Pittsburgh was one of the smelters of America’s Gilded Age. As the industrial revolution took hold there, Andrew Carnegie was struck by the contrast between “the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer.” Human beings had never before lived in such strikingly different material circumstances, he believed, and the result was “rigid castes” living in “mutual ignorance” and “mutual distrust” of one another.
The twenty-seven-story Mumbai mansion of the Ambani family, rumored to have cost a billion dollars, is just seven miles away from Dharavi, one of the world’s most famous slums, and the gap between these two ways of life is even wider than anything Carnegie could find in the Golden Triangle. So, for that matter, is the difference between Bill Gates’s futuristically wired 66,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Lake Washington, which is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 and whose library bears an inscription from The Great Gatsby, and the homes of the poor of Washington State, where unemployment in 2012 was slightly above the national average.
Even so, the correct etiquette in today’s plutocracy, particularly among its most admired tribe, the technorati of the U.S. West Coast, is to downplay the personal impact of vast wealth. In April 2010, when MIT students asked him how it felt to be the richest person in the world, Bill Gates suggestedit wasn’t a very big deal. “Well, the marginal return for extra dollars does drop off,” Gates said. “I haven’t found any burgers at any price that are better than McDonald’s.” He admitted there were some great perks, like flying on a private jet, but said that after a “few million or something, it’s all about how you’re going to give it back.”
If you traveled to Mountain View to visit Eric Schmidt when he was CEO of Google, you would have found him in a narrow office barely big enough to hold three people. The equations on the whiteboard may well have been scribbled by one of the engineers who works next door and is welcome to use the chief’s office whenever he’s not in. And while it is okay to have a private jet in the Valley, employing a chauffeur is frowned upon. “Whereas in other cultures, you can drive your Rolls-Royce around and just sort of look rich and have a really good time, in technology it’s not socially okay to have a driver who drives you to work every day,” Schmidt told me. “I don’t know why, but you’ll notice nobody does it.”
This egalitarian style can clash with the Valley’s reality of extreme income polarization. “Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out,” Schmidt explained. “We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done.” When he was CEO of Bain Capital and building his current net worth of about $200 million, Mitt Romney drove a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with red vinyl seats and a beaten-up fender. Carlos Slim’s trademark look is slightly scruffy casual wear, and he loves to tell journalists he doesn’t own any homes outside his native Mexico.
But even when he dresses down, a billionaire inhabits a world apart. A little more than a decade ago, I asked Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia (and, as it happens, also someone who favored casual clothes and lived in a modest house), what he thought of the rest of us. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” (Khodorkovsky’s subsequent experiences — his company was appropriated by the state in 2004 and he is currently in prison for fraud and embezzlement — have tempered this Darwinian outlook: in jail cell correspondence he admitted that he had “treated business exclusively as a game” and “did not care much about social responsibility.”)
The twenty-seven-story Mumbai mansion of the Ambani family, rumored to have cost a billion dollars, is just seven miles away from Dharavi, one of the world’s most famous slums, and the gap between these two ways of life is even wider than anything Carnegie could find in the Golden Triangle. So, for that matter, is the difference between Bill Gates’s futuristically wired 66,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Lake Washington, which is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 and whose library bears an inscription from The Great Gatsby, and the homes of the poor of Washington State, where unemployment in 2012 was slightly above the national average.Even so, the correct etiquette in today’s plutocracy, particularly among its most admired tribe, the technorati of the U.S. West Coast, is to downplay the personal impact of vast wealth. In April 2010, when MIT students asked him how it felt to be the richest person in the world, Bill Gates suggestedit wasn’t a very big deal. “Well, the marginal return for extra dollars does drop off,” Gates said. “I haven’t found any burgers at any price that are better than McDonald’s.” He admitted there were some great perks, like flying on a private jet, but said that after a “few million or something, it’s all about how you’re going to give it back.”
If you traveled to Mountain View to visit Eric Schmidt when he was CEO of Google, you would have found him in a narrow office barely big enough to hold three people. The equations on the whiteboard may well have been scribbled by one of the engineers who works next door and is welcome to use the chief’s office whenever he’s not in. And while it is okay to have a private jet in the Valley, employing a chauffeur is frowned upon. “Whereas in other cultures, you can drive your Rolls-Royce around and just sort of look rich and have a really good time, in technology it’s not socially okay to have a driver who drives you to work every day,” Schmidt told me. “I don’t know why, but you’ll notice nobody does it.”
This egalitarian style can clash with the Valley’s reality of extreme income polarization. “Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out,” Schmidt explained. “We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done.” When he was CEO of Bain Capital and building his current net worth of about $200 million, Mitt Romney drove a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with red vinyl seats and a beaten-up fender. Carlos Slim’s trademark look is slightly scruffy casual wear, and he loves to tell journalists he doesn’t own any homes outside his native Mexico.
But even when he dresses down, a billionaire inhabits a world apart. A little more than a decade ago, I asked Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia (and, as it happens, also someone who favored casual clothes and lived in a modest house), what he thought of the rest of us. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” (Khodorkovsky’s subsequent experiences — his company was appropriated by the state in 2004 and he is currently in prison for fraud and embezzlement — have tempered this Darwinian outlook: in jail cell correspondence he admitted that he had “treated business exclusively as a game” and “did not care much about social responsibility.”)
by Chrystia Freeland, Reuters | Read more:
