Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More

© 2024 Rob Larson

Published in 2024 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 979-8-88890-105-2

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation, Wallace Action Fund, and Marguerite Casey Foundation.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email info@haymarketbooks.org for more information.

Cover design by David Gee.

Illustration of Earth © 2014 Dmitry Rukhlenko.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

To Noam, whose work we carry on

CONTENTS

BOSS FIGHT

— INTRODUCTION —

WHY READ ABOUT

THE RULING CLASS

— CHAPTER 1 —

THE NUMBERS

— CHAPTER 2 —

THE LIFESTYLE

— CHAPTER 3 —

THE CLASSES

— CHAPTER 4 —

THE LIES

— CHAPTER 5 —

THE BURDEN

— CHAPTER 6 —

THE CLANS

— CHAPTER 7 —

THE PLAN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

This is an impressive crowd—the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.

—George W. Bush¹

I saw that mill built stone by sone; I saw the pickers, the carding engines, the spinning mules and looms put into it, one after the other, and I would see every machine and stone crumble to the floor and fall again before I would accede to your wishes.

—Colonel Richard Borden,² cotton baron, on the thirteen-hour day

The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty.

—George Orwell³

BOSS FIGHT

The world’s billionaires now have their own private space programs. The classic public space services like NASA were paid for by aggressive taxes on the rich, but those are gone now so Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson each have their own, where they take their friends to orbit, soak up media coverage, and even pretend to do research. ¹ The wealth gap has reached such towering proportions that the most insanely expensive projects are now within the play budgets of our fun-hoarding ruling class.

Conservative novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term masters of the universe to refer to elite Wall Street financiers, and it became a broader mainstream term for the insanely rich elites of today and their fantasies of power.² But when things actually turn ugly, it’s another story—the Masters had their hands out for bailouts after the 2008 and 2023 financial crises, and when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020 they stampeded out of town to their remote estates and summer homes.

And their decisions matter. A leaked 2005 investment memo from two Citibank economists called the US a plutonomy, meaning economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few. They estimated that the top 1% of households … account for 33% of net worth, compared to the rest, the ‘non-rich,’ the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the economic pie. They concluded that for their business, clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of US households is paramount.³ Many Americans, encouraged to imagine themselves as billionaires-to-be, may hope to enter the 1 percent, but it’s a tough lift at $4.4 million American just to get in, let alone the average of $10.4 million in wealth you’ll need to really fit in.⁴

Meanwhile, incomes have stagnated for most of the US population for decades and debt has risen steeply, while the real fruits of economic growth went to the top households. And in an incredible development, the average life expectancy in the US, the richest country in the world, actually stopped rising in 2015. It fell until 2018, then rose briefly only to drop again with the pandemic, continuing through 2021.⁵ That same year, the billionaires’ hoard went from $3 trillion to $4.5 trillion.⁶

And today’s data shows that every country, no matter how poor or rich, has a hyper-affluent tiny ruling class. As the Financial Times put it, the world is in a new imperial age with a system of indirect rule that has involved the integration of leaders of developing countries into the network of the new ruling class.⁷ That class is more worldwide in its lifestyle than ever, since its members frequently count among their wealth a significant passport collection, purchased from the many countries that offer full or partial citizenship in exchange for making a qualifying real estate purchase or other investment.⁸ Safes stuffed with global residency documents are the family jewels of the world’s ruling class.

As we behold continents on fire, pandemics thrashing public health systems to smithereens, and falling economic prospects and life spans, we must remember one thing: All this, all this is for the benefit of a tiny number of people, a small class that owns the wealth and institutions of the economy, a ruling class for whom we are ruining every part of the natural systems on Earth, and screwing over a gigantic social majority that’s desperate for a fair share of the wealth they produce in the first place.

