Are billionaires a bad thing?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2019

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are more than 150 billionaires in the UK, but is that concentration of immense wealth actually a sign of failure? Should anyone ever be worth a sum of money that has nine zeroes in it? For decades nobody seemed to question wealth: it was something to aspire to, and the idea that money would trickle down to the rest of society was widespread. But things seem to be shifting. Mainstream politicians are questioning what, until just a few years ago, was the accepted wisdom that it’s fine to be filthy rich as long as you pay lots of tax along the way and then become a philanthropist. We hear from the BBC’s Business editor Simon Jack, and check in with Kerry Dolan, who’s been helping to compile the Forbes rich list for the last 25 years. And our producer Lucy Hancock went to meet artist Darren Cullen, who runs a museum of neoliberalism. Presented by Matthew Price. Producers: Heidi Pett, Lucy Hancock, Katie Gunning. Mixed by Nicolas Raufast. Editor: John Shields

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Hello, I'm Matthew Price.
0:08.9	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:11.5	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:15.0	Today are billionaires a bad thing.
0:26.0	He teaches people to become he teaches people to become millionaires today, hear his money-making secrets.
0:37.5	It's weird to think about it now, but for decades no one really wondered about whether making money was a good thing.
0:44.0	The whole story that we were told and most of us bought into was that getting rich was good for the people who got rich.
0:51.0	Five dragons are poised to do business. was good for the people who got rich, and that overall the money would eventually
0:57.0	trickle down to make everyone better off.
1:01.0	Something's changed in a really fundamental way. Since 08 and the economic crash, more and more people have been thinking about inequality, about the super-rich. It's a theme that you can see running right through the election here in the UK at the moment.
1:17.5	It's also happening on the other side of the Atlantic in the US election as well.
1:32.0	And it might help to explain why some very rich people in the world are already right now trying to change the way that their companies work, what they do, why they do it. We'll hear about that in a moment. But first, let's turn
1:37.0	to, well, we don't have a billionaire's correspondent at the BBC as such, but if we did, it would probably be Simon Jack he's the BBC's
1:45.4	business editor. Mainly they became billionaires sort of by accident I don't think
1:50.8	anyone of the billionaires that I have met set out to join the three
1:55.0	comma club as they call it three commas in your own salary the three comma club
1:58.8	yes but what they did was they came up with something that they solved the problem that people
2:05.0	found easy to use.
2:07.3	You know, if you look at Windows, Microsoft Windows, you look at Facebook, what have you.
2:11.6	They didn't set out to become the Three Comer Club, they set out to do something
2:14.4	they thought people would like, and the riches then followed.
	...

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