We Can Do Hard Things
WHY ARE BILLIONAIRES?!?: You’re Not Gonna Believe This B.S. with Amanda & Anand Giridharadas
20 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What myths about billionaires does this episode explore?
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. This is Amanda, and you're not gonna believe this bullshit. I'm feeling very excited and nervous and energized and vulnerable, hoping that you love this new little series I'm hosting that I am loosely calling You're Not Gonna Believe This Bullshit.
It's going to be a set of shows throughout the year that are sort of Real Housewives meets History Channel meets TED Talk meets your favorite etymology book. My goal is to bring you one thing that seems maybe obscure or isolated or niche, like cat ladies, pre-celibacy, the carbon footprint, birth control, the bar exam, the CIA, something we sort of take as given. And we're going to bust it open.
We're going to dig back into the history of that thing, how it was invented, because of course everything is invented for someone else's profit and at someone else's expense. And we're going to peel back what that seemingly inevitable idiosyncratic one thing reveals about everything, about power and culture and our daily lives.
And it will be about our actual lives because nothing is more political than our daily lives. I have a hunch that most structural power is built of tiny Jenga pieces that seem insignificant, isolated, and obscure. That those who are on top of the structural power system need us to believe and see as natural and inevitable.
And that the more we take them out, turn one and another over in our hands and really examine it, the closer we are to toppling the whole damn thing and being able to build back a sturdier structure that we can all live and breathe and thrive inside of. That's my dream.
And if we fall short of that dream, we'll at least have some really interesting context to reframe the way we interpret what we see in the news and experience in our lives. And at the very, very least, we'll have some sexy new facts to share at the dinner table or bus stop or grocery line. I'm anxious because I hope you will love this series.
And I'm trying to be brave because I think it's going to be fun and important. So here we go, y'all. Our first one. And you're not going to believe this bullshit about billionaires. I've wondered for a long time why we are not talking about billionaires, our societal lust and adoration for them, their extreme stranglehold ownership over the economy, the media, and the government.
It's the reason we are in this godforsaken train wreck of an era. So today we are pulling back the curtain on the entire political theater playing out in front of us. Why are billionaires? Who are the billionaires? How did they happen? Who is paying for billionaires' right to exist?
Why do we praise them as philanthropic heroes instead of preventing their inane hoarding of what should be collective prosperity? We are diving into the different roles, written and unwritten, they play by. What created our cultural obsession with them?
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Chapter 2: How do billionaires manipulate public perception?
I mean, I think we should be obsessed with billionaires, but for very different reasons than we are. First, I need us to understand what we are talking about when we are talking about billionaires. We tend to refer to millionaires and billionaires. The fact is that a millionaire is closer economically to a minimum wage worker than to a billionaire. This is what a billion is.
If you earned one dollar every second, you would reach one million after 11 and a half days. To get to a billion dollars, you would need 31.7 years. If you earned $100,000 a year, you would earn a million after 10 years of work. At the same rate, you would need to work 10,000 years to earn a billion. If you spent $1,000 a day, it would take you just 2.7 years to spend a million dollars.
If you spent the same amount a day, it would take you 2,740 years, longer than the Roman Empire existed, to spend $1 billion. That's what a billion is. That's what billionaires have. More money than they could ever ethically make. More money than they, quite literally, could ever spend in thousands of lifetimes.
Across the world, eight, eight billionaires own the same wealth as 3.6 billion people, half the entire population of the planet. Eight people. In America, the top 1% of Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 90%.
In these United States of America, the three wealthiest men, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, all of whom were in the front row of Trump's inauguration and are in the driver's seat of his administration—he has an unprecedented 13 billionaires in his administration— Those three men own more wealth than the bottom half of America. More wealth than over 165 million of us.
In America, we have a deeply curated and intentional story that billionaires are the natural result of extraordinary effort, inventive brilliance, and brave risk-taking. This, my friends, is some bootstrap bullshit. Take Elon.