As billionaire investor Warren Buffett said, There is class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.⁹

The wider world gets peeks at the wealth of the ruling class when parts of it get in trouble, like when Russian oligarchs had their megayachts, private planes, and other assets seized due to Western sanctions during the Russo-Ukrainian War. But there are so many more exploits to explore, and elite-class vulnerabilities to learn. This book is for learning all about our global rogues’ gallery of remote ruling-class bastards.

INTRODUCTION

WHY READ ABOUT

THE RULING CLASS?

If you’re the type that’s out to envy the flashy high-end lifestyle of the rich, there’s no shortage of magazines to read and online videos you can watch. Countries like the US that celebrate wealthy people are happy to produce tons of media around them, from Downton Abbey to Succession . The rich of the real world have their luxurious lives depicted in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and the Wall Street Journal ’s Mansion section.

But this book is not just for ogling the velvet lives of the ruling class, although there’s plenty of room for that. It’s about taking the rich out of the cockpit of society and putting a democratic system in their place. Because beyond their multiple gigantic homes and private jet miles, the control of the ruling class over the rest of us is pretty stunning, not to mention utterly grossly undeserved.

It’s a fact that today eight rich men own as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the world’s population (all four billion plus of them).¹ In 2020, half the names on the Forbes list of the fifty richest families had appeared on the list in 1983.² The richest 1 percent of US households owns 40 percent of the stock market, and the top 10 percent owns 84 percent, meaning that the rich own corporate America and its great productive power.³ These figures are pretty obscene, and a peek behind the high-tech security fences protecting their enclaves reveals a lifestyle even obscener.

The overpowering flow of money to these families has led to some unbelievably dumb and cartoonishly wasteful uses of the wealth of humanity. On Wall Street, it’s now somewhat out of fashion but still common for rich finance employees to literally eat gold, using a topping on their desserts and coffees that could completely change the lives of the less fortunate.⁴ Other members of the ruling class think big, like when billionaire Larry Ellison bought one of the Hawaiian islands in 2013.⁵ Despite Hawaii having the highest rents in the US, Ellison gave makeovers to elite resorts there instead of building affordable housing.

Today’s giant megayachts burn a hundred gallons of diesel an hour standing still, and customizations include Kevlar-lined safe rooms.⁶ The richest tenth of the world is responsible for almost half of all climate emissions, playing a giant, disproportionate role in climate change and destroying the ecosystem, even while portraying themselves as environmental celebrity spokesmen.⁷ As you research the ruling class, you discover that getting rid of them isn’t just something needed for humanity to progress, it’s a matter of life and death.

They have surprising numbers of apartments they’ve never lived in, expensive clothes they do not wear, imported cars they do not drive. And it is all paid for with money the rest of the population is desperate for—there are many thousands of GoFundMe fundraising appeals for groceries and rent for working-class people, enough that the platform created a separate category for monthly expenses and bills.⁸

So this book isn’t just for leering at the gross excesses of the elite lifestyle, or feeling the heat of watching cruelly hoarded money wasted on tacky-ass conspicuous consumption. This book is for fighting back—organizing your coworkers into unions to wrestle the boss for a fair share, building political movements to demand universal health care and good schools anyone’s kid can go to. And it’s for helping to take late action to preserve a version of our natural environment and climate for future generations. To achieve anything, important labor and environmental movements require a good understanding of what’s going on—including the shifting strategies of the owning class and their corporate property.

The point of this book is not just to study the rich, but to learn their vulnerabilities, and to help build the growing movements that could put some limits back on the power of the ruling class that owns our economy and runs the government. In the past the rich have had what they consider punishing tax rates slapped on their giant incomes, the popular voting franchise was established over their objection, and agitation even forced some of their corporate monopolies to be broken up. And even in a country as capitalist as the United States, the rich have experienced one major expropriation, a massive seizure of their productive wealth that was worth the equivalent of billions today.

That time was the emancipation of the American slaves in 1863. And one good emancipation deserves another.

