Thousands march during the "Make Billionaires Pay" rally in New York City on September 20, 2025. | Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty ImagesKey takeawaysThere are more billionaires than ever, both in the US and globally, and they’re much richer than they were even a decade ago.The proliferation of billionaires is, in many ways, a policy choice. Changes to the tax code have made it easier than ever to make and keep a fortune, even as little has changed for the bottom 90 percent of Americans.A growing wealth gap has resulted in growing anti-billionaire sentiments in US politics, most recently showcased in Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race.It feels like everyone’s mad at billionaires right now.Maybe it’s the disconnect between Americans struggling with grocery prices and health care premiums and the ultrarich sailing on their super yachts and flying on their private jets.Maybe it’s that Elon Musk is on course to become the world’s first trillionaire.Maybe it’s that billionaires poured money into trying to defeat Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race.Maybe it’s that members of the three comma club are paying a lower tax rate than the rest of us.Either way, new survey data shows that 67 percent of Americans say billionaires are making society less fair, up eight points from a year ago.The anti-billionaire sentiment is high. To understand why, Today, Explained co-host Noel King called up Evan Osnos, a staff writer at the New Yorker. He’s spent a lot of time with the very wealthy and published a decade’s worth of essays about them in his book The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.Evan, what are the best and worst parts of hanging out with billionaires?Unfortunately, the best part is that it is awfully tempting. You begin to realize just how delicious the fresh-squeezed juice really is. The worst part is that you also begin to wonder about some big questions about the small-D democratic health of the country. So, it sends you back into history in ways that can be both funny and thrilling — and also quite disconcerting at times.If you say billionaire to me, I think Oprah. That is where my mind goes. But Oprah would not be a typical billionaire, demographically. She’s an older Black woman. Is there a typical person who represents what a billionaire is?The median billionaire would look a lot like Elon Musk, which is to say he is a man in his mid-50s who made his money on a combination of technology, inheritance, and the sheer accumulation of giant numbers.What’s really noticeable about today is that it’s never been easier for your small billionaire fortune to become a giant billionaire fortune. For the very first time in the history of the species, we have now centibillionaires. Ten years ago, nobody in the world had $100 billion, but today, there are more than a dozen. Elon Musk, for instance. Ten years ago, he didn’t have more than $20 billion, and today, he has around $400 billion. So, the numbers have gone through the roof.Right now, worldwide, there are more than 3,000 billionaires, and you see the growth most sharply in the United States. In 1990, there were about 66 billionaires in this country. Today, there are close to a thousand. Even more astonishing than that simple number is that the share of wealth that’s controlled by billionaires has also soared. It used to be that 0.1 percent of Americans controlled about 7 percent of all the wealth in the country, but today, it’s gone up to 18 percent. And why? The answer has a lot of factors, but the key one is that we’ve changed the rules over the last century to make it much easier for big fortunes to grow, mostly by reducing the taxes that would chip away at them over time. By one measure, the average tax rate for the top 400 richest Americans is now about half of what it was 50 years ago, while the tax rates for the bottom 90 percent of Americans have really not budged much at all.So, you make the money or you inherit the money, and then the tax code benefits you in a lot of ways. And so you keep the money. How do you spend the money? What are billionaires buying?It used to be that there was an expression among the very wealthiest advisors to the rich, which was that, “The whale that never surfaces doesn’t get harpooned.“ In other words, if you keep yourself out of sight, then you stand less chance of attracting public outrage or attracting the tax man. But these days, the style has changed. You see the wedding that Jeff Bezos is having in Venice, which is visible for the whole world to see. Or take, for example, the world of superyachts. These are machines that are, in a sense, the most expensive objects that humans have ever figured out how to own, that cost about a half a billion dollars in some cases. There are also ways that people are figuring out how to spend their money that simply were not possible a generation ago. It used to be, if you had a huge amount of money, and you wanted to see your favorite artist, you might buy a front-row ticket or maybe a skybox. Now, people have so much money, as one musician put it to me, that “people can afford to have the Foo Fighters come to their backyard on a Thursday.” Pop stars are now available for hire.One thing that’s very clear now is that the numbers have gotten so big that