Elon Musk, the man purported to despise big government, has netted out a personal individual in-his-pocket profit of $9.2 billion thanks to government subsidies, grants, tax breaks, and contracts to his companies. Bezos has received more than $15 billion in government subsidies and contracts. Take the Waltons, who own Walmart.
Walmart pays its more than 1.6 million American workers below a living wage, which means that roughly one in four Walmart employees relies on public assistance, costing the American taxpayers $6 billion a year.
While we pick up the tab, the billionaire Walton family collects the profits generated by their poverty wages, meaning that your money is directly subsidizing the Walton family fortune, which is now at $430 billion. Taxpayers are effectively writing a check to the Walton family for roughly $3 billion every year since they own half of Walmart.
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Chapter 3: What do the Epstein emails reveal about billionaire behavior?
by subsidizing low wages through public benefits. Billionaires are not bootstrappers who pulled themselves up. They are in fact an invention of specific policies that created them, specific laws that didn't exist until the 1980s that allow hoarded wealth to scale limitless while denying workers the fruits of their productivity. A line from E.L.
Doctorow's Ragtime goes, how can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few? The answer is by being persuaded to identify with them. We have been persuaded that billionaires are not unethical hoarders, but aspirational heroes, and that we too could be that wealthy if only we were clever enough and hardworking enough with a little luck.
Hoping to be winners like them, we are children standing before a carnival game that the owners have already ensured is unwinnable. We keep trying, we keep losing, while the carnival owners chuckle, pocket our tickets, and assure us we'll get them next time. The problem with idolizing billionaires is that we aspire to wealth we will never come close to touching.
instead of changing the system that protects only the hoarders and hurts the vast majority of us. The vast majority of us who are the people we should be identifying with.
Because if we stop fighting with each other for this billionaire scraps for a hot minute, we could unite to create a more just, stable society where folks have enough, where people can even get rich, but where one dinner party's worth of people cannot ensure the economy, the media, and the government work exclusively for them.
Now, there is extreme wealth, which I suppose one could argue is not inherently unethical. But what we have today is extreme wealth and extreme wealth inequality. Extreme wealth by a few in a nation where the majority of hardworking people are not even able to get by. So who is subsidizing billionaires?
In order to reach the low end of Bezos' wealth, the average worker would need to work for 4 million years. Elon Musk makes more in a single day than a teacher will earn in thousands of lifetimes. The fortunes of the five richest men in the world more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, while billions of workers who made their success possible declined in wages and living standards.
Here's what we need to understand. It's not that there isn't enough productivity or money. Productivity per worker has nearly doubled since the 1970s. It's just that anyone who isn't at the top is denied access to the fruits of their own productivity. In the 1970s, median wages tracked productivity fairly closely.
But from 1980 to today, median wages have barely budged, even though productivity rose by as much as 80%. This means that workers create far more value than they are compensated for. That compensation is just captured by owners and execs. In 1970, a U.S. worker produced $20 an hour of output and earned $19 an hour.
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Chapter 4: How does the Mandani campaign challenge billionaire influence?
Okay? You produce $20, you earn $19. In 2024, a worker produced $50 an hour and earned $25. Since 2019, CEO compensation has increased 50% while worker pay rose by less than 1%. Right now, over 60% of our fellow Americans live paycheck to paycheck. 40% of us would not be able to come up with $400 for an emergency.
85 million are uninsured or underinsured, and more than 20 million households spend over half their incomes on rent and mortgages. Over 60,000 people die every year because they can't afford to go to a doctor on time. 25% of our seniors survive on less than $15,000 a year. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth.
And working people, unsurprisingly, live far shorter lives than the rich. This is not natural. This is not how it has always been. This is a political decision and we can and must make a different one. This is a Jenga piece we have to pull out. I'm delighted to bring into this conversation Anand Giridharadas.
We talk about billionaires, what the Epstein files reveal about their rules, what the Mandani election reveals about who they are. And by the end of this conversation, You will never again hear the phrase win-win or hear of a billionaire philanthropist without questioning both deeply. You will see why Lean In and other ultra-elite faux solutions are propagandist bullshit.
