The Haves and Have-Yachts

Who are America's oligarchs? What do they want? How do they operate? Is there anything that can be done to contain their power?

The ultrarich hold more of America’s wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. In this incisive and provocative book, Evan Osnos offers an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power.

With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, Osnos explores the indulgences, incentives and psychological distortions that define our time. He delves into the unprecedented influence Silicon Valley and Wall Street have on government, drawing on in-depth interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires. He also exposes the hidden world of the ultrarich in all its outrageous, fabulous, ridiculous detail: a private wealth manager who broke with members of an American dynasty and spilled their secrets; the pop stars who perform at lavish parties for thirteen-year-olds; the status anxieties that spill out of marinas in Monaco and Palm Beach like real-world episodes of Succession and The White Lotus.

Originally published in the New Yorker, these essays have been revised and expanded to deliver an unflinching portrait of the rise of America’s modern oligarchy. Osnos’s essays are a wake-up call – a case against complacency in the face of unchecked excess, as the choices of the ultrarich ripple through our lives. Entertaining, unsettling and eye-opening, The Haves and Have-Yachts couldn’t be more relevant to today’s world.
 

The Gilded Age had Mark Twain, the Jazz Age had F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Age of Trump, luckily, has Evan Osnos. In The Haves and the Have-Yachts, Osnos reveals the secret lives and preoccupations of America’s increasingly powerful oligarchs and probes their outsized impact on the rest of us. Osnos is an astute political reporter and a wonderful and witty stylist, making this menagerie of modern-day Robber Barons equal parts entertaining and appalling. Anyone trying to understand who really rules Trump’s America must read it.'  -- Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money
'National Book Award winner Osnos (Age of Ambition) provides an amusing and enraging glimpse into the lives of the überwealthy. In a series of essays originally published in the New Yorker, Osnos follows the 1% as they purchase 295-ft.-plus “gigayachts” (“the most expensive objects our species has ever owned”), plan to ride out the apocalypse in a “luxury apartment complex built in an underground Atlas missile silo,” and hire rapper Flo Rida for a bar mitzvah. The author also reveals how the upper echelons stay there – usually through innovative tax dodges like flying a jet to a business meeting to “maintain the claim that their trust was not run from California” – and how wannabes are relentless in their efforts to scam their way to the top, like an incarcerated Hollywood Ponzi schemer who plagiarizes motivational speakers on his prison blog. The best essays revel in the sheer ludicrousness of extreme wealth: “bored billionaires” hiring “experiential yachting” experts to stage a mock Battle of Midway or getting Zabar’s bagels delivered via helicopter. These over-the-top tales are balanced out by more conventional profiles and analyses, including an examination of Facebook’s “cult of growth.” While adding ample historical context (the first 'trusts' originated as a tax dodge for Crusaders), this succeeds most of all as an exposé of the grotesque excesses of the elite.' Publishers Weekly

Evan Osnos has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. His most recent book, Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, where he shared two Pulitzer Prizes. He lives with his wife and children near Washington, DC.

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