Not Like Us: How Billionaires Think
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As billionaires hoard more control over our politics, it seems more important than ever to ask: What makes them tick? Four reporters gather after hours at a wine shop to discuss – over drinks – what they’ve learned from covering billionaires for years, and how it can help us hoi polloi make sense of what the ultra-rich are doing right now.
Featuring Vicky Ward, who has covered the Kushner family and Trump, and who, in 2002, was the first journalist to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s finances in a profile for Vanity Fair; John Hyatt, who covers billionaires, with a focus on Elon Musk, for Forbes; Douglas Rushkoff, who has written about tech billionaires preparing for the end of the world; and Edward Ongweso, Jr., who covers the impact of the exponential growth of large tech companies for outlets like Vice and The Nation.
A small correction: Douglas Rushkoff said that his trip to a hedge fund conference in the desert happened in 2018, but the trip was actually in 2017.
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“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From placement theory in KCRW, this is Question Everything. |
| 0:03.5 | I'm Brian Reed. |
| 0:05.4 | I'm kind of freaking out about how quickly billionaires seem to be taking over. |
| 0:10.2 | Every day, there's like a dozen new moves by Elon Musk and his newly conjured Department of Government Efficiency, Doge. |
| 0:18.0 | Go after spending, sure. |
| 0:19.8 | But the richest person in the world never elected to anything, |
| 0:23.3 | being given license to run roughshod through the federal government, |
| 0:26.7 | which does nearly $21 million in business with his companies. |
| 0:30.6 | It's scary. |
| 0:32.0 | People who already have an immense amount of power |
| 0:34.4 | are seizing so much more of it so quickly. |
| 0:38.2 | Trump has appointed at least 13 billionaires to his administration. |
| 0:42.6 | 13, the most ever. |
| 0:45.0 | Let me just list their roles to give you a sense of the breath here. |
| 0:48.4 | There's Musk, but then there's also the education secretary, the Commerce Secretary, |
| 0:52.4 | Treasury Secretary, the Social Security Administration |
| 0:55.1 | Commissioner, the NASA Administrator, ambassadors to the UK, France, and Turkey, the special envoy to the Middle East, ambassador to the Organization of American States, the Administrator of the Small Business Administration, and the AI and Cryptozar. |
| 1:09.1 | All of them, bona fide billionaires. |
| 1:11.7 | Depending on how you count it, there's arguably 14 now, |
| 1:14.5 | since a co-founder of Airbnb recently joined Doge. |
| 1:17.9 | And then, of course, there's Trump, a billionaire himself. |
| 1:25.0 | This is the wealthiest group of cabinet members |
... |
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