The New Robber Barons: Same Greed, Less Guilt
Let me tell you something that's going to sound crazy, but stick with me: Andrew Carnegie was a piece of shit. John D. Rockefeller? Less so, but also a piece of shit. Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, the whole lot of them—grade-A, certified, industrial-strength pieces of shit who built their fortunes on the backs of broken workers, many of whom were children, some of whom they literally killed.
But here's the thing that keeps me up at night staring at my newsfeed like it's a portal to chronic depression: compared to the tech oligarchs currently buying their way into our democracy, the old rich look like Christ-like humanitarians and philanthropists.
And maybe that's because they were philanthropists. Terrible, blood-soaked, union-busting philanthropists—but philanthropists nonetheless.
I won't romanticize the past. Carnegie's empire was built on human suffering that bordered the medieval. His workers at the Homestead Steel Works in Pennsylvania put in twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, in conditions so brutal that injuries and deaths were only passively reported. When those workers had the audacity to organize—to demand that maybe, just maybe, they deserved to be treated like humans instead of expendable machinery—Carnegie's right-hand man Henry Clay Frick sent in 300 Pinkerton thugs to crack skulls.
The result? July 6, 1892. A day that saw Pinkerton agents floating up the Monongahela River on barges, armed to the teeth, while ten thousand workers and their families waited on the shore. When the shooting stopped, at least ten people were dead and scores more were wounded. Carnegie, of course, was in Scotland at the time, living like royalty in his castle, sending carte blanche cables that said things like "We...approve of anything you do."
Meanwhile, Rockefeller was busy cornering the oil market with Standard Oil, which at its peak controlled nearly 90 percent of U.S. oil refining. His workers weren't dying in pitched battles, but they were grinding themselves into dust in refineries with minimal safety regulations, earning wages that barely kept them alive. In 1899, a child in a sweatshop made 27 cents for a fourteen-hour day.
That same year, Carnegie pulled in $23 million—with no income tax. I'll do the math, that's $897,764,819 today.
But here's where it gets interesting. Carnegie, for all his sins, believed in something he called the "Gospel of Wealth"—the idea that the rich had a responsibility to use their money for the betterment of society. It's a hypocritical rationalization, sure, but at least it resulted in something tangible.
Between 1883 and 1929, Carnegie funded the construction of 2,509 libraries worldwide. Over 1,680 of those were in the United States alone. He poured $56 million into this project—roughly $2 billion in today's money. And yes, his name is plastered on every single one of them. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Library of Homestead (yes, the irony), Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon University. The man wanted credit for his generosity, no question.
But here's the truth: those free libraries changed lives. Still do. They gave working-class kids access to books, to education, to the possibility of something better. Carnegie himself credited a private library with giving him the foundation for his success. "The man who dies rich dies in disgrace," he wrote, and then proceeded to give away roughly 90 percent of his fortune—$350 million total—before he died. That's $6.5 billion today.
To put that into perspective, if the trio of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos gave away 90% of their wealth that would amount to $855 billion. This would end world hunger and provide clean water and sanitization to 8.2 billion people. Yes, that is earth's entire population. But shed no tears, they could still make ends meet with a paltry $95.7 billion remaining.
Rockefeller wasn't far behind. He gave away $530 million during his lifetime—the equivalent of roughly $10 billion today. He funded the University of Chicago with $80 million. He created the Rockefeller Foundation, which pioneered medical research, established some of the world's first schools of public health, and funded the Green Revolution that may have saved a billion lives through agricultural innovation. He helped found Spelman College for Black women and pumped money into medical institutions that developed vaccines for meningitis and yellow fever.
Was it blood money? Absolutely. Did it come with the stench of worker exploitation? Without a doubt. But it also built institutions that outlasted their founders and continue to serve the public good today.
Now let's talk about the modern equivalent—the tech oligarchs, the PayPal Mafia, the Silicon Valley lotto winners who've decided that democracy is just another market inefficiency to be disrupted.
Musk. Bezos. Thiel. Zuckerberg. These are names that will be remembered alongside Carnegie and Rockefeller, except with one crucial difference: where the old robber barons at least pretended to give a shit about society after they'd finished bleeding it dry, the new ones seem hell-bent on purchasing the government itself.
Let's start with Musk, the poster child for the new gilded age. In the 2024 election, this man spent over $277 million to help get Donald Trump elected. That's not philanthropy—that's a business investment. And what did he get in return? A position as "Senior Advisor to the President" and de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, giving him direct influence over federal spending and regulation. The same regulations, mind you, that govern his companies Tesla, SpaceX, and X (which I will call Twitter until the day I die, like some kind of silent protest against the death of sanity).
And his reign as DOGE tsar went exactly as expected. Aside from abject failure to accomplish any, you know, efficiency, he shut down US AID, one of few remaining beacons of international goodwill America hasn't shredded. He flashed a Nazi salute. But his pièce de résistance was the drug addled presser in the Oval Office as national embarrassment to the once hallowed space - a high bar to meet for the Trump Oval that's hosted wack pack personalities like Kanye, Ted Nugent and Kid Rock.
But that wasn't enough. No, Musk had to turn his ownership of Twitter into a personal propaganda machine for MAGA, pumping out twenty or more political posts a day to his 200 million followers. A recent study found that even if you told the algorithm you weren't interested in Elon Musk, his posts would double in your feed. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, 50 misleading or false tweets from Musk about the 2024 election accumulated 1.2 billion views. One point two billion.
