Episode 228 — Billionaires as Insta-Experts: How Our Media Conflates Extreme Wealth with Expertise
Citations Needed | September 24, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Welcome to season nine of Citations Needed. This is the premiere episode of our new season. Of course, let me get the logistics out of the way here. You can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support is so appreciated as we are 100% listener funded, and I cannot stress enough how grateful we are to our listeners. Now, entering into our ninth season, we are able to continue to do the show because of the incredibly generous and consistent support of listeners like you.
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[Music]
Nima: “Tesla just got snubbed by Biden’s electric vehicle summit,” lamented CNN in 2021. “Bill Gates is optimistic about the global future,” trumpeted NPR in February 2025. “Mamdani Prepares to Meet With the City’s Wary Business Leaders,” announced the New York Times just this past July.
Adam: Seemingly all the time, and as a matter of course, our media asserts that the country’s, and the world’s, richest people are somehow per se experts on a wide range of political, social and economic topics. Whether education, public health, or the so-called “economy,” it’s assumed that multi millionaires and billionaire business owners, investors, and executives possess a somehow unique or specialized knowledge on all sorts of matters, and are entitled therefore to having proximity to the highest levels of government and media simply by virtue of being ultra-rich.
Nima: But why is this assumption made? How is it that someone who made billions in software or finance or real estate or electric cars is assumed to be a trusted source on education, foreign policy, public health, or agriculture? And whose voices are being silenced so that the richest among us can be heard?
Adam: On today’s episode, our season nine premiere, we’ll examine how elite media systematically frame the world’s richest people as indispensable authorities on some of the highest stakes political issues of our time, for literally no other reason than they’re just extremely rich, when in reality, these rich people are capital J, capital S, capital G, Just Some Guys who happen to have a ton of money and who, of course, have only their self-interest in mind.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Rob Larson, professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Tacoma, Washington. His analysis has appeared in outlets like Jacobin, In These Times, and Current Affairs, and he is the author of the books Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, and Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More, both published by Haymarket Books.
[Begin clip]
Rob Larson: We live in a, of course, in a society that wall-to-wall worships wealth and wealthy people. And a big contributor to this also is the most recent iteration of wealth hagiography, which is celebrating all the alleged innovations that wealthy people and their giant tech platforms are supposed to bring to us, even though, if you look at the record, and as I talked about in my book on Big Tech, most of the foundational technology comes from public-sector investments, developing the internet, mostly through the Pentagon and university systems.
[End clip]
Adam: Now, the basic premise of this episode is best summarized in the 2017 DC Comics film Justice League. We’ve made a reference to this before, I believe, but we wanted to play the clip because it kind of conveys what we’re getting at here. So this is a conversation between Barry Allen, the Flash, played by Ezra Miller, who’s speaking with Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne, who is, of course, as I’ve just recently learned, I didn’t know this, he is also Batman.
Nima: Yeah. Spoiler alert.
Adam: Spoiler alert. So let’s listen to that clip right here.
[Begin clip]
Barry Allen: How many people are on this special fight team?
Bruce Wayne: Three, including you.
Barry Allen: Three? Against what?
Bruce Wayne: Tell you on the plane.
Barry Allen: Plane. What are your superpowers again?
Bruce Wayne: I’m rich.
[End clip]
Nima: Yeah, that basically sums up the premise here.
Adam: And so rich people are afforded per se expertise, even though, and as we’ll lay out in the episode, the vast majority of time they’re commenting on something for which they have zero experience on. Now we want to be clear, we are not resumé humpers on this show. We obviously mock expertise as a comment in general, how expertise is formulated, how it produces and reproduces dangerous ideologies.
Nima: But why a software mogul should be basically running an entire nation’s education policy, or the world’s health policy, really does raise some questions.
Adam: About expertise, or the concept of expertise, that once you surpass some arbitrary number of dollars in your bank account, you can, pretty much by sheer fiat, assert expertise in literally anything you want.
Nima: Now, the ultra-wealthy have been granted special access to policymakers since at least the first Gilded Age around the turn of the 20th century. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, for example, placed then-President Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the Senate President and the Speaker of the House, on the first board of trustees of his newly inaugurated Carnegie Institution of Washington in the early 20th century. This was effectively the dawn of the age of philanthropy. And he did this as part of an effort to be inside the Roosevelt administration’s good graces, to have access to that power and vice versa, to make the government intricately intertwined with his own new foundation. So right off the bat here, at the beginning of the 20th century, we see how important rich people are to setting policy.
