The Journeys of America's Richest Men | Oligarchs | US Documentary

Tycoons are, in many ways, the lifeblood of society. They're the most competitive people you will ever find. Inside the secret world of the mega rich are some of the most powerful people on the planet, this time, the United States. New billionaires are being created, really, almost on a daily basis. How do these tycoons make their fortunes? They are calculated risk takers, willing to put everything out there. They're willing to lose everything. How do they hang on to them? These people have so much money because they haven't had to pay taxes. And how are they shaping the future of America and the world? Money is a form of political power. And right now, that power is entirely in private hands. And that's very, very dangerous. America, the richest country on Earth. This is the land of the tycoon. We now have over 700 billionaires in America. Tycoons, from social media to manufacturing, definitely define the way that we work and all that we do. These men and women all began with a relentless desire to do something new and extraordinary. Every time there's a technological revolution, it throws up massive new amounts of wealth. Riding the wave of tech innovation is at the heart of the American tycoon story. They are calculated risk takers. They're willing to put everything out there. They're willing to lose everything. But they do it in a way that's targeted to get to a vision, an idea. And the richest man in America and the world is constantly in pursuit of new ideas. No one in the history of Forbes tracking billionaires has been worth as much as Elon Musk. Elon Musk risks everything each time he starts a new project. Elon Musk says he could only do this in the United States. Most other societies don't have that much wealth, and they don't put that wealth into the risk takers. Tesla is now the most valuable car company in the world, worth around a trillion dollars. It kickstarted the electric vehicle revolution. Their idea of an electric car is something that doesn't look good, isn't fast, doesn't have high performance. We wanted to break the mold. Tesla makes less than a million cars a year, and yet it's worth more than the world's nine largest car companies put together. I think what we've done here is, for the first time, created an electric car that you actually want to buy. But Tesla could so easily have been a different story. Instead of making Musk the world's richest man, he could have lost everything. Risk taking is like the Promethean fire. You can get close and use some of it, but you can't use too much of it. Elon Musk has had moments when it was on the precipice of disaster. Everywhere you look, the color is red. And no one, it seems, can stop the bleeding. In 2008, the financial crisis meant the global economy was on the brink of collapse. Mayhem, carnage, a bloodbath. Call it what you want, but what we saw on global stock markets today was ill-disguised panic. It became impossible for startup Tesla to raise capital. Elon Musk was broke. The most sensible thing would have been to sell. So Musk tweets that Tesla is only three days from bankruptcy, that he doesn't own a house, and that he has to borrow money just to keep the company afloat. That's how close they were to disaster. Musk took a huge risk and secured a $40 million loan and put it all into Tesla. It's extremely unusual for somebody to put their money on the line, risk bankruptcy, and make these projects work. He had the courage to do that. Really introducing the first true mass market electric vehicle to the American market is a triumph that Detroit couldn't pull off. And now Detroit is following suit. There's a bit of a revenge of the nerd going on here with the amount of wealth that he has created. Elon Musk grew up in South Africa, which was to shape his desire to succeed at all costs. Elon Musk has a rather interesting background. His mother often said that she didn't know what was wrong with him as a child. He later revealed to us that he had Asperger's. And he was bullied. At one point, some of the school kids pushed him down the stairs. And he ended up with a fair amount of injuries. I think part of his ego is based on the way he was treated as a child. He has a lot to prove. His ex-wife, Justine, had an incredibly difficult time with Elon. She said that he was the most obsessive person that she'd ever met. And what Musk did next was obsession on a whole new level. He's built this space company that was started off as kind of a seemed like a side hustle, you know, this extra thing he was doing. That has become a major contract or a major player. Cuban Space Flight is the reason that SpaceX was created. And we're currently honored to partner with NASA. Again, it was touch and go whether he'd lose everything. He had three failed launches and one rocket left to try to show that he could get them into space and supply the space station. 