And you will have reason to be deeply hopeful that as much as we are in the throes of crisis and injustice, we are also on the precipice of a new progressive era in which we will get to have nice things. nice things that much of the world already enjoys. I am delighted to be today with Anan Girdedas to talk about the bullshit stories and rules of billionaires.
Anan Girdedas is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Persuaders, the international bestseller, Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Times, he is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC and publisher of the newsletter, The Inc. Thank you for being here, Anand. Thank you.
I'm so happy to be with you.
This is such a treat.
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Chapter 5: Why do we idolize billionaires instead of questioning their wealth?
I feel like the effort of every power structure is to have us believe that it has always been this way, that this is inevitable and natural and to just accept it and live within it. And so I wonder if we can set the stage with the brief historical evolution of how this happened, because it wasn't always like this. The post-World War II period is Through 1973, we have high taxes on the rich.
We have strong unions. We have regulated finance, rapidly growing wages that actually are tied to productivity. Imagine that. And then 1980s happens and Reaganism happens. So 1982, U.S. has 13 billionaires. Now we have more than 900 billionaires. billionaires in America. So what the hell happened there that took us to a place where we have accepted massive inequality as normal?
Well, first of all, I'm so happy to be on the show. I've admired it from afar and it's a thrill to be talking to you. I actually want to start where you were a second ago.
which is that every ruling class throughout history invents a story to do a few things, I think, to make it seem like this is the only way, to make it seem like this is fair, this is justified, and that it would be too difficult, too costly, too dangerous to change it, right? And the reason I think it's worth starting there is it is easier to see how this is done
when you are looking at other people's times and places. It's actually hardest to see this in your own time. Precisely because of how the story works. Let's pause before we get to now. Think about slavery time. You can't just have slavery. You can't just have a material system
in which some people are enslaved and put in bondage and killed if they break rules and chased if they leave, you can't just do that activity. It's incredibly important to invent a narrative if you want that kind of regime. And we all know that, right? Because it's a different time and place.
And by the way, you gotta invent a narrative, ideally, if that's what you wanna defend, that the people on the top of that system believe, obviously,
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Chapter 6: What historical context explains the rise of billionaires?
But you got to invent a narrative, ideally, that even some of the people who are not benefiting from that regime believe. So in the case of slavery, you wanted to get a lot of the poor white people who are not benefiting from the capitalist exploitation of enslaved labor. You want to get some of them believing it.
Ideally, you want to get some of the enslaved people thinking that there's some naturalness to this order. You think about a caste system in India. You can't just divide people into the warriors and the priests and the laborers and the people who have to think they're untouchable. Their shadow can't even cross someone.
They got to sweep behind themselves as they walk through the village to make sure that they don't contaminate anybody else. You can't just divide labor and hope it all goes well. You have to invent a story. And so in India, the ancient caste system, there was a tremendous amount of narrative work done. to allow that.
And even though the caste discrimination and stuff is formally illegal in India, that story is still very much in India thousands of years later. You can feel it. It has implications for the present. We could go on, example, example, example. Feudal times. Think of Downton Abbey, right? Think of any of these worlds from the past. It's not enough to just split people into upstairs and downstairs.
You gotta invent the story. And so what I was interested in is what is that story for now? What is the story? Because everybody sees the story once it's in history. Once it's in your eighth grade history textbook, you're like, man, those were some suckers believing that narrative. It's real easy to look at 150 years ago and be like, man, people were real idiots back then.
They just believed whatever the elites wanted them to believe. The more interesting question is, what are you believing right now that your great-grandchildren will be like, can't believe my ancestors believed that? And I began the project that became Winners Take All with that question of like, what is that for now? Because as you say,
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Chapter 7: How can we create a more equitable society?
starting in the early 80s, there was this... Reagan policy regime, tax cuts, spending cuts, cut what government does, help people less, trust people to pursue the American dream on their own devices, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, whether or not you have shoes or even feet. Let's see what happens. So what started to happen was the obvious, predictable thing.
