the media.
He thanked the two thousand inhabitants of Van Horn, Texas, for hosting the proceedings, and then he expressed his gratitude to a much larger group of human beings.
“I also want to thank11 every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this,” Bezos said. “So, seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
This exultation captured international attention as a marker of the degree to which billionaires like Bezos had become unmoored from the rest of the human experience. The company he had built stood accused of mass labor exploitation and ruthless market predation. He had personally become a symbol of grand-scale, if legal, tax evasion. Yet the monumental winnings he had extracted from Amazon—from modern life—had allowed him to catch a glimpse of the Earth from more than sixty miles above the ground, which he was celebrating not just as a personal triumph but as an advance for all of humanity.
Three years earlier, Bezos had described his quest to reach space as part of a grand aspiration for his species in the face of declining resources on its home planet.
“I’m thinking of a time frame of a couple of hundred years,”12 Bezos had said. “Take the scenario where you move out in the solar system. The solar system can easily support a trillion humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power.”
Bezos was rightfully admired as a visionary, his thinking unbounded by conventional limitations. That he was contemplating human progress long after he would be around to enjoy it was in some ways inspiring. Yet there was no end of human problems demanding solutions in the here and now, problems for which Bezos was personally implicated. His company had exposed workers to extraordinary pressures and perils, helping him amass an unrivaled fortune, and now he was thanking those same employees for advancing a mission whose hypothetical rewards would be accrued long after they were all dead.
Bezos had reportedly poured13 $5.5 billion into his space company. That was enough to save14 38 million people from starvation, according to World Food Program estimates—not two centuries forward, but right now. It was twice as much money as Covax was seeking in its bid to vaccinate 2 billion people against COVID-19, in a pandemic that was by no means over. It was money that could have funded paid sick leave for Amazon’s employees.
Down on the ground, people were mired in their terrestrial concerns: bills to pay, children to raise, traffic to navigate on their way to stultifying jobs. Bezos preferred to contemplate the Earth from high above.
“It felt so serene and peaceful,” he said. “And the floating, it’s actually much nicer than being in full-on gravity.”
Over the course of my journalism career, I’ve frequently been struck by how people tend to view economics in fatalistic terms, accepting the notion that unfathomable wealth alongside mass scarcity is essentially inevitable, and beyond the power of democracy to alter. To pass as a sophisticated person in the twenty-first century often seems to require being resigned to the futility of controlling the forces operating across borders—the capital flows, the technology, the multinational corporations. It means accepting the triumph of Davos Man over the public interest.
But that is not really sophistication; it is cynicism. Deference to the inevitable supremacy of the billionaire class amounts to a renunciation of our historical legacy, a failure to realize that humanity has been here before.
Americans stared down the Robber Barons, using democracy to fashion an effective response to the injustice of one select group monopolizing the gains of capitalism. Britain reacted to the trauma of the Depression by constructing a social welfare model that shared the gains of its industrial might. Even as France and Sweden have seen their social democratic values diluted, they retain status as exemplars of societies that have figured out how to harness the merits of the market system while still attending to collective interests. For all of its problems—and they are many—Italy is a showcase of human potential, from the arts to engineering to modern medicine.
The challenges of the current crisis of inequality may be greater this time, because Davos Man possesses especially advanced tools to preserve the status quo by undermining collective action. Social media distorts the information stream, while companies wield surveillance technology and data collection in the service of political aims. Amazon’s fake television spots attest to its refined tactics in preventing worker solidarity. Benioff, Fink, and Dimon have excelled at drawing accolades for turning business into a vehicle for progressive change while profiting mightily off the status quo. Around the globe, extremist political parties that provoke tribal hatred divert the electorate from accountability for Davos Man’s plunder.
The point is not that the billionaires are puppeteers in a master conspiracy; it is that Davos Man thrives amid confusion, conflict, and suspicion. The billionaires exploit governance that is compromised by discord and dysfunction as an opportunity to profiteer absent the usual checks and balances.
But democracy is itself a powerful tool—a system of governance that guarantees nothing and is forever vulnerable to being hijacked by organized interests, yet contains within it the mechanism by which the public can realize its own interests.
Many of the world’s most meaningful problems are, at root, issues of unfair economic distribution. Human beings have developed extraordinary capacities in our brief time on earth. We have harnessed science to coax unprecedented volumes of food from the soil, applied medical know-how to tame disease, pioneered inventive forms of housing and transportation, while conjuring novel means of keeping boredom at bay.
In ways both profound and prosaic, this is surely the greatest time to be alive in the history of civilization, an era of multiplying solutions to problems once considered unsolvable, ubiquitous, tedious, and fatal.
Davos Man would have us believe in the false binary choice at the heart of his grift—that we either accept globalization as we have known it for decades, or we throw in our lot with Luddites operating in the thrall of backward ideas. This frame is not only false but dangerous. It invites those who have not shared in the benefits of globalization to demand its opposite—nationalism, nativism, parochialism, and ignorance. If globalization run by Davos Man for the betterment of Davos Man gives way to the destruction of globalization and the pursuit of tribal interests, the world will be poorer, more violent, and less able to summon the cooperation needed to solve the most complex problems, from pandemics to climate change.