3, 2, 1, 0. SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket NASA turns to the private sector to resupply the International Space Station. And the fourth one succeeded. And it was really a defining moment. You want to do projects that are inspiring and that make people excited about the future. Musk's out-of-the-box thinking has come under fire, though. His plan to rescue trapped children from a flooded cave in Thailand with a mini sub built from rocket parts was a PR disaster. And his ideas for the future of car travel have run into problems. Some of his ideas, it's not certain how realistic they are. The Boring Project to create tunnels underground that cars could zoom through at incredible speeds would take an enormous amount of work. And I think a lot of people are not sure how feasible that really is. Musk's plan to send 1 million people to Mars by 2050 is also viewed with deep skepticism. The ideas that drive tycoons to wealth can also be the ideas that drive them to disaster. We should expect that he might remain a tycoon, but that he's spreading himself too thin and making too many risky bets at the same time. But whatever the future holds, Elon Musk is just the latest in a long line of American tycoons who've staked their all on the potential rewards of a new technology. To fully understand the role tycoons have played in the country's history, you have to return to the 19th century, to the pioneers of UFOs. The robber barons were a group of men who ran the industrialization of the United States. In those days, there weren't many rules constraining what they could do. Called the robber barons because of their ruthless behavior, they made their wealth from the new technology of the industrial age. The richest of them all was John D. Rockefeller, who made his fortune from oil. John D. Rockefeller was president of the creation of the oil business, and he rode that horse to become the biggest, richest man in the world in his time. Rockefeller's fortune was bigger than Bezos, bigger than Musk. It was enormous. In today's money, he is the tycoon who was the closest contender to being a trillionaire. In 1915, John D. Rockefeller could have paid off the national debt of the United States and still have been the richest man in the world. But like many US tycoons, Rockefeller started out with nothing. His father was a ne'er-do-well, someone who was always hustling, but not necessarily doing it in the most legal of ways. Many billionaires are individuals who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and that motivation is what leads them to actually become people who transform the system and make a lot of money for themselves in the process. Going from rags to riches is the essence of what's called the American dream. The American dream, to me, means the ability to become wealthy. It provides the hope that drives people to work hard. You work your way up from nothing. You don't come from money. You don't come from family. And the idea that if you hustle enough, you can do anything. And one family from Arkansas defined the American dream. The Waltons are the richest family on Earth, thanks to their stake in the retail chain Walmart. Founder Sam Walton's three surviving children have consistently been in the top 20 of Forbes' rich list. And Alice Walton, his youngest child, is worth $65 billion alone. Alice Walton is the richest woman in the United States. She inherited most of her money, but she also invested her money. She remains involved in many of the Walmart businesses. Sam Walton became the richest man in America in 1985, a position he held for four years. Sam Walton is the true rags to riches story. Mostly, it's a matter of believing in our people, working with our people, and really trying to do everything we can for their best interest. And they, in turn, come back and take care of our customers and take care of ourselves. Walmart now has around 11,000 stores worldwide and is the largest retailer across the globe. This retail giant started with a small shop in Arkansas. And once again, he made his fortune by using new technology. He was one of the first people who used computers to track his inventory. What allowed Walmart to become so extremely successful was a very tight control of inventory. So they would buy it at the last minute, sell it as quickly as possible, keep the goods moving. Once Walmart became a giant, they were able to push their suppliers and force their suppliers to sell it at lower prices. He used glossy commercials to attract families. Walmart everyday low prices means everything, every day. Everyday low prices really means something at Walmart. Every single item in the store, every day. Passing all savings on to consumers to make Walmart the cheapest place to shop was always Walton's aim. He also reinvested profits, allowing the company to grow quickly. So Sam Walton became a cult figure. People saw Sam Walton as the embodiment of the American dream. And everyone in the company said, Mr. Walton, you've got to perform. We did it. Now you do it. But when Sam Walton died in 1992, some saw it as a turning point. Walmart became more of a big, empty corporation after Sam Walton's passing. Instead of helping their communities, it came to look like Walmart was just making money from their communities. Walmart also attracted criticism for its working practices. So they tried, in a first sense, to make themselves more community friendly. They also tried to address a number of very damaging exposes about the mistreatment of their labor, the low wages they paid. Aware of this growing criticism, in 2008, Walmart decided to rebrand and give themselves a more caring image. They tried to raise their wages and do things to make Walmart a healthier, happier place for people to work. And they wanted to tell that story. The growth of Walmart keeps the Walton family the richest in the world. But their domination of the retail sector still provokes controversy. Fundamentally, when a Walmart comes to a town, Main Street dies. Who's going to compete with Walmart? The story of Walmart shows that size isn't everything. Tycoons getting too big and too powerful has been the great American dilemma since the time of robber barons. How to balance business success with the greater good. At its height in the early 20th century, Rockefeller's Standard Oil controlled 90% of America's oil business. Monopolies meant that a few people were