White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Billionaires Will Rule Down Through the Generations

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Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book “Careless People” takes aim at Facebook (parent company Meta) and tells a tale of its potentate, Mark Zuckerberg, as a man who is sought after by the great and the powerful and who lacks social consciousness or real interest in anything beyond himself and his company.

Wynn-Williams is the New Zealander who went to lengths to get hired at Facebook because she believed in its ability to do good. She ended up in the company’s inner circle of management as director of global public policy.

Zuckerberg was of keen interest to heads of state because of Facebook’s influence in their countries. A meeting with Zuckerberg would confer status on them, even if they were the heads of quite important nations.

Additionally, they were paying homage to wealth, something that happens throughout society. If you are rich enough, you get the bended-knee treatment.

It occurs to Wynn-Williams, while once looking at these leaders, sitting around a table, waiting for Zuckerberg (he doesn’t get out of bed before noon for anyone), that none of them will be in power in a decade, but Zuckerberg will still be there.

That is sobering.

We live in a time of billionaires, and their impact shouldn’t be minimized. Nor should the impact of their billions down through the generations.

The heirs to today’s billions will shape the future for decades, possibly centuries.

Money has staying power. In the 1700s, the Grosvenor family began developing property in what is now the West End of London, the most exclusive area which includes Mayfair and Belgravia. The duke of Westminster, heir to the Grosvenor fortune, still owns large amounts of some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

In the last century, some very wealthy people lost their money, but none of them had the kind of wealth we are talking about today.

Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P grocery chain fortune, and Barbara Hutton, who inherited part of the Woolworth five-and-dime store fortune, both squandered enormous amounts and ended up nearly broke.

Today’s fortunes are so much larger that even if the same mistakes were made with inflation-adjusted dollars, large fortunes would remain, fortunes that will be heard from as the heirs take charge.

Wynn-Williams, in her very readable book — which The Economist listed as one of the best reads of 2025 — paints a picture of the extraordinary power of Zuckerberg and his money: power that seeks only extension and self-perpetuation. Zuckerberg emerges as shallow, self-centered and self-regarding.

My take is that the inherited wealth story this time is different. It is different, say, from the railroad oligarchs.

They sought control of the railway technology which had made them rich. The new tech giants seek to control new technology as it is invented: to scoop up startups, so long as they promise tech dominance. Think of Facebook and WhatsApp.

The current attempt by Zuckerberg to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI is an attempt to secure for himself and his family the same status in the future as he has in the present.

Leaders come and go, but money goes on forever.

There are over 1,100 American billionaires today who accumulated their wealth in their lifetimes, although some may have had a running start from family, such as Rupert Murdoch.

As this wealth — more money than the world has ever seen — moves down through the generations, it will have an ever-present impact on how we live and how we are governed.

The Washington Post has done some revelatory reporting on the impact of the richest people in politics. Mostly they support Republicans, in the belief that that will be the best way of protecting their wealth, according to the Post.

To the left of the political stage, there is always talk of wealth taxes or, as might be said in private, “soaking the rich.” This is easy to say and hard to do.

Punitive taxation sends money flooding overseas and its owners changing their abodes. Switzerland, Monaco, the Channel Islands and other offshore destinations make billions and their owners feel welcome.

Benjamin Disraeli, who was to become prime minister as a Conservative, said in his 1845 novel “Sybil” that Britain had become two nations: the rich and the poor.

In the United States, we are becoming three nations: the ultra-rich, the comfortable and the lamentably poor. Is this the American dream or the beginning of a long, sleepless, distorted night?

America’s Year of Thinking Dangerously

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By Llewellyn King

If you accept that seminal means an event or moment after which things will never be the same again, then we are living through a seminal year.

In matters big and small, change is in the wind.

This wind blew through Iowa and New Hampshire, and is defining the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are not so much the leaders of this time of change, but rather the products.

The product is something hard to pin down, but it is there nonetheless — a sense that it is time to turn the page, to read the next chapter; a yearning for something fresh.

The millennials, hunched over their cell phones, are looking for the future in their small screens. The rest of us are looking for it in new leaders, new lifestyles; and new thinking, sometimes about old ideas.

Societies go through periods when they feel the need to change up things. But they want a sped-up evolution rather than a full-fledged revolution. This is such a time.

Change is everywhere from the bold, new things television is doing — frontal nudity, gay coupling and interracial love — to the kind of car we favor.

While we grapple with change and yearn for the new, we are surprisingly open-minded. American values appear to be undergoing a recalibration: We are getting more socially tolerant. Social conservatives are a diminished force.

Young people do not have the same commitment their parents had to conventional employment, to be defined by where they work. This leads to a world where people are less concerned with appearances, and all that goes with appearances. The business suit and its essential accoutrement, the necktie, are on the way out – and in much of the country, they are now curiously out of date. Apartments are being favored over houses because of new social values.