Overview

How can some dumb book help accomplish all that? We’ll start by looking at the money, digging into who has how much, the ruling class’s share of the total economy, and with a special interest in the 1 percent’s ownership of the corporate world of big business. Knowing just how much wealth our rulers are hoarding tells us how much is available to be put to way-better use. Before we get to the lurid lifestyles and ugly class conflict, we need to learn who’s holding the bag, and chapter 1 shows us just that for the US and around the world.

The second chapter turns to the steamy, secretive world of the ruling-class lifestyle. Gigantic homes, private planes, purposeless expensive trinkets, and of course an entourage of groveling ass-kissers are just the beginning. Yachts with Picassos, billion-dollar divorces—it’s all here, and it’s all disgusting.

Next we take a microscope to the class structure of our society, considering what defines different economic and social classes and how they relate to each other. A picture emerges quickly of concentrated wealth forcing the working class to toil for corporate empires. Understanding that today’s global companies enrich themselves by exploiting the labor of the working class also reveals the potential power of the toiling majority: the boss needs us more than we need the boss. The segregated economic lives we lead are also part of the class landscape profiled in chapter 3.

Chapter 4 takes up the tired defenses of the rich rolled out by various bootlicking sycophants. According to supporters of capitalism, the richest families deserve their monumental fortunes for all kinds of dumb meritless reasons: more productive personal characteristics, natural selection among people, alleged technological innovations, and above all philanthropic charitable giving. Every one of these embarrassing fig leaves wilts the minute you look at it critically, and yet few prominent media figures seem to ever criticize their bosses, allowing these bald-faced lies to sink into the popular consciousness. Hastening the decay of these common-sense myths is a direct aid to the growth of social movements to build a better world, since belief in them is often the first thing organizers have to toil against.

Our fifth chapter is a careful consideration of the ecological impact of the 1 percent. Despite often claiming to be Very Concerned About the Environment, wealthy businesspeople, politicians, and celebrities have the most disgracefully wasteful lifestyles in the world, scarfing down resources and farting out wildly disproportionate levels of climate emissions. The public data on this subject is pretty stunning, and ought to serve as a handy road map to preventing our so-called betters from continuing to cook the planet.

Chapter 6 explores the numerous ruling-class subspecies, first reviewing key ruling-class industries like Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and then governing elites around the world. Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires, European corporate families, Arab monarchs—this chapter takes a trip around the world and dissects every specimen of owning-class jerk known to science.

Finally, chapter 7 starts with the resurrection of the labor movement and the stunning upswing in support for socialism in the US. As we’ll see, socialism as a goal goes beyond the highly popular but relatively modest reforms associated with the cause today, like Medicare for All. Real socialism means expropriation of the great wealth of the ruling class, from its vast pools of liquid wealth to its tightly held ownership of corporate America. Not just taxing their giant incomes, but actually confiscating the assets that put them in charge of society would be the break with capitalism that past reform efforts failed to make. Doing so would allow us to operate the economy on a democratic model with gains for all, rather than enriching the wealthy while we toil for a pittance in dead-end jobs. So with the working class rediscovering its strength, this final chapter puts on the brass knuckles and talks about what it’ll really take to pry the invisible hand of the ruling class off the steering wheel of society.

You can’t overthrow a ruling class you know nothing about. Grab a beverage and put up your feet, you’ll soon have the secret access ports of the Death Star of capitalism, and then the clock’s ticking till the big finale.

CHAPTER 1

THE NUMBERS

JUST HOW RICH ARE WE TALKING?

I can’t live on 5 percent or 6 percent return on my investments anymore. It’s not enough. I need more.

—Wealth peer group participant¹

God gave me my money.