getting wealthy from it, not the vast majority of Americans. And so they're not living the American dream. Because companies have gotten too big and too powerful, it's clear that something needs to be done to create some rules of the road. The Sherman Antitrust Act back in 1890 allowed the government to dismantle monopolies. This included the breakup of Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Governments continued to regulate tycoons throughout the 20th century. But in 1981, a new president decided to change everything and set the tycoons free. I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States. So help me God. Reagan thought things were being overregulated. And that was stifling economic opportunity and profit making. In the 1980s, Reagan undertook to repeal many of the limitations on wealth creation and business entrepreneurship in the United States. In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. Reagan cut taxes and deregulated markets, hoping the wealth created would improve everyone's standard of living. Reaganomics did create an updated version of the American dream. Reagan's policies actually increased inequality in the US. However, over 16 million jobs were created. And the booming economy made Americans feel good about themselves again. They were ready to buy houses, TVs, fridges, cars, and fast food. Oh, the 80s were great for billionaires. One of the truly great eras of prosperity in American history. It was a vision that Americans enthusiastically embraced. Reagan's policies also paved the way for a new type of tycoon, one who didn't actually make anything. Instead, he made his fortune by investing in other people's companies. Warren Buffett is an example of this new breed of tycoon who becomes immensely wealthy not by building things, but by investing in things. By buying stakes in undervalued companies, Buffett, for a time, became the richest man in the world. Buffett is very good at reading what sectors of this new market, this service economy, post-industrial economy, what's going to grow and what's going to be profitable. Thanks to deregulation and a booming economy, Buffett made his first billions in the 80s. Instead of following the stock market, he studied financial reports from his office in Omaha, looking for undervalued businesses. I've never had a computer in there. I've never had a calculator in there. And I've never had a stock ticker in there. He once spent a billion dollars buying Coke shares, which then quadrupled in value over four years. Warren Buffett epitomizes the 1980s because from his little office in Omaha, Nebraska, he's now able to move capital around without limitations. Before the 80s, it wasn't possible to move money that way. I'm having the time of my life. I mean, I get to do every day exactly what I like to do with people who I love and who seem to like me pretty well. And it doesn't get any better than that. He now has thousands of followers for whom he invests money. They call him the Oracle of Omaha. Despite his huge wealth, his lifestyle remains modest in the extreme. Warren Buffett is interesting because he kind of bursts onto the scene at a time when the images of wealth are often flashy and, you know, fur coats dripping with jewels. And Warren Buffett's not that at all. He is a folksy Midwesterner from Nebraska, lives, you know, not someone who flashes his wealth. Buffett still lives in the same house he bought more than 60 years ago. How would I improve my life by having 10 houses around the globe? I mean, if I'd wanted to become, you know, a superintendent of housing or something of the sort, you know, I could have gone into that as a profession. But I do not want to manage 10 houses. And I really don't even want somebody else doing it for me. And I don't know why the hell I'd be happier. Nothing really changed in the Buffett household as Warren Buffett got richer. His kids found out that they were wealthy because they read about him in Forbes magazine. Now, as well as advocating for higher taxes on the rich, he's also sworn to give away most of his fortune before he dies. The 1980s was also the beginning of a new technological revolution, the digital age. It saw the birth of the tech tycoon. Just as in the 19th century, entirely new industries and sectors grew. And you have the arrival of the commercially available personal computer. Computers make possible things that before were not possible. And that includes the accumulation of enormous fortunes. Bill Gates saw the boom in home computers. But his genius was not to build them, but to write the software. Microsoft is the second most valuable company in the world and is worth around $2 trillion. Gates understood how technology would change our lives, foreseeing the impact of smartphones before most of us were even using a computer. Virtually everyone in 10 to 15 years' time will be able to carry around a wallet PC. You can have thousands of pictures of your children, if you like. Easy to call up. You'll be able to receive messages, news bulletins. In fact, the machine, over time, will learn what you're interested in. An individual like Bill Gates is someone who sees a future before it's occurred. Their ideas help them to imagine a different kind of world. And they're investing and taking risks to try to get to that world. Gates wrote his first software program at the age of 13. He's a nerdy, brainy guy. So even growing up, he was a bookworm. They had a rule at the Gates house. No Bill, no more books at the dinner table. He's sort of one of these child genius type of kids. He dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to set up Microsoft. Gates was creating a company