A century ago, the robber barons at the helm of the U.S. economy were easily identifiable titans of industry: Andrew Carnegie of Carnegie Steel, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, financier and steel magnate J.P. Morgan. It was easy to draw the link between the robber barons’ brutal business practices and their immense wealth; it was clear that these businessmen were, quite literally, robbing the American people in the course of amassing their fortunes.
The influence of today’s super-rich is significantly harder to trace. Much of their wealth is managed in opaque Wall Street investment vehicles and byzantine corporate structures. They are less likely to slap their names on their ventures, and their profitable relationships with the most destructive segments of our economy are hidden behind layers of corporate control. In our post-industrial economy, they amass wealth not by producing things with actual value, but rather by riding waves of speculation, such as the housing bubble, to dizzying heights of wealth.
Today’s super-rich are not robber barons, but bubble barons: they extract their fortunes from intensifying cycles of imaginary wealth creation and destruction, live at a far remove from their businesses, and evade accountability in the public spotlight. The robber barons stood behind their economic crimes; the bubble barons, for the most part, do not.
We’ve identified 67 “bubble barons” (also listed below) to target with this investigation. All are worth $2 billion or more, and all have ties to the industries that benefited most from the housing bubble: real estate and finance. Some, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, have enjoyed increases of over 400 percent on what were substantial fortunes in the pre-bubble years. Others, such as former Enron trader John Arnold, are newly minted billionaires.
Following the bubble barons’ money will be a key component of our investigation; naturally, this will entail a closer look at their charitable and political activities. Bloomberg, for one, supports public health initiatives through his family foundation. George Soros is a well-known funder of progressive causes through his Open Society Institute. The Koch brothers, on the other hand, are prominent backers of conservative organizations.
All of these fortunes were built on the illusion of a sound economy — an illusion that came crashing down for most of the country in 2007 and 2008, as record numbers of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure and saw their jobs disappear.
But the illusion didn’t come crashing down for the bubble barons. The U.S. government came to their rescue, in the form of massive, taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailouts and a monetary policy that rewards wealth, above all — the bubble barons, above all. While Americans struggle under the burden of double-digit interest rates on mortgages and credit cards and see their savings accounts eek out gains measured in basis points, the bubble barons are essentially getting paid unprecedented amounts to sit on their money, simply because they have lots and lots of it.
Some notable names did not make the initial list because they did not see net gains in wealth over the past 10 years. Warren Buffett, surprisingly, hasn’t seen huge gains since the dot-com bubble, if Forbes’ data is to be believed. Others didn’t make the cut because their industry was not adequately bubble-oriented (e.g. Oprah, Bill Gates and the Google founders).
The Bubble Barons (in alphabetical order):
Sheldon G Adelson
John Arnold
Andrew Beal
Leon D Black
Michael Bloomberg
Donald Bren
Ronald W Burkle
Charles Butt
Steven Cohen
William E Conway Jr
Daniel D’Aniello
Ray Dalio
Stanley Druckenmiller
Dan Duncan
Philip Falcone
Malcolm Glazer
Kenneth Griffin
William Gross
Harold G Hamm
Timothy Headington
William Hilton
Robert Holding
Carl C Icahn
Rupert H Johnson Jr
Charles B Johnson
George Kaiser
Pauline MacMillan Keinath
Peter N Kellogg
Richard Kinder
Charles G. Koch
David Koch
Bruce Kovner
Henry R Kravis
E Stanley Kroenke
Edward Lampert
Richard LeFrak
Theodore Lerner
Cargill MacMillan Jr
Whitney MacMillan
Michael Milken
Paul Milstein
David Murdock
Daniel Och
John Paulson
Ronald Perelman
Peter G Peterson
Marion MacMillan Pictet
Ira Rennert
George Roberts
Julian Robertson Jr
Stephen Ross
David Rubenstein
Donald Schneider
Stephen Schwarzman
David Shaw
Harold Simmons
James Simons
John Sobrato
George Soros
David Tepper
Paul Tudor Jones II
Dennis Washington
Stephen A Wynn
Samuel Zell
Daniel Ziff
Dirk Ziff
Robert Ziff