—John D. Rockefeller²

Even people who rarely think about the economy are aware of their country’s billionaires. The richest people around the world are often treated as symbols of the people’s hopes for prosperity, or as national champions. Famous ones get celebrity-level news coverage of their cosmetic surgery and high-stakes divorces. But beyond that, Americans don’t talk that much about class—the sociologist Paul Blumberg called it America’s forbidden thought. ³

However, Americans’ intuitions about the wealth gap were fascinatingly revealed by a study conducted by Harvard Business School and Duke University.⁴ A representative national sample was asked to estimate what they thought the US wealth distribution was, and then to indicate what they felt an ideal distribution might look like. The researchers found Americans believe that the wealthiest 20 percent of households own about 59 percent of total US wealth, while the number was closer to 84 percent when the study was conducted. Their ideal distributions of wealth had the richest fifth of the country owning a relatively modest 32 percent—closer to Sweden’s distribution. Despite reliable media opposition to any suggestion of redistribution of wealth, they found much more consensus than disagreement on the subject.

But when you’re talking about millions and billions of dollars, it can sometimes feel overwhelming or totally abstract to learn about how much wealth exists in society, and how much is stuffed right at the top. It can feel like trying to think about how much water is in the ocean, how many stars are in the galaxy, or how old the Earth is. But knowing the details is important, I think, especially down the road when we look at where the money goes. And if you want to do something about the wealth and power of the rich, you need to at least understand them and their holdings. Especially because it’s not just cash—other economic assets are also locked in the hands of the rich, like stock in the corporations we buy from and work for. Social control, like money, can be hoarded at the top.

But just how much money are we talking about here?

Making Payroll

We can measure up the money of a society in different ways. One way is by income—who earns how much of the total income, and from what kind of economic activity. For the large majority of us, incomes play the main role in deciding our standard of living, since most people don’t have large amounts of independent wealth.

Economists studying incomes in the US and around the world have identified clear historical patterns. Incomes broadly grew slowly over the long historical eras from antiquity to the industrial revolution of the 1700s and 1800s, as hard-won gains with simple technological advances were wiped out by periodic plagues, wars, and climatic shifts. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, production of goods grew and national incomes rose in Western countries through the Gilded Age of Rockefeller and Carnegie, then fell with the Great Depression and the destruction of so much wealth in the world wars. Production and total national incomes then rose again in the postwar era of more government-managed growth.

Through this long history, however, different families had very different economic experiences. Sticking to incomes for now, for the working majority wages fell during the Industrial Revolution as workers were pushed off farms and into factories, in harsh competition with one another, thus creating today’s modern labor market of wage-based work. In the late 1800s, incomes finally grew for some workers, as labor broadly became more skill-based, and as the professional middle class of managers, engineers, and other educated professionals grew to support the fast-growing industrializing economy.⁵

But incomes for rich households rose strongly through the Industrial Revolution as large existing merchant fortunes or traditional landholdings could be invested in capital for industry. And income grew quickly for owners of that physical capital—productive assets like factories, farms, oil refineries, and data centers. But since capital ownership has always been far more concentrated than people’s ability to labor, this growth mainly benefited the richest. Over this period top household incomes went from being predominantly based on land rents and commerce to being primarily from financial assets that represent ownership of big business, and the data reveals that to this day within the top 1 percent of households pure capital income (rent, interests, and dividends) clearly predominates.⁶

This means a lot of the shifting fortunes of historical struggles among the classes can be seen in the factor share of income, which refers to how much of the total national income goes to the owners of different factors of production—labor, capital, or important natural resources like oil or lithium. The Industrial Revolution in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe slowly lifted capital’s share of income to a peak of 40 percent in 1870, which then gradually declined and fell more steeply after World War II, before rising again in all countries after the 1980s’ turn to neoliberalism, the current version of capitalism characterized by free markets, reduced social welfare spending, limited labor unions, and much lower taxes on the rich.⁷

This income history is documented by contemporary economists like Thomas Piketty, the French economic historian and breakout publishing success. Piketty, for his part, was a professed liberal at the time of his famous book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, supporting capitalism but with traditional social democratic measures—a progressive income and estate tax, regulations on industries, extensive public services. Despite his support for profits and markets, he got so uncomfortable looking at a wealth gap as big as today’s that he wrote a gigantic book about it.

Figure 1. Income inequality in US, 1910–2010. From Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014).

One reliable pattern throughout