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The danger of American oligarchs
The danger of American oligarchs

Fast Company

time2 days ago

  • Business
  • Fast Company

The danger of American oligarchs

New Yorker staff writer and author Evan Osnos spent decades chronicling the social, economic, and political changes in China and currently writes about American politics. To understand the second election of President Trump, though, he realized he needed to understand the vast inequality in American society. According to 2024 data from the Federal Reserve, more than two-thirds of the country's wealth is held by the top 10% of U.S. households. And the top 1% of U.S. households hold more than one-third of the country's wealth. Osnos's new collection of essays, The Haves and Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, explores the world of the 1%, from their tax-dodging and yacht-buying techniques to their propensity for building luxury bunkers and employing pop stars to perform at private events. Osnos came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about his book, what's behind the rising inequality in America, and the danger that inequality poses to democracy. Why did you want to write about the ultrarich? In 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president, I realized that the normal tools of political analysis—the way that I usually write about what's happening in the world—were not going to suffice. I couldn't understand how a guy who declared himself the enemy of the elites could somehow inhabit that role while being the billionaire son of a real estate family in New York. I needed to understand. The answer to that lay, ultimately, in trying to understand the mechanics of the big money world. That was the origins of this. You begin the book by talking about how ubiquitous the ultra wealthy are in the administration and you write that inequality has led to the undoing of many societies. Do you think that is happening in America? We are at a very tenuous moment, and I don't think I'm unique in that impression. All of us, no matter where we sit on the political spectrum, we look at it and say, this feels really fragile and it feels volatile. The question of course is, why? From my perspective, you can't understand this periodwithout recognizing that we're living at a time of really historic, arguably unprecedented inequality in this country. That's not an abstraction. The richest people in America have a larger share of the nation's wealth than their predecessors did in the Gilded Age. If you want to really have an honest conversation about what it will take to hold this country together, we have to be honest about the facts. Let's remind ourselves [that] we've been through these moments before and we've found our way back to a more stable, productive, democratic future. The super yacht is the super symbol of our era. There used to be 10 of the largest yachts [available] a generation ago, and now there are 170. They occupy this kind of strange place in our culture. They're both visible and invisible. I mean, you see them in the New York Post or in the Daily Mail. They're designed to stay out of reach, but they are the most conspicuous machines that anybody could possibly own. The yachts are a symbol of a world in which capital is more mobile and more fluid and in which borders are liquified. I had this really interesting interview with a guy who has been in the yachting world for decades. He watched it turn into this ginormous industry with huge amounts of money on the line. And he said every decade or two [the yacht buyers are coming from] a new industry. First it was the Greek shipping fortunes. And so you saw Aristotle Onassis competing against another shipping magnate [for the most ostentatious yacht]. [Then] it was the oil money. All of a sudden, it was people from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and they had different needs. They were sailing their yachts around the Arabian Peninsula and they were inside all the time. They needed good air-conditioning. But what's really interesting about [yacht buying] is that it tells you something about the global economy. Where is the center of gravity at any moment in our time? You could chart the history of American economics over the last 60 years by looking at the high seas. They also depreciate in value immediately. I remember the Financial Times wrote a great piece that described them as about as financially prudent as buying 10 Van Goghs and then holding them above your head while you're treading water. [Yachts are] essentially something for people who have limitless resources. You write about how it's almost easier for a billionaire to live on a luxurious yacht than on land. It might seem uncouth to show how rich you are on land; on water, it's a different story. A Silicon Valley CEO said to me that the honest fact is that you can't live in a $500 million house because the optics are weird. Your employees will be enraged at you. But a half billion dollar boat is pretty nice. This same CEO said to me that the yacht is the best place to, as he put it, absorb excess capital. A certain number of businesses have generated so much [money] because of the ownership structure for their founders and for key investors that [these people] are quite literally encountering this problem of having excess capital and having to figure out ways to park it in places that won't cause blowback socially and culturally and ultimately in business terms. One of the themes that I noticed across this world was that, in a way, this is the natural result of an unthinking cult of scale. It's not that long ago that we thought scale was an unambiguous good. When I wrote a profile of Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago [for The New Yorker ], I was talking to him and to his employees about this period when essentially connecting people was a euphemism for growing. And growing was a self-justifying, self-fulfilling idea. It was an end in itself. The yachts are the symbolic representation of that concept. You grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and decided to write about the town's turn towards Trump. Why did you want to write about it? It's always been a prosperous place. It was an amazing place to grow up as a kid. It has the only public high school that I know of that has an electron microscope. There was also a point at which I became aware that Greenwich told us something important about what was happening in Republican politics. Greenwich had been traditionally the birthplace of the country club Republican. The Bush family was from there. Prescott Bush, who was the father of George H.W. Bush, was quite literally the country club golf champion in town. He was the senator from Connecticut, and he was an old-school moderate Republican—what they used to call a Rockefeller Republican. But in 2016, the Republican Town Committee in Greenwich was led by somebody who came out and said they were not going to vote for Jeb Bush. They were going to vote for Donald Trump. That became a revealing indicator: Republican strongholds that we might've thought of