Secrets of Trump’s Tarnished Gilded Age

The New Abnormal

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Author Evan Osnos joins Joanna Coles to parse the twisted games the world's wealthiest play with and aboard their crazy expensive yachts. As tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg snap up megayachts, Osnos, author of 'The Haves and Have-Yachts,' unpacks what these floating palaces reveal about a seismic shift in American wealth and power. He explains why Donald Trump shut down the KleptoCapture task force, how oligarch envy shapes Trump's worldview, and what it means that he once owned a Saudi arms dealer's yacht—but hated being on it. From Adnan Khashoggi to Elon Musk, Osnos traces the rise of ostentatious wealth, the decline of discretion, and why the modern billionaire isn't satisfied with private jets—they also want political control. Plus, how Musk crossed a line even Andrew Carnegie didn't, and why Americans may finally be waking up to a new, gilded threat.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Fancy a fever tree and vodka.
0:03.8	Yes, vodka, not gin, because this is fever tree Mexican lime soda.
0:10.0	Yes, soda, not tonic.
0:12.9	With Mexican lime and Japanese yuzu for a zesty, refreshing lime soda that's just sweet enough.
0:19.6	Delicious with vodka or on its own. Fever tree, Mexican lime soda that's just sweet enough. Delicious with vodka or on its own.
0:23.1	Fever tree Mexican lime soda mix with the best.
0:27.7	Hmm, now that hits the spot.
0:31.8	Trump is basically eliminating the category of white collar crime as an idea.
0:40.0	I'm Joanna Coles. You are listening or watching or dancing to the Daily Beast podcast,
0:45.8	and we have such a treat for you today. We have the author, Evan Osnos, who's on staff at the New Yorker,
0:52.9	here to talk about his new book, The Havs and the Hav Yots.
0:57.1	It's the read of the summer. If you're going on a yacht this summer, especially a giga yacht,
1:02.3	then you need to take this book with you and antagonize your hosts. So let's get into it.
1:09.7	All right, Evan Osnos, I cannot wait to talk to you about the have and the have yachts.
1:15.3	I want to hold the book up because it's a most beautiful cover of this extraordinary yacht.
1:20.5	But it's really dispatches about the rich and the rich's behavior and the new norms,
1:25.7	which we're all tracking on social media too. So let's start off
1:29.5	with the ultimate symbol of deep, deep wealth, the yacht. How big are they? What defines a super yacht?
1:37.5	So there are gradations. To go from a boat to a yacht, you need to hire a crew. That turns it into a yacht, in effect.
1:45.8	At a certain point, when you get to be about 100 feet, then you're a super yacht.
1:49.3	If you get to be about 235 feet, you're a mega yacht.
1:53.4	And if you are 295 feet, which, you know, is whatever that is, about a football pitch.
	...

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