People were suffering, people were hurt, people were not getting the help they need, people were not able, in fact, to pull themselves up when they didn't have the right education, didn't have the right healthcare, and so on and so forth.
And in that environment, as government pulled back, as inequality started to yawn wider and wider and wider, it became important to do what elites have always done, which is continue to articulate a story. But This particular elite in our era needed to invent a story suited to our time. If they had said, you know, well, we're rich because we're white, like that might have worked in 1850.
People don't love that narrative today. If they had said, you know, we're rich because my grandfather inherited this land, as you might have said in Downton Abbey kind of world, people don't really like that story anymore. So the story sometimes has to evolve. What people respect in our time is entrepreneurship, is go it alone business success, is hacking it and making it in the free market.
We live in an age that's called the age of meritocracy, is being very smart and being very credentialed and making something and making something of yourself through that. They figured out they needed to make a story about the naturalness of this inequality in this time by telling a story of their brilliance, their enterprise, their grit, their perseverance in making these fortunes.
And this is the really interesting twist. Because I think they began to understand the anger that was emerging over inequality. People are not stupid. They know when they're hurting. So these elites, and this is the twist, they went further than many elites in not only saying we earned it.
They told a second related story, which is those of you who are mad and don't maybe think we earned it or think that even if we did earn it, this ain't right. You all need to simmer down because
If you really want change, which is what you say you want, if you really want reform, if you really want to change the world, you really want revolution even, actually in our time, in a time like ours, the only way to get it is, lo and behold, for us rich people at the very tippy top of our society to give it to you. That's right. The only way to change the world now is for Mark Zuckerberg
to eradicate diseases and Elon Musk to fight climate change and Google to organize all the world's information and transform education and make YouTube videos for the poor and Goldman Sachs to bring finance to rural farmers in Africa. And this was where this ruling class story got so smart. They were basically saying, if you mess with us billionaires and these big companies.
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Chapter 8: What gives us hope for a progressive future amidst inequality?
If you come for us, if you tax us, if you regulate us, you're not hurting us. You are hurting the wretched of the earth who we are on the cusp of liberating through our apps and through our foundations and through our give one, get one products. You will hurt the people with the least power in this world if you come for the most powerful people in the world.
It is on its face such a bizarre story, but I think in other ways, a tempting and seductive one, because it has just enough truth to not feel like a lie. I mean, Google did organize all the world's information. Elon Musk has built things that can have an effect. on the environment and climate.
Mark Zuckerberg does have enough money to make a dent in diseases, as he promised and then moved away from. So they invented this story, and the story serves to say, don't mess with our power. It was almost like the most powerful people on Earth used the people with the least power on Earth as human shields and said, don't come at us with your reform.
It seems to me a circular argument because you have to believe that these people who accumulated this tremendous disproportionate wealth came by it through merit and skill and ingenuity in order to believe that those people are uniquely situated to apply that ingenuity and genius to the world's problems.
If you take a different tact, and if you say, no, actually, these people came to these billions because capital gains are taxed less than labor, because there's no wealth tax, because estate tax exemption, because of weakened and declining unions. it takes away from their inherent savior status.
They become people who are built because of a system that intended to build them, not people who rose to the top and therefore are uniquely situated to save us from the perils of civilization. Like if you start to unpack, the only thing unique about these people is they had enough money to buy policies that ensure that they will continue to be rich.
Then you lose that kind of allure that they are the ones that will save us.
Yes. I think this is one of the crucial, crucial points in how this whole thing works, which is, again, to just think about past elites for a moment, brilliance was not always an important part of the pitch.
If you think about the landed aristocracy in England, again, you think about upper caste people in India, or you think about Germans who were trying to criminalize being Jewish and then exterminate Jews. it wasn't necessarily important to any of these stories that they were smarter than the people they were going against.
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