that was selling something that previously had been given away for free. Gates had a very different vision. And he was right. Software was a business. Gates' big break came in 1980 when IBM chose Microsoft software for their computers because it was user friendly. Bill Gates' software made it possible for you and me to understand how to operate a computer. Microsoft did a deal with IBM that also allowed them to sell the same software to other computer companies, putting them ahead of the competition. He didn't always have the best software on the market. There were other programs that were better. But he knew how to get them out there. Like Rockefeller before him, who ran 90% of America's oil business, at its height, 90% of the world's PCs were running Windows, making Bill Gates America's youngest billionaire at the age of 31. One of the characteristics that Bill Gates has in common with a lot of other tycoons is he's intensely competitive. Part of Microsoft's success comes from that real intense, take no prisoners, we're going to, you know, we want to win. We're not here to make friends. And it also is something that contributes to their getting in trouble with the Department of Justice. By 1998, when Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, worth $51 billion, Microsoft was being accused of illegally creating a monopoly in the same way the robber barons were in the 19th century. How many of you use a PC without Microsoft's operating system? Gentlemen, that's a monopoly. Because he bundled his own web browser, Internet Explorer, with Windows software, he was accused of crushing his rivals. Silicon Valley companies referred to Microsoft as the Death Star and, you know, saw it as this sort of enemy of everything that was right and good. The antitrust controversy was most certainly the greatest obstacle in Bill Gates' Microsoft journey. His attitude under questioning was a PR disaster. Did you actually read what was in there? Gates is a very difficult person to get along with. He has a tendency to try to denigrate people that he's debating with. He did not take seriously the arguments of those who believed Microsoft was too big, who believed it was too predatory, who believed it was stifling innovation. He came to represent the example of the spoiled narcissistic leader, not the innovative entrepreneur. This court ruling finds the company guilty of acting as a monopoly and stifling competition. Microsoft was ordered to split in two. But on appeal, the decision was reversed. Gates has since said he was naive back then and that he made some mistakes. Even though Microsoft itself was not broken up in the way Standard Oil was, the gold was now tarnished. After the antitrust proceedings, Apple was cool. Microsoft wasn't. After the trial, Bill Gates devoted increasingly more time to charity work through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. After the lawsuit, just like Rockefeller and Carnegie, Bill Gates went into philanthropy to deploy their great wealth for a greater good. And so the Gates started engaging in some smaller scale philanthropy in the late 90s. And then in the early 2000s, founded their foundation, which became immediately the largest in the world. And the goal is by 2040 to eliminate this disease. So the scientists here are part of an incredible, exciting undertaking that will make malaria history. To date, the foundation has given away over $50 billion. Bill Gates has also recruited fellow billionaire Warren Buffett and others to make a pledge to give away their wealth as well. As a philanthropist, he's really had this second act that's very different. His foundation has done extraordinary work at scale, kind of these massive interventions in global health. Bill Gates' philanthropy is an example of how many tycoons are extending their reach into other areas of American life. They're becoming public figures in a way that exceeds their previous reputation as just business people. In the 2020 presidential election, an unprecedented three tycoons ran for office. I think Americans of 1910 would have had great reluctance to let John D. Rockefeller run for president. And I think that there should be the same trepidation about the billionaire dominance of politics now. But it's not just running for election. It's influencing policy as well. Oil barons Charles and his brother David Coke, who died in 2019, are perhaps the biggest examples of billionaires using their wealth behind the scenes. They have funded some of the most conservative politicians in the country. So Coke's money is still very much attached to taking resources out of the ground that often have a negative environmental consequence. And so he has a very strong interest in limiting any government interference in the activities that produce these environmental consequences. They've spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars supporting candidates who spread lies that climate change is a conspiracy. These two brothers are trying to buy America. You could argue that the Coke brothers have been two of the most influential political actors in the world in the last 20 to 30 years, yet neither of them has ever held an elected office. The influence over American life also comes thanks to favorable US tax laws, which have enabled tycoons to build their immense fortunes. So a new report reveals the 25 richest Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk, they paid relatively little and sometimes nothing in federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018. Both Bloomberg and Bezos have endorsed the call for a corporate tax rise. One way tycoons legally avoid income tax is by owning shares in their