Key takeaways

• There are more billionaires than ever, both in the US and globally, and they’re much richer than they were even a decade ago.
  
• The proliferation of billionaires is, in many ways, a policy choice. Changes to the tax code have made it easier than ever to make and keep a fortune, even as little has changed for the bottom 90 percent of Americans.
  
• A growing wealth gap has resulted in growing anti-billionaire sentiments in US politics, most recently showcased in Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race.

It feels like everyone’s mad at billionaires right now.

Maybe it’s the disconnect between Americans struggling with grocery prices and health care premiums and the ultrarich sailing on their super yachts and flying on their private jets.

Maybe it’s that Elon Musk is on course to become the world’s first trillionaire.

Maybe it’s that billionaires poured money into trying to defeat Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race.

Maybe it’s that members of the three comma club are paying a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

Either way, new survey data shows that 67 percent of Americans say billionaires are making society less fair, up eight points from a year ago.

The anti-billionaire sentiment is high. To understand why, Today, Explained co-host Noel King called up Evan Osnos, a staff writer at the New Yorker. He’s spent a lot of time with the very wealthy and published a decade’s worth of essays about them in his book The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Evan, what are the best and worst parts of hanging out with billionaires?

Unfortunately, the best part is that it is awfully tempting. You begin to realize just how delicious the fresh-squeezed juice really is. The worst part is that you also begin to wonder about some big questions about the small-D democratic health of the country. So, it sends you back into history in ways that can be both funny and thrilling — and also quite disconcerting at times.

If you say billionaire to me, I think Oprah. That is where my mind goes. But Oprah would not be a typical billionaire, demographically. She’s an older Black woman. Is there a typical person who represents what a billionaire is?

The median billionaire would look a lot like

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