Summary
When you have billions it's impossible to spend it all on yourself and your family. So what else do you do? Join the space race like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos or start a foundation like Bill Gates and follow in the footsteps of the massively wealthy industrialists of the Gilded Age, like Andrew Carnegie or John D Rockefeller? What do they tell us about our world is changing for better or worse.
GUESTS
Dr. Katharina Rietzler, Lecturer, American History, University of Sussex
Paul Vallely, Author, 'Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg'
Manfred Kets de Vries, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change, INSEAD
and
Abigail Disney, Co-founder Fork Films and host of All Ears podcast
Producer: Julie Ball
Editor: Hugh Levinson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Hello and welcome to the programme. |
| 0:06.7 | There's been quite a preoccupation with the super rich in recent years. |
| 0:10.6 | Are they too rich? |
| 0:11.7 | Do they deserve their wealth? |
| 0:12.9 | All that. |
| 0:13.9 | But the super rich is not a well-defined group. |
| 0:16.7 | It must include anyone in sight of a billion dollars of wealth, |
| 0:19.5 | J.K. Rowling, say, or her peers. |
| 0:22.5 | But forget such folk for now. Mere paupers compared with the group we are going to talk about today, |
| 0:28.8 | because we're going to focus on the super, super rich. People who are, say, 10 times richer than Richard Branson, |
| 0:36.2 | the kind of folks who have enough cash to run their own space program. |
| 0:40.1 | Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates, Elon Musk of Tesla. |
| 0:45.2 | Now obviously, when you have $100 billion or more, it is quite impossible, literally impossible, |
| 0:51.0 | to spend it all spoiling yourself and your family, so you find things |
| 0:55.0 | to do with it like developing reusable rockets as Elon Musk's SpaceX company and Jeff Bezos's |
| 1:01.4 | Blue Origin have been doing. Or there is philanthropy like Bill Gates. But what do these people |
| 1:08.8 | tell us about how our world is changing for better or worse? |
| 1:13.7 | Now, no multibillionaires were available for the making of this program, |
| 1:16.9 | but we do have a number of contributors rich in thought, if not so much, in pocket. |
| 1:22.1 | Katerina Riedzler is a lecturer in American history at Sussex University. |
| 1:26.7 | Paul Vallali is the author of Philanthropy from Aristotle to Zuckerberg. |
... |
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