What are billionaires for? It’s time we sussed out a plausible answer to this question, as their numbers ratchet upward across the globe, impervious to the economic setbacks suffered by mere mortals, and their “good works” ooze across the fair land. The most recent count from Forbes reports a record 1,826 of these ten-figure, market-cornering Croesuses, with familiar North American brands holding down the top three spots: Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, and Warren Buffett. Esteemed newcomers to the list include Uber kingpin Travis Kalanick, boasting $5.3 billion in net worth; gay-baiting, evangelical artery-hardeners Dan and Bubba Cathy, of Chick-fil-A fame ($3.2 billion); and Russ Weiner, impresario of the antifreeze-by-another-name energy drink Rockstar ($2.1 billion). For the first time, too, Mark Zuckerberg has cracked the elite Top 20 of global wealth; in fact, fellow Californians, most following Zuckerberg’s savvy footsteps into digital rentiership, account for 23 of the planet’s new billionaires and 131 of the total number—more than supplied by any nation apart from China and the Golden State’s host country, a quaint former republic known as the United States.
What becomes of the not-inconsiderable surplus that your average mogul kicks up in his rush to market conquest? In most cases, he (and in the vast majority of cases, it is still a “he”) parks his boodle in inflation-boosted goods like art and real estate, which neatly double as venerable monuments to his own vanity or taste.
But what happens when the super-rich turn their clever minds toward challenges beyond getting up on the right side of their well-feathered beds? Specifically, what are the likely dividends of their decisions to “give back to the community,” as the charitable mantra of the moment has it? Once upon a time, the Old World ideal of noblesse oblige might have directed their natural stirrings of conscience toward the principles of mutuality and reciprocity. But this is precisely where the new millennial model of capital-hoarding falls apart. The notion that the most materially fortunate among us actually owe the rest of us anything from their storehouses of pelf is now as unlikely as a communard plot twist in an Ayn Rand novel.
Look around at the charitable causes favored among today’s info-elite, and you’ll see the public good packaged as one continual study in billionaire self-portraiture. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, endowed by a celebrated prep-school graduate and Harvard dropout, devotes the bulk of its endowment and nearly all of its intellectual firepower to laying waste to the nation’s teachers’ unions. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is but the Gates operation on steroids, unleashing a shakedown syndicate of overcapitalized and chronically underperforming charter schools in the beleaguered urban centers where the democratic ideal of the common school once flourished.
The Clinton Global Initiative, when it’s not furnishing vaguely agreeable alibis for Bill Clinton’s louche traveling companions, is consumed by neoliberal delusions of revolutionary moral self-improvement via the most unlikely of means—the proliferation of the very same sort of dubious financial instruments that touched off the 2008 economic meltdown. In this best of all possible investors’ worlds, swashbuckling info-moralists will teach international sex workers about the folly of their life choices by setting them up with a laptop and an extended tutorial on the genius of microloans.
This recent spike in elite self-infatuation, in other words, bespeaks a distressing new impulse among the fabulously well-to-do. While past campaigns of top-down charity focused on inculcating habits of bourgeois self-control among the lesser-born, today’s philanthro-capitalist seigneurs are seeking to replicate the conditions of their own success amid the singularly unpromising social world of the propertyless, unskilled, less educated denizens of the Global South. It’s less a matter of philanthro-capitalism than one of philanthro-imperialism.
Where once the gospel of industrial success held sway among the donor class, we are witnessing the gospel of the just-in-time app, the crowdsourced startup, and the crisply leveraged microloan. This means, among other things, that the objects of mogul charity are regarded less and less as moral agents in their own right and more and more as obliging bit players in a passion play exclusively devoted to dramatizing the all-powerful, disruptive genius of our info-elite. They aren’t “giving back” so much as peering into the lower depths of the global social order and demanding, in the ever-righteous voice of privilege, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” [...]