Fast Company, October 21, 2019: This Man is Disrupting the Cult of the Billionaire
“I love it,” Giridharadas, 38, says of being on television, as we wait in a narrow greenroom before his 7 a.m. call time. An author and journalist, he first appeared on Morning Joe in 2015 after sparring on Twitter with the show’s cohost Joe Scarborough about the Trump campaign’s proposed Muslim ban. By the time Giridharadas’s 2018 book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, became a best-seller, he had become somewhat of a regular. Being on the show “made me realize how few people I was reaching,” he says. “I just didn’t have a sense of the scale.” (He now has more than 520,000 Twitter followers.) The talking-head format favors big shows of personality over substantive debates about economics or politics. But joining the fray is worth it, he says, “to give millions of people a diluted version of my idea.”
That idea, or at least the sound-bite version of it, is that today’s plutocrats—as Giridharadas isn’t afraid to call the 1%—maintain their elite status, and the broader status quo, by using their wealth to control, marionette-style, the priorities of America’s noble-minded societal institutions, from top research universities to humble community organizations. For too long, Giridharadas argues, we’ve allowed our modern moneyed classes to burnish their reputations with philanthropic gifts and Davos fireside chats while the corporations they control simultaneously gut our labor institutions, plunder our planet and hoard our collective resources. Given this exercise of power, he believes, it should come as no surprise that inequality has been on the rise in the United States for the past three decades, and that no giant check from on high has fixed it.