being more inclined towards moderate Republicans were lining up with Trump. Part of the explanation is that there had been a decision along the way that we can no longer afford to do the kind of moderate Republican thing that gives a little here and takes a little here, but ultimately believes in working with Democrats. There was an argument to be made that there was a similar thing going on in the Democratic side, in terms of getting more and more extreme. But it was when you had the birthplace of Country Club Republicanism begin to line up with Donald Trump, I said, I've got to understand how that happened. And this essay tells that story. What did you learn about how American elites paved the way for Trump's election? There is a lot of blame to go around for creating the myth of Donald Trump that continued for so long. Around New York City, Donald Trump was a permanent piece of media furniture. He was in the papers all the time, partly because he was pretending to be his own publicist and planting stories. To see him, through The Apprentice, become something else in the eyes of Americans more broadly was a turning point. All of a sudden he [became] known, through the power of this invented persona, as the icon of a big city, successful capitalist. Part of the reason why I think why the word elite has become so fraught is that Trump used his own position in communities of power to say to the American public, 'Because I am an elite, I can help you pick the lock. I will help you understand why [the government] is corrupt, how it works, and therefore I, dear voter, will give you a piece of the action.' After a half a century of him selling the illusion of access to power and fortune, he and his family have now realized that in 2025 the thing people will pay most exorbitantly for is access to the highest reaches of the United States government. His son has created a club called Executive Branch with an initiation fee of up to $500,000. It's funny because at the same time, he hired a lot of elites to his cabinet. He named 13 billionaires to the highest ranks of his administration. You can imagine a scenario in which you say, look, these are people who have succeeded. They understand the market; they understand economics. What becomes a problem is when the administration is so secluded from the experience of regular life that it has a very hard time expressing and enacting the public will. It was quite telling when Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, said that his mother-in-law wouldn't notice if her social security check didn't show up. I think there's a lot of Americans that probably would notice if their social security check didn't show up. I think this is part of what Elon Musk ran into, when he started talking about empathy as a weakness of Western civilization or social security as a Ponzi scheme. It was a revealing indicator of how much his life had become divorced from the experience of ordinary people. You've written about elites deriding other elites and saying, 'I'm different because I understand the common man.' Why do you think that is so resonant with voters? Americans at their core want to get rich. We always have and we always will. That is baked into the American idea. What's happening now is that people in larger numbers are beginning to realize that there are impediments to that process. Part of the reason why Donald Trump was able to win again was that he is able to say to people, even in an unspoken way, that he wants them to prosper and succeed. Part of the process of getting people to understand [our level of inequality] is getting [them to] visualize some of the fault lines in our economy that are making it harder for people to prosper. The key is not saying to people they should give up on the goal of getting rich. The key is giving people the information to understand why they're not. When you're talking about the sort of elites who have yachts, are they completely divorced from understanding the common person? I think that the experience of entering into that world is actually farther away from regular life than outsiders imagine. There was a yacht owner who said on a documentary that if the public ever knew what it's really like on these yachts, they'd bring back the guillotine. It sounds like a joke except that part of what's happening is that [elites] are aware. There was a really prophetic comment a century ago from [Supreme Court justice] Louis Brandeis. He said, you can either have democracy or you can have money concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, but you can't have both. That was one of the observations that led to the New Deal and to an effort to try to shift the balance from a concentration of resources into the hands of too few, into a more equitable distribution. [That] led to what was ultimately a period of rising standards of living for more people. That period came to an end in the late 1970s. I think there is a recognition on the part of some in politics that we need to figure out a way to get back to that. What was your favorite essay to write in the book? The piece about pop stars performing at private parties. I embedded with Flo Rida for a bar mitzvah. It was an experience that as you're doing it, you say to yourself, I think I will be able to die happy when I've done this. The reason I got interested in it was [wondering], what are the economics of that? What makes a pop star who could be performing in front of 40,000 screaming fans say, Actually I'm going to go to a sweet 16 in Teaneck. In the end, it's not that complicated what motivates them to go. The reason why this is an artifact of our time, why it's like a new thing, is the simple fact that, until recently, people couldn't afford to have the Foo Fighters in their backyard on a Thursday, and now they can. I sometimes feel like I'm like a historian writing in real time about a world that we need to describe while it exists. In 2015, Uber famously offered Beyoncé $6 million to perform at one of their corporate events. Instead, she requested an equity stake in the company and ultimately made $300 million from it. If you step back, what's fascinating about that is that right there is a transaction between billionaire and billionaire. When you can get on board a certain kind of opportunity and experience, then the curve goes vertical, and you get access to all kinds of other things. It can be quite dangerous for a country because it means that those people are then getting further and further from the experience of everybody else. I think it's perilous for those individuals because they run the risk of suddenly encountering a kind of backlash and realizing they've lost touch with the people they were supposed to be in touch with. I quoted Ramsay MacMullen, the great scholar of Rome, in the book. He was once asked if he could summarize the epic history of the fall of Rome as concisely as possible. He said that it took 500 years but it can be distilled into three words: fewer had more. The extended deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is this Friday, June 27, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.