Now, largely in times of economic turmoil, media elevates business owners as economic authorities who must be involved in financial decision-making. For example, in 1934, in the early years of the other Roosevelt presidency, this time FDR, and several years into the Great Depression, the Associated Press reported this, quote,
BUSINESS LEADERS WILL JOIN FIGHT AGAINST “LEFT” MOVEMENT
The article, datelined November 17, 1934, began like this. Quote,
Big business leaders gave every indication today of putting their full force behind the housing drive as a means of hurrying recovery, striking a blow at unemployment, and thus preventing Congress from plunging far to the “left.”
This, an authoritative source disclosed, probably will be a chief plank in the recovery platform, which spokesmen of the chamber of commerce of the United States and other organizations will present to the White House.
End quote. The article continued. Quote,
In striving for a united front to urge the business viewpoint on the president, the chamber’s directors adopted a resolution declaring there is “evidence of a growing determination by business, industry and agriculture to cooperate in every possible manner to promote an improvement in recovery from our existing economic condition.
End quote.
Adam: Now, later that year, the AP was outraged to report that the Roosevelt administration had been insufficiently deferential to capital and its avatars. Consider a piece from the AP dated December 21, 1934, which states, quote,
CONFLICT DEEPENS BETWEEN BUSINESS LEADERS AND NEW DEALERS
Leaders’ Proposal Greeted With Wisecracks and Sarcastic Criticism
God, I love the FDR administration sometimes. They were a bunch of pinkos. The article would write, quote,
Just a lot of wisecracks and sarcastic criticisms is about all the 100 business leaders of America got from the various administration officials for their efforts in trying to work out a program of cooperation between the government and business.
Unquote. So here we have, again, this is a typical element of the genre, this presumption that the so-called “business leaders,” quote-unquote, “business leaders” ought to be afforded, right? It’s just assumed in the premise of the article, they ought to be afforded some unique status. If this was 100 miners or 100 teachers or 100 nurses, there would be no presumption that they ought to be taken seriously by the administration.
Nima: And so being greeted by sarcasm and wisecracks is almost like a, you know, pearl clutching.
Adam: It’s a mark of unseriousness.
Nima: Yeah, you can see how the media is shocked and appalled by that reception.
Adam: Then the article would go on to say,
Maybe it was too much to expect that administration officials who have made up their minds that the system of private initiative and profit, except for rigid regulation, is all wrong, would accept any program from business groups. But it was not a mistake for the businessmen, nevertheless, to draw up such a program. It makes a matter of record what they believe is essential to economic recovery, and answers the oft-heard query “Well, what would you do, or what program do you offer?
Unquote. And so there’s obviously the major difference between these business leaders and Roosevelt officials is that the Roosevelt officials were elected. They were part of an election. The people voted for them. And the business leaders were not elected by anybody. They are capital J, capital S, capital G, Just Some Guys. And so this symmetry is and you’ll see this again later at the very end, when we talk about the ways in which New York business leaders are elevated to some bicameral status with the Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, they’re sort of presumed to have be on equal footing. They’re this fourth branch of the government, unofficial fourth branch of the government, who elected leaders are necessarily supposed to, if not grovel to, at least, kind of bring into the fold and consult.
Nima: Right, because basically behind this entire idea, Adam, and we’re going to get to different examples, but there’s this common thread of trickle-down success, right? That the people who are, quote-unquote, “successful,” and successful to a level by which they have amassed extreme wealth, personally, individually, maybe for also their peer business leaders, for their high-up executives in their companies or across their industry, sure, but that there is this ultra-wealth that has been amassed, and that somehow is translated to mean, by the political and the media class, as expertise, and therefore a way to then bring that wealth and that success to a common collective, rather than seeing their wealth and so-called success as being indicative of them doing what’s right for themselves, not for everyone.