The lethal spread of COVID-19 and the appalling lack of preparedness were clearly symptomatic of how globalization has been run without required supervision, enabling unchecked shareholder demands to make the world susceptible to dangers.
But we need not choose between allowing Steve Schwarzman to exploit the American health care system or having no health care at all. We can purchase the wares that Amazon delivers to our doors while still demanding that its workers receive sick pay. We can use the software that entrepreneurs like Marc Benioff provide, and at the same time tax them to finance the schools that train their engineers.
We can tap the genius of our brightest research minds, who have cracked the code on a vaccine for COVID-19, and also demand value for taxpayers who financed the research, ensuring the availability of these lifesaving inventions for all.
We can run global capitalism in a way that preserves its capacity for innovation and prosperity without handing all the rewards to Davos Man.
Fukuyama was wrong, arrogant, and even colonialist when he declared the end of history, as if American primacy and its version of capitalism represented the highest order of human development. But he was not crazy in his reverence for the market system. Global capitalism is indeed the most advanced form of economic organization. It promotes the inspiration and exchange of groundbreaking ideas that have extended and improved life. It produces more wealth, which is a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
What capitalism lacks is an inherent mechanism that justly distributes the gains. That is the responsibility of government, operating under a democratic mandate. That Davos Man has convinced us to believe otherwise, accepting horrific levels of inequality as part and parcel of modern times, has imperiled faith in the legitimacy of democracy itself. The resulting anger has tapped into the worst aspects of human nature, supplying oxygen to hate-inspired movements, while giving rise to fantastical conspiracy theories. Facts and science have been devalued.
Society has been so poisoned by bitterness and grievance that governance sometimes seems impossible.
The idea that the defining characteristics of human experience—where we live, how much health care we receive, the quality of our schools, and the abundance of food on our tables—should be entrusted solely to the unsentimental workings of the market will, with any luck, one day look as insane as burning witches at the stake or applying leeches to attack disease. That this idea achieved the status of truth among broad slices of the populace amounts to a form of collective madness. But it did not gain command of the policymaking levers by accident. This thinking was promoted by people in charge of money, spread by academics compensated by finance companies, and disseminated by a public relations machine working for multinational corporations. It is an idea that has enabled Davos Man to add to his wealth, while justifying his station as the fruits of a system that rewards virtue. In truth, even as he is prone to wax poetically about the magic of free markets, Davos Man is not really interested in that concept, or any ideological position. He propagates market fundamentalism when that serves as justification for things he craves—weakened regulations, diminished taxes, and license for monopoly power. We have not had free markets. We have had markets manipulated by the most powerful interests for their profit at society’s expense. We have had welfare for billionaires and rugged individualism for everyone else.
Davos Man’s greatest triumph has been insinuating into public discourse the notion that anyone who opposes his monopolization of wealth is antibusiness, as if forcing Schwarzman and Bezos to pay higher tax rates than their secretaries would be akin to turning suburban subdivisions into people’s communes. That idea must be revealed for what it is—not merely a lie, but the foundational lie for the pillaging of capitalism itself.
History never ended, but history needs to be reset. Capitalism must be reshaped to extend the bounty to far more people.
In the popular narrative, the billionaires were—by the middle of 2021—under attack. They faced antitrust probes in multiple nations, a new American president empowered to revive fairness, and an international push to eradicate tax havens. But Davos Man was expert at weathering outrage, projecting his rhetorical admission of injustice as evidence of change, which meant that those on the other side of the divide—the 7.7 billion people around the globe who fell short of being billionaires—were going to have to fashion a meaningful strategy to right the balance.
To survey the last few decades of the global economy is to understand that the lopsided distribution of gains will not be rectified through voluntary acts of benevolence from the handful of people who control most of the wealth. It will not unfold through stakeholder capitalism, or whatever formulations emerge from the idea labs of communications consultants.
It can happen only through the exercise of democracy—by unleashing strategies centered on boosting wages and working opportunities, by erecting new forms of social insurance, by reviving and enforcing antitrust law, by modernizing the tax code to focus on wealth.
None of this will be easy. But absent substantial economic redistribution, the very concept of democracy is endangered. This is the inescapable truth of recent times, from the Trump era, to Brexit, to the wave of illiberalism sweeping the globe.
It is a story that is in no way over, a force still gathering strength. When people are deprived of the material for stable lives, they take refuge in traditional privileges—tribal identities, and fantasies of glorious futures enabled by reclaiming what they view as theirs. They become susceptible to simplistic explanations peddled by demagogues who weaponize democracy itself. The result is chaos, anger, and instability. No one wins except the people who have already won.
Launching an era in which Davos Man no longer writes the rules is not a radical step. It is the restoration of what advanced economies knew in the first decades after World War II—a far-from-perfect time, yet a period of collective progress.
Democracy has been warped by the billionaire class, its workings tilted toward private islands, offshore bank accounts, and secret meetings in Davos convened to plot the next insider deal.
Reclaiming power from Davos Man requires no insurrection or revolution of ideas. It demands the thoughtful use of a tool that has been there all along: democracy.