And then there was the Pennsylvania lottery scheme—excuse me, "paid spokesperson program." In October 2024, Musk announced he would give away $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states who signed a petition. The first three winners? All registered Republicans in Pennsylvania who had already voted. Even nutty Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner sued to stop it, but a judge let it continue. Legal experts called it "clearly illegal" vote-buying. Musk's lawyers eventually admitted the winners weren't chosen randomly at all but were pre-selected "spokespeople."
Think about that for a second. A billionaire literally handing out cash to voters in swing states to influence a presidential election. Carnegie bought books. Musk bought votes.
But here's where the comparison really starts to sting. Carnegie and Rockefeller, for all their faults, existed in an era before income tax. When Carnegie made his $23 million in 1899, there was no federal mechanism to redistribute that wealth. The robber barons kept their money because there were no rules saying they couldn't.
Today's billionaires have rules. They just don't follow them.
Matthew Desmond, in his must-read book Poverty, by America, drops a statistic that should make your blood boil: if the top 1% of Americans simply paid the taxes they already owe—not higher taxes, not new taxes, just the taxes they're legally obligated to pay—the United States would raise an additional $175 billion every year. That's almost exactly the amount needed to pull every single American out of poverty.
Let me repeat that for the people in the back: We could end poverty in America tomorrow if the rich just paid what they owe. Instead, they hire armies of accountants to find loopholes, they stash money in offshore accounts, they restructure their wealth as loans that aren't taxed as income. Meanwhile, a waitress making $30,000 a year pays her taxes like a responsible citizen because she doesn't have a legal team to help her hide her tips in the Cayman Islands.
But good old fashioned, quiet and anonymous tax avoidance isn't enough for the new rich. Consider Nike founder Phil Knight. He just announced a $2 billion donation to the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University. Sounds great, right? The largest single donation ever to a U.S. university. His name will be on everything—the buildings, the programs, the waiting rooms. You'll see Phil Knight's legacy every time you're sitting in that hospital wondering if your insurance will cover your treatment.
But here's the thing: Knight's net worth is around $35 billion. If he paid his fair share of taxes, that money would go into the general fund, supporting not just cancer research but schools, roads, social services, fire and police departments, and everything else we scrape and claw to fund each year. Instead, he gets to choose where his money goes, gets his name plastered on buildings, and gets lauded as a philanthropist—all while ordinary Americans pick up the slack.
This is the new model: Don't pay taxes. Donate to the causes you personally choose. Get the glory. Let the community beg you for scraps. And the scraps are taxes paid by the poor and middle class.
You want to know where the money goes that should be funding hospitals, fire departments and schools? Let me introduce you to super yacht Koru.
Jeff Bezos, the second-richest human on Earth, owns a yacht that cost $500 million. It's 417 feet long—so big it needed a separate support vessel that cost another $75 million. That support vessel exists primarily to carry a helipad because the main yacht's masts are too tall for a helicopter to land. The annual cost to maintain this floating monument to obscene wealth? About $25 million. That's just to keep it afloat.
Meanwhile, food banks across America struggle to stay open. Schools hold bake sales to buy textbooks. Fire departments run on shoestring budgets in rural communities. And we're supposed to be grateful when billionaires donate to causes they personally find interesting.
Carnegie may have been a ruthless capitalist, but when he died, his estate was worth only $26 million. He gave away everything else. He didn't hoard wealth for its own sake. He didn't engage in an arms race against himself to see how much he could accumulate. Today's billionaires do exactly that. Wealth as a scoreboard. Yacht length as a status symbol. Another zero in the bank account as the ultimate measure of success.
But the yachts are almost beside the point. The real horror show is what happens when that money flows into politics.
Peter Thiel, who is equal parts Doctor Doofenshmirtz and Mr. Burns is a Republican billionaire who co-founded PayPal and Palantir. He mentored J.D. Vance, gave him $15 million for his Senate campaign, and then lobbied Trump to put him on the presidential ticket. More than a dozen people with ties to Thiel have been folded into the Trump administration. That's not democracy. That's a billionaire building a government made in his own image.
This is the merger of Silicon Valley and MAGA that nobody asked for but everyone predicted. These tech titans—some of whom weren't even born in America—now dominate our political discourse. And their goals aren't altruistic. They want deregulation. They want reduced oversight. They want a government that will let them do whatever the fuck they want with minimal interference.
Musk wants government efficiency (translation: fewer regulations on his companies). Thiel wants to live to be 160 through anti-aging technology. They're not thinking about public libraries or eradicating hookworm—they're thinking about Mars colonization and crypto wealth that exists beyond state control.
They're thinking about themselves. Only.
Carnegie and Rockefeller, for all their flaws, at least had some concept of charity, the idea that privilege comes with responsibility. Today's billionaires have privilege without shame.
Here's where I'm supposed to offer some hope, some path forward. But let me be honest: I've got nothing.
The new robber barons feel no such pressure. They've convinced themselves that they deserve their wealth, that government is the enemy which they must infiltrate, that paying taxes is for suckers. The poor are lazy and don't deserve a dime of their wealth. They don't want to build libraries; they want to build influence. They don't want to improve society; they want to reshape it according to their vision—and then move to Mars when things get too messy.
Carnegie built 2,509 libraries because he believed knowledge could lift people out of poverty. Musk offered cash to swing-state voters because he believed money could purchase elections. Rockefeller funded medical research to eradicate disease. Thiel funds politicians who'll protect his investments.
The Gilded Age had its robber barons. We have ours. But at least when Carnegie looked at his fortune, built on the bodies of dead workers, he felt compelled to atone with it that might outlast him, that might provide some redemption—however inadequate—for his sins.
These new oligarchs? They're not looking for redemption. They're not even looking at us. They're too busy counting their money, buying their governments, their mega yachts and planning their escape to the stars.