Innovation takes centrestage, 95% of Indian firms rank it among top 3 priorities: BCG report
Innovation takes centrestage, 95% of Indian firms rank it among top 3 priorities: BCG report

India Gazette

time2 days ago

  • Business
  • India Gazette

Innovation takes centrestage, 95% of Indian firms rank it among top 3 priorities: BCG report

New Delhi [India], June 30 (ANI): Around 95 per cent of Indian companies rank innovation among their top three priorities amid ongoing economic and geopolitical turbulence, a new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) revealed. The report, titled 'Most Innovative Companies 2025: In Disruptive Times, the Resilient Win', explores insights from two decades of BCG's innovation research. Based on an analysis of the firms that have appeared on BCG's annual 50 Most Innovative Companies lists since 2005, the report found a strong link between long-term innovation excellence and total shareholder return (TSR). Top innovators outperformed the broader market by 2.4 percentage points annually on average, with particularly strong gains during the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. 'The ability to innovate through adversity is what separates exceptional companies from the rest,' said Justin Manly, a BCG managing director and senior partner and a coauthor of the report. 'R&D spending alone isn't enough. What matters most is investing in the right initiatives and capabilities to turn uncertainty into opportunity.' China and India lead in innovation prioritisation with 95 per cent of their respondents reporting innovation as a top-three priority in 2024. Digital maturity has become table stakes for innovation success. BCG's analysis of corporate earnings call transcripts found that mentions of digital innovation doubled from 2005 to 2024. As companies face increased geopolitical uncertainty, the report outlines four questions to help business leaders prepare for a potential post-globalisation world: ambition, portfolio, talent, and footprint. 'The best innovators don't just weather the storm--they redesign the ship while sailing through it,' said Amy MacDougall, a BCG partner and a coauthor of the report. 'This is the moment for bold action to future-proof innovation systems.' (ANI)

Academy Bank Named One of America's Most Innovative Companies by FORTUNE for 2025
Academy Bank Named One of America's Most Innovative Companies by FORTUNE for 2025

Yahoo

time19-05-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

Academy Bank Named One of America's Most Innovative Companies by FORTUNE for 2025