company instead of taking a salary. In 2018, Elon Musk paid no income tax. After the ensuing outcry, he polled his Twitter followers and chose to pay $11 billion in 2021. The American tax system is a grotesque thing right now. It's amended about 4,000 times a year. And of those 4,000 amendments, almost all of them are little favors to people. Congressmen need campaign funds. They have a mutual backscratching society. I mean, you help me get reelected, and I'll help you solve that tax problem. In 2021, 55 of the largest companies in America paid no federal corporate tax. Others have been criticized for not paying enough. Among them is one company whose founder sits just off the top of the rich list. Amazon now ships 15 million parcels a day and has 1 and 1 half million employees across the world. The company dominates online retail, and this is all thanks to Jeff Bezos' obsession with customer service. People ask me, are your customers loyal to you? And I always say, absolutely, right up until the second that somebody else offers them a better service. I really believe that. Bezos understood from the start that online shopping gave customers much more choice, but also more power. Online, the balance of power shifts away from the merchant toward the customer. It's because customers have great information online. They can price compare very easily, all sorts of things like that. Also, the customers can tell each other what they find out, so they can use the internet as a megaphone. 30 years ago, Bezos was a banker in New York. He saw the number of people using the internet, then a brand new technology, grow over 2,000% in a year. He realized it was a chance to make his fortune. The biggest sacrifice which Jeff Bezos took was, of course, leaving his career on Wall Street. He had been incredibly successful in finance by going into this online space, which was relatively unknown at the time. He was taking a massive gamble. So the billionaires who really make it big, they're the ones who take advantage of a new technology and connect their ideas to that technology. And so he drops out of the Wall Street rat race, instead moves across the country to Seattle because it's got a good stock of software engineers because Microsoft is in Seattle. He rented a house and set up in the garage with a door for his desktop. He wanted to be seen as a frugal, bare bones startup that wasn't going to waste money. In just two months, sales at Amazon reached $20,000 per week. The personal qualities that make a tycoon a tycoon is in thinking very big and thinking very long term. Jeff Bezos is a great example of that. The plan from the beginning was to grow big quick by investing everything back into the business. His other great insight was that a successful company in the late 20th century was not a company that made a lot of money, but a company that had a lot of revenue. Investors would be investing in growth. That's what they want. If you look at our US books business, it was profitable in the month of December of 1998. And that was a critical mistake because the management team of the company should have been able to figure out, and that was me, by the way, should have been able to figure out ways to invest that money. Amazon's success has had a huge impact on main streets across the world. But from the early days when Bezos was mainly selling books, he's been unapologetic. Complaining is not a strategy. Amazon is not happening to book selling. The future is happening to book selling. It's not just bookshops. Now with around 12 million products sold by Amazon, all areas of the retail sector are under threat. Amazon have very aggressively gone into more and more sectors. This, of course, isn't a sign of the future at all. It's a sign of Jeff Bezos' ambitions and also his continuous drive for growth. Like most tycoons, Bezos has kept his family life private. That is, until 2019 when he divorced his wife, Mackenzie. She is now the fourth richest woman in the world, and he's living a more celebrity lifestyle. He now lives a much more Hollywood-oriented lifestyle, but an extraordinarily expensive home in LA. His new girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, was a model before becoming an entertainment reporter and news anchor. He now has yachts in St. Bart's, where he hosts models and celebrities. You can find him jetting all over the world. He's constantly found in designer clothing with his new girlfriend, and generally living what is called a more jet-set billionaire lifestyle. Many have said that they believe that Bezos might be having a midlife crisis. Something's definitely going on with Bezos. But some tycoons go beyond buying yachts and supercars with their unlimited spending power. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the man on whom the classic film Citizen Kane was based, built his wildly extravagant Hearst Castle in California. It was packed with unusual antiques. Here's the original itself. As the fifth most popular movie of all time, the $50 million Hearst art collection goes on sale. Articles from $0.35 to $200,000, 15,000 objects in all, spread over 80,000 square feet of floor space, the fruits of 50 years of search for art treasures. Eccentric business tycoon Howard Hughes spent his billions building record-breaking aircraft. Builder of the monster, Howard Hughes, stormy petrol of aviation, surveys the 320-foot wing of the Colossus, whose weight is 200 tons and whose length is 200 feet. There are tycoons now with ambitions beyond the material world. The billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, wants to live forever. He plans to freeze his body after death so he can be brought back to life when the technology exists. Others don't just want to save themselves. They want to save the planet. We have sent robotic probes now to every planet in the solar system, and we know without any shadow of a doubt that Earth is the best one. This is the best planet. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, they certainly have a dream. They want to explore space. Both men want to use space to solve Earth's problems. Bezos plans to tackle climate change by moving heavy industry to the moon. Elon Musk wants to secure the future of mankind by colonizing Mars. History fundamentally bifurcates in one of two directions. Either we are a multi-planet species and out there exploring the stars, or we are a single-planet species waiting around for some eventual extinction event. We need those bold ideas and big thinking. At the same time, the idea that colonizing Mars is the better answer than attending to the problems on Earth is related to believing that technology can make things better. We can engineer our way out of a problem, whether it be climate change or social inequality or disinformation on the internet, that there must be a better fix. Sometimes the answer isn't always more technology. These men are driven by a sense that they are right, that they know what others don't know. And they don't see their own shortcomings. They don't see their own limits. This is especially true in the age of social media, where the rapid development of new technology has led to unintended consequences. Social media has changed everything about modern society. We now live our lives online. Facebook, which also owns Instagram and rebranded under the name Meta, has connected almost 3 billion people, over a third of the world's population. I mean, the mission of the company is to make the world more open and connected, because we believe that everyone is going to have a much better experience when they're doing different things with their friends. The problem is that it is a platform that has prioritized more inflammatory content. Privileging the loudest voices in the room. And that contributes to polarization. As head of the company, in 2018, Zuckerberg was called before Congress to address mounting concerns. I think it's time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things. Facebook has grown so big so fast. That much influence comes with enormous social responsibility on which you have failed to act. He can't control the ills of society. He can't control online harm. But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility. And that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake. And I'm sorry. I started Facebook. I run it. And I'm responsible for what happens here. The overwhelming evidence is that Mark Zuckerberg sees the world only through Facebook's eyes. That he believes his company has the right to do what it does because it's popular. He's shown very little evidence of really taking seriously the concerns people have about hate speech, about data mining. Your every click, and everything you do, and everything you look at, that is data. And that data is being taken in and being used to sell ads to advertisers. But in doing that, you don't know how much privacy you're surrendering or how much they know about you. The rise of Facebook has been astonishing. But its origins were very modest. In 2003, while still at Harvard, Zuckerberg wrote the software for Facebook in a week. It was an immediate hit. In the first week alone, I'd come home from classes and see that 10% of students at Harvard were logged on at any one point in time. And that was just really cool. So then by the second week, we had all these people from other colleges around us, like MIT and other colleges. I'm in the neighborhood. We're emailing people. We're typing in, asking if we could release Facebook at their schools, too. He dropped out of Harvard, moved to Silicon Valley, launched Facebook worldwide, and within a year, hit 5 million users. Mark Zuckerberg, of course, turned down various offers to sell his company. The hardest one was really when Yahoo offered us a billion dollars, because that was the first really big offer. And at the time, I knew nothing about business. So I knew nothing about what a company would be worth. And I had to make this argument to people that somehow this was going to be the right decision. Tycoons go against the conventional wisdom. They always want to get rich. But it's the idea, the passion, that often separates the tycoons from other business people. When he floated Facebook on NASDAQ age 28, he had gone from a student to being worth $20 billion in seven years. On this special day, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I just want to say to all the people out there who use Facebook and our products, thank you. But the phenomenal growth of Facebook continued to bring a raft of unintended consequences. The problem now is that all these platforms, nearly all of them, are so large that they're impossible to moderate. They simply can't be this big and have either human or computer-driven moderation that is effective. Facebook is in a lot of trouble right now. I don't think the government will shut Facebook down, but I think they will intensively regulate Facebook and break it up. At the end of 2021, Facebook user numbers dropped for the first time as users found fresh alternatives. Zuckerberg rebranded as Meta and announced grand plans for a virtual reality metaverse, hoping to lure them back. Markets weren't convinced, though, and Meta lost a quarter of its value in just one day in early 2022. Social media platforms have changed the way we interact. Riding the smartphone revolution, platforms including Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok have accessed billions of users across the world. Social media has taken us beyond the world of newspapers and radio, where the more you circulated something, the more you could sell, you could make millions. Now with social media, you can instantly make perhaps billions because you can reach more people more quickly at lower cost. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is worth $6.6 billion. Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel is worth $7.8 billion. As well as turning these entrepreneurs into hugely powerful billionaires, social media has also given unprecedented power to influencers who know how to harness it to create their own fortunes. Kim Kardashian has risen from nowhere using reality TV and social media to become one of the most famous, influential, and wealthy people on the globe. Kardashian was kind of famous for being famous. She was a friend of early reality TV star Paris Hilton. And then this reality show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, really kind of put her and her family on the wider map of popular culture. I can't even deal with my mom doing a keg stand. Like, there are no words. The show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, ran for 20 seasons. I need someone to make me laugh. Where's Kim? It followed the lives of mom, Kris, and stepdad, Bruce Jenner, along with their kids. Stop! The celebrity that bought her allowed her to promote company's products. And this is, like, one of the stores that I love to come to. And it just has, like, all different styles. I come with my two sisters. There's so many, I get them all mixed up. And we always, we have such different styles. And we always find stuff at Intermix that fit all of our personalities. Yeah, Kim Kardashian is someone who's leveraged social media to make her fortune in really kind of clever ways that have been extremely influential, where you establish a following, you have a certain level of celebrity, and so you start selling things. Her next step was to start selling her own brands, using honest demonstrations of her products on social media. I always had so many products. And I just wanted, like, a little defined kit of all of my favorite products that could just be really easy. I always do the tip of my nose, because it just shortens your nose and makes it look so cute. Many of the beauty trends that have emerged in the last 10 years have come from Kim Kardashian. Her followers are women who want to be like her. She's got a beauty company, KKW Beauty, with cosmetics. And then perhaps her most valuable creation has been this body wear, shape wear company called Skims. The Skims body wear company is now valued at $3.2 billion. It's kind of like an idea factory. She comes up with the idea. She outsources the manufacturing with somebody else. She does the marketing on her social media. And there you have it. Next thing you know, she's a billionaire. Kim Kardashian now has 280 million Instagram followers, making her one of the most influential people in the world of fashion and beauty. But running a business driven by a social media star can be tough. It's hard to stay relevant. I mean, one of the things about being on social media and being a social media star is you've got to give your viewers something new and different to see and ogle about. So I imagine she'll keep reinventing herself and creating new companies. She's young. She's only 41 years old. The American dream was built on the back of tycoons and their groundbreaking ideas. Few Americans begrudge them their success. But in recent years, the size of their fortunes has caused increasing concern about wealth disparity. The public perception of billionaires has changed very drastically. They were once seen as figures of American pride. But now we know how much tax they pay and how much they're putting back into the economy. We will see the level of wealth continue to flow to the billionaire class. We have long been a very unequal society. But two things have changed. One, the disparities in wealth are so evident. They're so obvious. We see on social media and elsewhere how other people live. So it's in our face. And even more important, there's a concern about mobility. People will accept inequality if they believe they have a chance. This is the American dream, right? In American society today, that's less and less true. The wealth gap between America's richest and poorest families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016. The challenge of our moment is that everyone sees a need for better regulation of wealth. But the people who are in a position to make policy decisions are very dependent on the wealthy. And so they have a disincentive to make those changes. But I think it's going to require a much broader political imagination, thinking, rethinking the sort of same question that American lawmakers grappled with in the early 20th century, which is, how do we find a way to balance capitalism with the needs of a broader public? Whether governments find a solution to the wealth gap remains to be seen. However, there's no doubt tycoons will continue to drive the American dream. The United States still has enormous opportunities, enormous resources, enormous talent, and an enormous will to get ahead. And I think that'll see us through in fine shape. Well, there will be many, many more tycoons in the future doing what tycoons of the past have done, taking new technology, finding a new market for it, and building their fortunes and fame based on that. And that's a healthy thing. That's how society changes and evolves.