Adam: Yeah, clearly, a group of 100 business leaders are worried about their own bottom lines. They’re not trying, they’re not worried about some abstract thing called the economy, or, God forbid, the American worker. They want to profit as much as humanly possible and maintain, more importantly, in the context of the Great Depression, maintain their power in relation to the federal government.
So let’s fast-forward to the 1970s. Over the decades that followed, wealthy bankers, industrialists would continue to assert their qualifications to make policy decisions, particularly ones about the so-called economy. In the early 1970s, for example, David Rockefeller, the grandson of John D. Rockefeller, who at one point was, of course, the richest person in the world by quite a wide margin. David Rockefeller, Rockefeller’s grandson, would insert himself into New York City’s municipal policymaking as an authority on how the city could handle what was then an emerging financial crisis. In a 1971 address on real-estate development the city, Rockefeller stated, quote,
It goes without saying that in performing its primary role of producing goods and services efficiently, business is accomplishing a vital function of great public importance. Beyond this, however, more and more businesses are coming to recognize that they have a responsibility to assume a larger share of the social burden as well, hand-in-hand with the government.
Unquote. Now, how would these businesses handle the social burden Rockefeller insisted that they shoulder? Well, according to Joshua Freeman, professor of history at Queens College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, Rockefeller and other heads of industry would recommend the following, quote, “adopt austerity measures like reducing the number of municipal employees and increasing their productivity, cutting services, slashing capital spending, and raising taxes and fees,” unquote.
In 1979, Rockefeller founded the New York City Partnership, later known as the Partnership for New York City, which was functionally a lobbying group designed to increase the level of corporate power in New York City’s policymaking. The Partnership for New York City is fairly explicit about this goal, stating on its website as of 2017 that, quote,
‘Rockefeller’s vision’ was to ‘allow business leaders to work more directly with government and other civic groups to address broader social and economic problems in a “hands on” way.’
Unquote.
Nima: Now, what are these, quote-unquote, “problems” that are going to be addressed in a, quote, “hands-on,” unquote, way? Essentially, corporate taxes. So according to Kim Moody, author of the book From Welfare State to Real Estate, the partnership lobbied to make changes to land use procedures that, between 1990 and 1993, resulted in an average of $144 million in tax reductions per year for real-estate developers. In addition to influencing policy decisions internally, the Partnership for New York City took to the pages of the New York Times to suggest that the city’s then-deputy mayor Sally Hernandez Pinero be replaced with, quote, “an experienced and distinguished business executive,” end quote.
Moody also notes that Hernandez Pinero was replaced by, quote, “a long-time Chase, i.e., Rockefeller, veteran,” end quote. Now, the idea that the Rockefeller family, by virtue of being banking moguls for decades and decades, should have this kind of not only access, but influence over government decision-making and policy, is basically the crux of everything that we’re discussing here, right? Why is that and how is that not seen as an automatic conflict of interest, right? The fact that rich people and certainly “business leaders,” quote-unquote, would have a vested interest in exactly what the policies of a government are, you know, whether city or state or federal. This seems fairly obvious, yet that is not viewed as a conflict of interest. It is viewed as endowing this kind of benevolent expertise.
As an aside here, Adam, I also just want to note that David Rockefeller, again, John D. Rockefeller’s grandson, who was longtime chairman of Chase Bank, was also very close to the Jimmy Carter administration around the time of the Iranian Revolution, and was one of the foremost advocates for Jimmy Carter allowing the deposed Shah of Iran to enter the United States, against the wishes of the revolutionaries in Iran, who were calling for him to be returned to Iran to face trial for his crimes against the Iranian people over the past quarter century. Now, I bring this up because Rockefeller, whose bank had long maintained a substantial financial relationship with the Shah, called the deposed Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, quote, “a friend to the United States for 37 years,” end quote. And he was advocating, alongside people like Henry Kissinger, to have the Shah admitted to the country. Not only did he win that argument, and that’s what happened, which then kicked off the Iran Hostage Crisis, but the Shah arrived in New York City on October 22, 1979 aboard David Rockefeller’s private jet.