Honor recognizes companies driving industry transformation KANSAS CITY, Mo., May 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Academy Bank – a full-service community bank and wholly owned subsidiary of Dickinson Financial Corp. – has once again earned national recognition for its commitment to innovation, landing a spot on FORTUNE magazine's prestigious list of America's Most Innovative Companies for 2025. This marks the second time in three years the Kansas City-based bank has been honored, having also received the accolade in 2023. Now in its third year, FORTUNE's annual list celebrates 300 U.S.-based companies that are transforming industries and setting new standards in innovation. Academy Bank is one of just 10 companies in Kansas and Missouri to be included in the 2025 rankings. "We're incredibly proud to be recognized once again by FORTUNE as an innovation leader," said Paul Holewinski, CEO of Academy Bank. "This award affirms our belief that forward-thinking solutions, both for our clients and within our internal operations, are key to long-term success." The America's Most Innovative Companies list, developed by FORTUNE in collaboration with global research firm Statista, is based on evaluations in three equally weighted categories: Product innovation – Examines a company's products and services for design, usability and more Process innovation – Looks at a wide range of processes in a company, such as procurement, sales and marketing Innovation culture – Measures the creativity and inherent sense of entrepreneurship within a company, primarily based on associate/employee evaluations According to FORTUNE, the 300 U.S.-based honorees on its 2025 ranking collectively generated over $12.6 trillion in revenue, with a median revenue of $22 billion. "This recognition is a direct reflection of our associates' unwavering commitment to fresh thinking and finding better ways of serving our communities," Holewinski added. Academy Bank joins a distinguished group of innovators across various industries on the Fortune Most Innovative Companies list, reinforcing its dedication to providing a superior banking experience through fast, easy and personal service. Academy Bank's innovative approach to banking emphasizes convenience, security and providing a seamless client experience. Investments in AI and automation, including robotic process automation, translate to cutting-edge banking solutions that are accessible, secure and simple. Academy Bank is consistently recognized for excellence in banking by a variety of respected local and national organizations. Recent Academy Bank accolades include a 2025 HCM Distinction Award for Talent at Work from global human capital management technology provider ADP, Fortune's Best Business CDs" and "Top Mortgage Lender" from the Kansas City Business Journal. The institution also won a Silver Stevie Award in the 2024 American Business Awards for the redesign of the Academy Bank website. About Academy BankAcademy Bank is a full-service commercial bank with $2.9 billion in assets and more than 75 banking centers in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. Academy Bank provides a wide range of financial solutions for business and individuals, including commercial and business banking, treasury management and mortgage services. Academy Bank is privately held and family-owned by Dickinson Financial Corporation, a $4.3 billion holding company headquartered in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Academy Bank's sister bank, Armed Forces Bank, headquartered in Leavenworth, Kansas, proudly serves active and retired military and civilian clients around the world with more on-base locations than any military bank in the country. For more information, visit Member FDIC View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Academy Bank

How Yahoo built AI-driven content discovery into its revamped news app
How Yahoo built AI-driven content discovery into its revamped news app

