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The Billionaires Are Winning

They don’t just have more money. They have more power over politics, technology, and the rest of us

In the first season of HBO’s drama series Succession, media baron Logan Roy awaits a phone call from the president of the United States. When he eventually has POTUS on the line, Roy makes him wait a long twenty seconds before picking up. This power play was more than symbolic. By the show’s third season, the executives of his megacorporation, Waystar Royco, are casually anointing their picks for the next commander-in-chief, as if the country’s electorate was an afterthought.

Succession, like the best satire, trades in biting truth. The show is directly inspired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a defining force in modern American politics. Jeff Bezos controls not only global package delivery but also one of the country’s most storied newspapers. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, bought Twitter, a social media platform with over half a billion users at its height, and degraded it, worsening internet discourse ever since. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg was recently called the ruler of “history’s largest nonterritorial empire,” spanning every network you use to talk with the family and friends you don’t have time to see anymore.

In his final Oval Office address in January 2025, President Joe Biden warned about American oligarchs and “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultrawealthy people” that could threaten democracy and basic rights. Days later, Donald Trump, a man with his own ten-digit net worth, succeeded him, and many of those same oligarchs attended the inauguration. Succession demonstrates that you can, indeed, write this stuff.

It’s a story that’s also being played out in Canada. Long seen as the bastion of progressivism, the country has the world’s seventh-highest number of billionaires, per the 2026 Forbes rankings. According to a new Oxfam Canada’s Wealth Inequality report, “a person in the richest one percent . . . owns 210 times more wealth than a person in the poorest 50 percent.” To call billionaires a policy failure has almost become a cliché.

It’s an argument David Moscrop, a contributing writer for The Walrus and one of the speakers at The Billionaire Problem,........

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