Adam: Fast forward to the 2000s. To me, one of the, I don’t want to say funniest, because it’s about a very serious thing, but one of the more shameless Just Some Guy episodes, was, in 2002 there was a coup in Venezuela, that we now know was backed by the CIA, to overthrow Hugo Chávez, who was duly elected by the people of Venezuela in 1999 and of course, the New York Times, being the New York Times, supported this coup d’etat, and their editorial of a short-lived mass protest in the streets forced the coup leaders to run for the hills, and Hugo Chávez re assumed his position in office, which, again, he was duly elected by the people of Venezuela. The New York Times editorial board wrote an editorial in support of the coup, and in justifying that support, they wrote, quote,
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.
So again, the person who won the election because he’s reforming the judicial system is a would-be dictator. He won on a huge mandate, over 65% of the vote. The Times would write, quote,
Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened…
Otherwise known as a military coup.
… and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona. But democracy has not yet been restored, and won’t be until a new president is elected.
Unquote. So here we have a respected business leader. He’s a puppet of a military coup, right? He’s just some rightwing guy they picked out of a hat in a military coup.
Nima: And the New York Times makes clear why this is important to them, because they write this in the same article. Quote,
Washington has a strong stake in Venezuela’s recovery. Caracas now provides 15 percent of American oil imports, and with sounder policies could provide more. A stable, democratic Venezuela could help anchor a troubled region.
End quote.
Adam: So here we have the New York Times swimming in the waters of ideology, not even really sort of knowing they are, caring, that they’re noting that they are. We have a respected business leader, respected by who? I don’t know. Again, the person who won the vast majority of votes is presumably also respected. Otherwise he wouldn’t have won the election. He’s not voted by anybody. He’s not elected by anybody. He’s just some rich guy, just some guy. But the New York Times assures you that, Don’t worry. He’s a respected business leader. Not an elected leader, not a leader that someone elected, but a business leader. He sort of conferred this air of authority just by virtue of the fact that the military coup chose him and that he’s, quote-unquote, “respected by business,” which really means it’s just respected by the US government, the CIA, and the Bush administration.
And they kind of give the game away when they talk about how they use kind of calming language of stable markets, this sort of calming and of course, everything is about the primacy of capital. It’s actually not about democracy. It’s not about who people actually voted for. We care about who people voted for within the narrow confines of, Do they serve capital, and if they undermine or threaten capital, they become a ruinous demagogue.
Nima: Exactly. And that becomes destabilizing. That is against the idea of a status quo stability, which is exemplified by the leadership of business, right? By the primacy of capital, that stability, whereas anything else, maybe changing the way that things operate, that becomes hostile to capital and therefore ruinous, therefore unstable and chaotic.
Adam: Now let’s cut to the 2000s and 2010s, when a new wave of tech billionaires and multibillionaires, chief among them Bill Gates, rose to prominence as per se experts on a range of things from healthcare in Africa to healthcare in the United States to education to science and technology development to world health issues. And they became those experts by virtue of just being rich. In 2000, Bill Gates launched the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now just the Gates Foundation, since his wife left him in large part due to his associations with Jeffrey Epstein. And they immediately began addressing so-called education reform, which had been a bit of a hobby horse of wealthy and hedge-fund donors for years. They tried to make inroads into privatizing education, but realized, because it was coded as Republican, they couldn’t. So they began to try to buy off liberal, progressive, and Democratic groups into embracing charter schools to a great deal of success. And Bill Gates was, along with the Walton Foundation, the Walmart heirs, became the biggest funder of those efforts. They began the charterization of public schools and the degradation of teachers’ unions, as well as the corporatizing of global public health as their central causes.
So we’ve discussed Bill Gates and his relationship with the media at length in the show, specifically, Episode 1, the first episode, and Episodes 45 and 46. It’s worth revisiting the power he wields over his media coverage, and that media coverage, which, because he, in part, funded them, but also by virtue of the ideology of capitalism, he is just asserted as an expert in whatever topic he feels like asserting his expertise on. Here’s an example from the Associated Press, from February of 2001, right when his efforts began in earnest at the beginning of the Bush administration, which effectively reads like a press release for the Gates Foundation, asked no critical questions about how Gates is qualified to speak on this topic, in this instance, education. And the headline would read, quote,
Gates hopes to downsize education: Microsoft founder proposes smaller, more personal high schools within existing schools.
Unquote. Now, again, who is Bill Gates, and why is he determining how many people are in our public schools? I didn’t recall having an election where we made him the head of the Department of Education.