people are actually struggling to figure out how to spend it. I spoke to a consultant who caters to what he calls the “bored billionaires,” and he said, “Look, I can come up with ways of people spending their money that they didn’t know were possible.” He’ll build a restaurant, for instance, on a sandbar in the Maldives, and it’ll be [3D-printed], and they’ll have dinner together, and then it’ll be washed away. And nobody will ever be able to eat in that particular place in that way again. That, he said, is the kind of thing that you eventually end up spending your money on once you’ve bought everything else.Recently, we have all been starting to hear about a sentiment that there shouldn’t be billionaires. Talk to me about where this “abolish billionaires” push comes from and where it began.As a general idea, this has been around since the Russian Revolution in 1917. But in recent years, it’s become much more explicit. Bernie Sanders was running for president, and he was talking about the idea that, as he said at the time, billionaires shouldn’t exist. And then you had Elizabeth Warren talking about a policy platform that would involve a wealth tax. The idea that every billionaire is a policy failure has become much more broadly felt in progressive policy circles. And Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was, in a sense, the most dramatic example of that, because it was unfolding right there in the financial capital of the United States: New York City.Not long ago, the singer Billie Eilish got an award from T=the Wall Street Journal, and she said, “Love you all, but there’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. And, if you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties.” It made me wonder whether we’re seeing more of this kind of conversation in 2025 or whether this is a continuation of the last five, ten years.It’s becoming much more a part of everyday conversation. The example you gave of Billie Eilish talking about this coming from a pop culture perspective is really noticeable for a few reasons. One, I think we’re living through a time now where the fusion of economic power and political power has never been as obvious. We all saw that scene on January 20, the inauguration of the second Trump presidency, in which the crowd was full of billionaires. Many of his biggest political supporters were the richest people in the country, and the richest people in the world. So many were on that stage beside him that there wasn’t even room for the leaders of Congress, who were relegated to the audience. Trump went on to then staff his administration with at least a dozen billionaires.We’ve never had a moment in which the actual levers of government have been handed over to some of the richest people in the world. This is not an abstraction; it’s just a fact. And you see that reflected across the decisions that the government makes. For instance, the big fiscal bill that passed earlier in the year, known as the “one big beautiful bill,” was calculated to be the single largest transfer of wealth in American history, simply by the way that it closed off avenues for subsidies and support for poorer Americans by creating opportunities for the wealthiest Americans to hold onto more of their money. It’s just no longer an abstraction in the background; it’s right there, front and center on stage. In the years after the financial crisis, I remember everyone said that, at some point, there is going to be a class war in the United States. People are fed up, and they’re frustrated, and it’s right in our faces. The thing that strikes me is that, a decade later, it is so much more in our faces. I wonder where you think American attitudes on this go?For a long time, I think that Americans tolerated and, in some cases, celebrated inequality, or these giant fortunes at the top, because they felt like they were the emblems of opportunity. They substantiated the myth that really is important to the American idea that you can go from the bottom to the top, the kind of thing that you still do hear from cab drivers on the other side of the world when they hear that you’re an American.But the numbers here at home are very different than that myth suggests. The simple fact is, if you’re a person who was born in 1940 in this country, you stood a 90 percent chance of out-earning your parents. But you fast forward to today, and a child who’s coming of age today stands less than half that chance of out-earning their parents. And, as a result, there is a feeling of hollowness and of frustration about that mythology. The history on this suggests that, at a certain point, people do get frustrated to the point where they don’t accept it anymore.There’s a great historian named Ramsay MacMullen who studied the fall of Rome. What he said was that the fall of Rome took 500 years, but you could condense that history into a very concise explanation: “Fewer had more.” In a way, I think that recognition that we’re beginning to monkey around with the very foundation of America’s democratic sustainability has bled out into the broader population to such an extent that that willingness to celebrate giant fortunes as emblems of opportunity rather than as signs of distress is changing. That pendulum feels as if it is beginning to swing in the other direction.