Latest news with #EvanOsnos
Fast Company
2 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Modern oligarchs? Evan Osnos on billionaires and broken systems
Is America in a Second Gilded Age? Evan Osnos thinks so. In this episode of Most Innovative Companies, Osnos unpacks how extreme wealth, corporate influence, and political inequality are transforming American life. If you've ever wondered how the 1% really operate, this is the deep dive you need.
New York Times
06-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
A Chronicle of the Rich Getting Richer, Crasser and More Obscene
THE HAVES AND HAVE-YACHTS: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, by Evan Osnos I kept thinking about the Weegee photograph 'The Critic' while reading 'The Haves and Have-Yachts,' Evan Osnos's collection of his 'revised and expanded' New Yorker articles about the 'ultrarich.' In the 1943 picture, two socialites, clad in furs, jewels and tight, dignified smiles, walk into the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera while, off to their left, a tipsy, bedraggled woman in a cloth coat gives them a withering stare. Osnos, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is urbanely critical of the rich who have gotten too rich, but is not Weegee's Critic. There are constant reminders that the various yacht owners, tech disrupters and hedge funders profiled lead a more lavish lifestyle than does the author — but it's clear to the reader that he can pass. Osnos is not a hater of success or even privilege; he's more an anthropologist of unseemly excess. In the acknowledgments, he thanks one of his sources and inspirations: 'a stranger, sitting next to me on a flight nearly a decade ago,' who happened to work in Silicon Valley. This person urged him to examine the 'changing conceptions of wealth, government and the future' then metastasizing among the elites of the ascendant tech sector. Presumably Osnos and this deep-pocketed Deep Throat were not flying coach. Osnos himself grew up in Greenwich, Conn., the son of a publishing executive. After Harvard, he made his way to China first as a student in the wake of the Tiananmen clampdown. By 2008, he was corresponding from Beijing for The New Yorker, at a time when many of America's business elites were making vast sums of money there. His excellent 2014 book 'Age of Ambition' won the National Book Award for its low-high depiction of a country coming of age — which, he writes, most reminded him of the Gilded Age United States. Back in America, Osnos was put on the plutocrat beat, just in time for a scheme-y new Gilded Age. There's plenty of excess to gawk at with him here, but the message is always that great wealth is in some way its own trap. Osnos gives us Anthony Scaramucci's few possible avenues for the rich: 'the art world, or private aircraft and yachting, charity-naming buildings and hospitals after themselves — or they can go into experiential.' Rod Stewart, Usher and Mariah Carey are hired to play at private parties. There's the guy selling 'experiential yachting' programs, which recreate the Battle of Midway to entertain 'bored billionaires,' complete with haptic guns. We meet estate planners who keep the rich from paying their fair share of taxes — if any. A good-looking, if mediocre, actor with an impressive social media presence runs a Ponzi scheme pretending to be a successful movie producer. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'New and very uncertain territory' as billionaires pay their way into Trump presidency
Evan Osnos, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the newly published "The Haves and Have-Yachts," talks with Jen Psaki about the rise of American oligarchy and how billionaires have had their way with the Trump administration, and the power of civic outrage to take the country back.
01-06-2025
- Business
Trump is making the ‘economy of influence' beyond ‘anything people have seen': Osnos
On 'This Week,' The New Yorker's Evan Osnos and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie discuss President Trump's recent pardons and the Trump family's business ventures.
Bloomberg
30-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Why the Boats Got Bigger as the Rich Got Richer
Watching sweaty 13-year-olds lose their minds to a performance by rapper Flo Rida at a bar mitzvah for the son of a finance executive in 2023, Evan Osnos felt something in America had changed. For decades the richest teenagers have booked big talent for private performances, a splurge disturbingly documented by the MTV reality show My Super Sweet 16. But recent years have seen a proliferation in the number of people who can 'blow a hundred and fifty grand on a Thursday' to have the Foo Fighters play in their backyard, drummer Charles Ruggiero tells Osnos.