Nima: Nevertheless, these headlines continued throughout the years. Here’s, again, the Associated Press in May of 2005 with the headline, quote, “Public schools, private billions,” end quote, and the subheadline reading, quote, “Gates Foundation invests in smaller, more personalized approach to education,” end quote. Now, what would this more personalized approach do, you ask? Well, number one, it would make teachers’ jobs far more precarious. It would incorporate more tech into the classroom. I wonder who that would benefit. And generally, it would make public schools far less democratic in their administration.
A thoroughly fawning Newsweek profile, for instance, from December 5, 2008, elaborated on these goals. Quote,
The Gates Foundation has learned some lessons from its investments in recent years in pathbreaking schools. The first big idea — to break up big schools into smaller, more manageable units — proved insufficient without major changes in personnel. Gates argues that rigorous accountability is the only option, from mayoral control (elected school boards are mostly a menace) to principal control (teacher tenure and onerous work rules are quality-killers) to data control (IT systems that closely track performance are a must).
End quote. Now, in 2010, a teacher in New York penned an open letter to Gates, noting that, quote, “Tenure in no way, no how, guarantees a job for life,” end quote. Contrary to Gates, his implications and the kind of public narrative about what tenure does, right, keeping unqualified, inefficient, unsuccessful teachers, right, unproductive teachers in jobs forever. This is a very common narrative. A teacher then wrote that this was not at all true, implying somehow, Adam, that maybe there are other people more qualified to speak on education than, say, a tech billionaire.
But going back to that 2008 Newsweek profile, it also noted that Gates, quote, “seem[ed] to be weighing in on Obama’s pick for secretary of education,” end quote, asking no questions whatsoever about why Bill Gates should be placed in that kind of position, being able to then determine who is appointed to senior cabinet positions. And as a side note here, the Obama administration did fully embrace Gates and his ilk. In 2009, for example, the Obama White House founded the quote, “Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation,” end quote, which stated that it sought to give, quote, “social entrepreneurs and other nonprofit leaders a greater voice in the public policy debates of the day by being part of the White House domestic and economic policymaking processes,” end quote.
Adam: And repeatedly, news outlets turned to Bill Gates as a per se expert on everything, again, just by virtue of the fact that he has billions of dollars. Vox Media practically made it a sub-vertical of its outlet. In 2014, quote, “The Gates Foundation pushes to make more academic research free and open to the public.” In 2015, “Bill Gates explains why Breaking Bad proves the world is getting smarter.” Also in 2015, quote, “The most predictable disaster in the world of the human race,” with a photo and interview with Bill Gates. Also in 2015, “Melinda Gates has the perfect response to the anti-vaccine movement.” In 2016, “Bill Gates: The energy breakthrough that will save our planet is less than 15 years away.” Also, quote, “These are Bill Gates’s five favorite books of the year: It’s like Oprah’s book list, but for nerds,” unquote.
And so there’s this sort of idea that he’s this kind of sage-like billionaire who, again, has expertise on public health, has expertise on development in Africa, has expertise on public education, has expertise on what we should do with teachers’ unions. But again, why? He didn’t get a PhD in any of these fields. He hasn’t written about them extensively in any meaningful way, prior to being a billionaire or prior to funding these groups. He’s just a guy with a lot of money who spreads money around, well, in the media, but also in the so-called nonprofit and NGO space, and just sort of overnight, by virtue of being rich, not because of the compellingness of his ideas or the sort of sharpness of his policy or his brilliant rhetoric, or he kind of worked his way up some system, or was voted by anybody. He just gets hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s it. That’s his entire fucking expertise.
Nima: Yeah. And that kind of expertise and authority is conferred, of course, not only on Gates, but across the landscape of kind of wealthy industrialists turned, quote-unquote, “philanthropists.” For instance, in 2014, the then Obama White House held a conference on, quote, “Next Generation Philanthropy,” end quote, featuring the scions of such ultra-wealthy families as the Rockefellers and hoteliers the Pritzkers and Marriotts. The event was closed to the media, but the New York Times did find a loophole by commissioning Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, who was invited to the event to write a report for the paper. According to Johnson, no relation to Adam Johnson, to be clear.
