The Haves and Have-Yachts: Field Notes from the Frontier of American Excess (t)

Summary

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From National Book Award–winning author Evan Osnos comes a “sharp…charming… regrettably timely” (The Washington Post) collection of essays exploring American oligarchy, billionaire culture, and the new Gilded Age, offering a wry, unfiltered look at how the ultrarich shape—and sometimes warp—our social and political landscape.

The one percent now hold more of America’s wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. In this incisive work of reportage, Osnos paints an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions that define today’s elite class: superyachts, luxury bunkers, tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations that bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power.

With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age. In each essay, Osnos lifts the curtain on a world rarely seen, from the outrageous to the surreal: a private wealth manager betraying an American dynasty; pop stars performing at lavish parties for children; status anxiety spilling from marinas in Monaco and Palm Beach like real-world episodes of Succession or The White Lotus.

Readers will meet disgraced moguls in a “white-collar support group,” unravel the largest Ponzi scheme in Hollywood history, and explore the global ambitions of tech tycoons, including Mark Zuckerberg. A celebrated political reporter, Osnos documents the unprecedented influence Silicon Valley and Wall Street now have on Washington—and the explosive backlash this influence provokes.

Originally published in The New Yorker, these essays have been revised and expanded to deliver an “eye-opening account” (The Guardian) of raw ambition, unimaginable fortune, and the rise of America’s modern oligarchy. Osnos’s essays are a wake-up call—a case against complacency in the face of unchecked excess, as the choices of the ultrarich ripple through our lives. Entertaining, unsettling, and eye-opening, The Haves and the Have-Yachts couldn’t be more relevant to today’s world.