My generation experienced the hopeful 1940s (just the tail end), the smug 1950s, the turbulent 1960s, the oil-shocked 1970s, and the computer-excited 1980s, which continued unabated until the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century – but re-inflated with new developments in Internet products like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In recent times, the only new American billionaire outside of the Internet was Hamdi Ulukaya, who popularized Greek yogurt in country hungry for yogurt choices. That is a dumbfounding fact. It means that it will be harder to get investment in old-line businesses and start-ups. The smart money has become myopically obsessed with the cyberworld.

If you were to go to Wall Street today to raise money for a new nuclear reactor that put all doubts of the past to rest and offered income for 100 years — there are such machines on the drawing board – you would find it hard to raise money; easier for a new Internet messaging system. This when there is no shortage of Internet messages (too many, I cry each morning). We are leery of the hard and enamored of the soft.

We sense that the education system is not doing its job; that it is broken and needs fixing. But how, we are not sure. We are sure, though, that we are going to change it.

We sense that we had the dynamic wrong in foreign affairs; that change at home, like toppling a generation of political leadership, is desirable, while toppling leaders abroad is a fraught undertaking, as with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

We feel less good about the wealthy, and we are less sure that there are secure places for us in the future. We watch cooking shows and order in pizza. We gave up smoking and started jogging. But we are, so to speak, deaf to the damage we are doing to our ears with incessant music piped to them by earbuds.

We are more nationalistic and less confident at the same time. We treasure our values more, and wonder about their long-term durability.

The largest contradiction that can easily be inspected is in the themes of Trump and Sanders: Trump has rehabilitated a kind of racism aimed at immigrants, while Sanders has made the taboo word “socialism” acceptable in political dialogue.

The desire for change has moved from a slight wish to a hard desire for a new alignment. It is everywhere, from what we eat to how we feel about the climate. But we do not agree on this new alignment, hence the huge gulf between Sanders followers and Trump adherents. — For InsideSources

The Glass Tower Life of the Super-Rich

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You and I live in houses, apartments, coops and condos, and flats. The super-rich — or is it the mega-rich or the ultra-rich? — live in “residences.” Well, they own them and sometimes they take up residence in one of their homes, so maybe the name is appropriate. In real estate speak, if it costs north of $5 million, it is a residence.

I get this not from the Oxford English Dictionary, but from the advertisements in The New York Times for living space in New York City. The city is one of a few places where the incalculably rich want to have a residence. And they shell out big bucks — bucks beyond the dreams of common avarice — to get a pad there.

Other cities where the rich feel at home are London, Monaco and Dubai. There is God Almighty-expensive real estate in Hong Kong and Mumbai (the world’s most expensive), but not all the new billionaires want to live there. They want the best of the West.

The real estate rush comes from the new billionaires. Whereas it was once the super-rich of Europe, known as Eurotrash, who sought the marble and concierge life in Manhattan towers, it is now the unfathomably rich from China, India and Russia who have ushered in a new Gilded Age with more wealth than Americans of the Gilded Age before World War I ever could have dreamed as they journeyed between Fifth or Park avenues and Newport, RI. Call them “Globotrash” — and watch them push up prices for everyone, as real estate moguls buy old buildings in Manhattan and demolish them to build luxury towers that rise higher than 90 floors.

Central London has gone, as far as ordinary Londoners are concerned. They have to commute further and further to work in the neighborhoods where they once lived. New York City is not much better: the Globotrash push out the middle class and the poor.

The skyline of Manhattan tells this new Gilded Age story: booming construction of spindly glass towers, so thin they seem even higher than their very real height.

Look in awe at 432 Park Avenue, the luxury condo which stands at 1,396 feet, slightly taller than One World Trade Center. Or the stunning new residence, One57: It rises to 90 floors with prices from a paltry $6 million for a one-bedroom to a penthouse for a god at $94 million. Now, we are talking residence.

The principal selling point for these pieces of fanciful engineering is that you get a view of Central Park. It is all, apparently about, privacy and views. Well, Central Park is nice to look at, but it is not one of the wonders of the world.

As for privacy, wait a minute. While you might want to take in the views of Manhattan as you soak in one of the grand bathrooms’ Carrara marble tubs, and then emerge in the buff to get another look at the views, for which you have paid so extravagantly, you had better watch out. I hear the paparazzi are getting camera-equipped drones. You see the park, and their cameras see you.

One57 has some of the best blue-veined marble ever quarried in Italy. In fact, there is so much of it in the building that an imaginative lawyer might be able to claim that it is a territorial extension of Italy. A part of Italy on Manhattan Island, Mamma mia!

And as the Globotrash are not known for their kitchen skills, it will be again up to the imagination of New York City to get another iconic Italian product, pizza, up there.