Adam: I wish. You think I’d be talking to you morons if I had that kind of cheddar? Right. Go ahead. Yeah.
Nima: [Laughs] If you had that kind of scratch.
Adam: You think I’d be railing against capitalism right now? I wouldn’t.
Nima: [Laughs] The conference, quote, “covered a broad range of topics including ‘Climate Change,’ ‘Millennial Healthcare’ and ‘Revitalizing Cities,’” end quote. Now, who better to put in charge of climate, healthcare, and urban environments, you ask, than the heirs of bankers and hotel owners, of course?
Adam: Yeah. So nowhere else is this instant expertise conferred on rich people than discussions of the so-called economy. The assumption is that if you’re rich, you’re like, good at the economy. You’re sort of the Michael Jordan of the economy, that by being rich, even again, if you inherited your money, or you inherited a ton of money, and then just turned it into even more money, that you somehow know about the economy, and that when you talk and, therefore, when you discuss it the economy, you’re not actually lobbying on behalf of your class interests. You’re actually somehow implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, deeply concerned for the everyman or the kind of generic economy, sort of growing the pie.
And the most nakedly egregious example of this was in 2021. Then-President Joe Biden held a summit to promote US-made electric vehicles, and major media went into a tizzy because Biden did not invite Elon Musk, despite the fact that Elon Musk, again, had been very critical of the administration up to that point and had been sort of an overt partisan actor. And this led to media being aghast at this. CNN, in August of 2021, “Tesla just got snubbed by Biden’s electric vehicle summit.” Business Insider, August 2021, “Elon Musk says Tesla wasn’t invited to the White House electric car summit despite selling the most EVs in the US.” CNBC, February 2022, “Elon Musk accuses Biden of ignoring Tesla, but says he would ‘do the right thing’ if invited to the White House.”
And so there was this scandal that Biden did not want to invite a, again, you know, whatever you think about him, an overtly partisan actor into an EV summit. Now here’s a clip from Kara Swisher, co-founder of Vox Media’s Recode, a website covering tech, who was kind of the court who, for years, was Musk’s court propagandist, who later tried to pivot to a Musk critic, but in the most unconvincing way possible. She’s, of course, a New York Times opinion writer as well. She interviewed Musk for Recode in 2021. We’re going to play a clip of that right now.
[Begin clip]
Elon Musk: You know like Biden held this EV summit. Didn’t invite Tesla. Invited GM, Ford, Chrysler, and UAW. EV summit. On the White House. Didn’t mention Tesla once and praised GM and Ford for leading the EV revolution.
[Audience laughter]
Kara Swisher: So you were pissed.
Elon Musk: Does this sound maybe a little biased or something? So, you know, just not the friendliest administration. [Unintelligible] Seems to be controlled by the unions, as far as I can tell.
Kara Swisher: So, think we need to get Trump back?
Elon Musk: Uh, no?
[Audience laughter]
[End clip]
Adam: Right. So here you have this idea that the unions are controlling, right, the workers, that people actually make the cars are controlling Biden. And Biden is sort of snub him. Now, you know, whatever. He has an EV summit, doesn’t invite Musk.
Nima: With Musk kind of looking off into the distance as he talks, like, Oh, you know, I can’t even imagine why, this is just clearly anti-me bias. Right? And I guess he just doesn’t, Biden just doesn’t want to do what’s right and kind of obvious for everyone, in this faux-thoughtful way that is just lapped up by not only Swisher, but also by the fawning audience at that Recode conference in 2021. The idea that Musk would be an overt partisan actor, right? That he would have a lot of skin in the game, as we knew then, but would also become even more evident, this is back in 2021 the idea that he was not actively advocating for one thing to happen over another thing to happen, namely, when it came to the 2024 election, is just sort of laughed off here.
Adam: And so there developed this narrative that Democrats pushed Musk away, right? Matt Yglesias has advanced this as we’ll get into. Ro Khanna, Ritchie Torres, this idea that Silicon Valley must be won over, that their sort of immense wealth and power is simply a feature of nature. There’s nothing we can do to change it, and the goal of so-called liberals or progressives or Democrats is to court them, is to court these super-rich people. And that’s just taken for granted. So this narrative emerged after Trump won and Elon Musk spent north of $250 to $300 million to elect Trump in this deeply corrupt, post-Citizens United system, that Democrats had somehow made a mistake, that Biden made a mistake by giving Musk the cold shoulder.