Yahoo

time13-05-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

How Yahoo built AI-driven content discovery into its revamped news app

In April 2024, Yahoo acquired Artifact, a tool that uses AI to recommend news to readers. Yahoo folded Artifact's—which was cofounded by Instagram cofounders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom—into its revamped news app to help surface and curate content for readers. 5 Navy SEAL strategies to turn stress into success in any situation Going 'AI first' appears to be backfiring on Klarna and Duolingo Rite Aid closing stores update: See the list of 68 pharmacy locations that will shutter across 7 states Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about the acquisition, the company's approach to news curation, and what the future could hold for the private equity-owned company. This interview has been edited and condensed. This embedded content is not available in your region. Yahoo acquired news discovery platform Artifact last year. Now, the technology is used in Yahoo's revamped news app. Why did you acquire the platform? Artifact had come up as a startup founded by the Instagram cofounders. It used AI and advanced algorithms to pull in really great content and also do a great job of surfacing it. When we read that they were going to shut it down, I reached out to Kevin Systrom immediately to say we should talk about acquiring it. We basically took the backbone of the Artifact app and made it the Yahoo News app. We look to acquire companies if they can fill a gap for us. We're not in the game of acquihires. It has to be a product fit. We're the No. 1 news publication in the U.S. in terms of total traffic. We got to that point by being an aggregator. We're aggregating thousands of sources and then using algorithms to surface the right ones for each of our millions of users. With Artifact, how are you using AI to personalize a user's newsfeed? We hope the end user doesn't think about it at all. It's just about the Yahoo News app getting smarter at delivering the right content to you at the right time. We're very pro publisher and we are a big part of the ecosystem. We send them traffic and give them revenue as part of it. We've been doing that for over 20 years. That is, in some ways, pro publisher, but AI summaries come up on search and articles get summarized via bullet points. That means users may not actually read the articles, and media companies will get fewer page views. I would think about it a little bit differently. If you go back to the beginning of how Yahoo has always worked with publishers, we're a huge part of the ecosystem in sending traffic out. It's very important to us to keep the ecosystem very healthy, at least how it historically was. I understand your point, and certainly that's a new factor for publishers to worry about in terms of AI companies sucking in all their data. Everything we do is with the publisher. We brought all of our publisher relationships to Artifact. Even when there's a summary, it's not trying to [stop people looking at] the article, it is trying to pull out the highlights of [the article]. We will also summarize a topic across publishers just for helpful understanding. But again, it all goes back to sending people down the funnel to [media] properties. But they would only go down that funnel if they want to learn more, right? I don't know how much time you've spent with any of these apps, but I'd say they're bullet points, short tidbits at the top. They're really not summarizing the whole article. A news algorithm designed for people can contribute to their biases. Yahoo's role is nonpartisan, but how do you think about balancing the goal of providing a customer service with preventing the information that only reinforces a reader's beliefs? We think a lot about it. We try to be very nonpartisan. It's a hard job. One of the signs we're getting it right is I get nasty emails from people on both sides. Part of our job with the algorithm is to make sure readers don't go too [far] into the rabbit hole and that [they] actually can continue to see a balance of things. At the same time, our job is to customize for them as an individual, so the algorithms take that into account. But there are a couple other things happening. We also balance [AI curation with] human curation, which is part of Yahoo being the trusted guide for all these years. Then of course, we are working with trusted publishers that we have long standing relationships with—not sharing user generated content. How does the app fit into Yahoo's business strategy? In any given month, we are usually the No. 2 ranked property on comScore in the US multiplatform or in the top five across desktop and mobile. We're in the top five with Gen Z, and 90% of internet users in the US touch Yahoo in any given month. So monetization of one property is not our issue. We monetize very well. Most of it's through advertising, like with any major freemium publisher or product. A certain percentage of our users subscribe to our more premium offerings in given categories like sports or finance or email. News is just a part of that. You've said job No. 1 is making every one of these products and brands under Yahoo superstrong on their own within the categories in which they operate. There've been news reports saying you might want to spin off different products and take them public. There've been other reports saying you might want to take the company public as a whole. I guess I'm trying to get a sense of what you think the future is for Yahoo. I would answer that maybe two ways. It's our job to create value and grow the business, which 30 years old. But for those who don't know, we were spun out of Verizon by Apollo, the world's largest private equity firm in September 2021, then I came in as CEO. Most private equity firms want returns. There are two ways to get a return. If you're a private equity firm, you could go public or you can sell. It is also possible that your investors feel that they have a tiger by the tail and want to hold out longer. I've founded startups, I've worked at big public companies. It doesn't matter the size of your company, the name of the game is growth either way. That's also a sign of a healthy company. It's a sign that you're delivering for users. We'll create a very valuable company, whether it's us stand-alone going public, or it's someone acquiring the company. That said, we definitely have inbounds all the time, especially because it is owned by private equity of people trying to pick off part of our pieces of our company. Part of the private equity game is probably to listen to everybody and understand what your options are. Every search engine tech company that puts out any kind of content or that aggregates content is partnering with LLMs like Open AI or Anthropic. Who are you partnering with? Going back to the late 2000s, Yahoo has had a longstanding relationship with Microsoft, which led to an easy relationship with Microsoft copilot. We have the second largest email platform after Gmail, it's in the hundreds of millions of users. Even a year before Apple announced this Apple Intelligence series of products that would show up in their mail product, we announced AI in Yahoo Mail, helping you search mail, summarize it, write, edit, and more. That partnership was done with OpenAI. We also are partners with Anthropic, with Google, and others on other products that we have. We work with everybody so far and we'll continue to do so. We're also internally building a bunch of our own AI products. I think it's too important to leave it purely to third parties. We have to have our own expertise there. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter: Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

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