As Jim Geraghty, an opinion columnist for of course, the Washington Post wrote, quote, “A Democrat, shows how to deal with Musk beyond reflexive criticism,” unquote, in which Geraghty praises Ritchie Torres, citing at length a since-deleted tweet, which is the funniest part of this, that Torres had to delete this tweet because it was so shameful. Geraghty wrote, quote,
On the other side is Ritchie Torres, a gay, Afro Latino Democratic congressman representing the South Bronx, a self-described “pragmatic progressive.” On Saturday, Torres asked online why Musk — the registered independent who says he voted for Democrats until 2022, and who once described himself as a “socialist” — “came to be the favored punching bag of the far left,” as Torres put it.
Whether you approve of him or not, whether you agree with him or not, the man is leading two of the most innovative companies on earth,” Torres wrote — on the Musk-owned X, inevitably. “But for SpaceX, the US would be losing the space race against China. But for Tesla, the EV industry in the US would be a shell of itself. The country thrives on intrepid innovators like Elon Musk. Why antagonize him so intensely that you drive him into Trump’s corner and make a permanent enemy out of him? Politics should be a game of addition, not subtraction.
Unquote. And Ro Khanna would indulge the same logic. Ro Khanna repeatedly criticized Trump. Ro Khanna’s had a relationship with Musk for over 10 years. He went on CNN and blamed the Democrats for, quote, “pushing Musk away,” unquote. Now, there are several things wrong with this premise. As I’m sure you can imagine, we disagree with this premise. First off again, Ritchie Torres had to delete the tweet because Musk’s drive to the right was not caused by Biden snubbing him. This is one of these bullshit origin stories they tell.
Nima: Yeah, he’s a white supremacist.
Adam: In 2019 and 2020, and way before that, Musk had been routinely sharing white supremacist content from, quote-unquote, “white genocide” conspiracy theories, race replacement theories, the idea that Europe is losing population showing, you know, tweeting out maps of African population growth. He had been, of course, down an anti-trans spiral for many years prior to 2021 with his alienation from his children. And the idea that somehow he was going to support Biden anyways, is absurd. But also, even if it were true, the point of politics is not to win over somebody just by virtue of the fact that they’re rich. Elon Musk ought not have any more power than you, me, or anyone else in this country, whether it’s a homeless person or someone who works at IHOP or a teacher or a janitor or someone who has a middle-class job, right? Some bullshit email job, what have you. He ought not have any more say in our democratic process just by virtue of the fact that he’s rich.
Now you say, Okay, well, Biden had an EV summit. That’s different, because it’s kind of a business summit. Okay, fine. But the fact that he doesn’t invite him does not mean he ought to invite him, and somehow Democrats should go court him, besides the fact that he has negatives higher than herpes in terms of polling, it’s not like Democratic voters are clamoring for Elon Musk’s approval. It’s simply an elite Beltway fixation. And of course, what they really want to say is, the Democrats need to focus more on pleasing wealthy tech people who are funded by crypto and AI, who can lavish the consultants that sponge off the Democratic Party and make them a bunch of money, rather than genuinely being worried about what voters want.
Nima: Yeah. Now, Ro Khanna, who you mentioned earlier, Adam, the Democratic Congressman from California, did one of these things. And, I mean, has been doing this for years. But notably in June of this year, 2025, was talking about how the Democrats need to do more to kind of get into Elon Musk’s good graces, for reasons that will become evident when I read this quote from Semafor, again, from June of this year, 2025. Quote,
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., talked with one of Elon Musk’s “senior confidants” on Thursday about whether the ex-DOGE leader, now feuding with Donald Trump, might want to help the Democratic Party in the midterms.
“Having Elon speak out against the irrational tariff policy, against the deficit exploding Trump bill, and the anti-science and anti-immigrant agenda can help check Trump’s unconstitutional administration,” Khanna told Semafor on Friday. “I look forward to Elon turning his fire against MAGA Republicans instead of Democrats in 2026.”
Khanna, who has known Musk for more than a decade, has long argued that Democrats unwisely pushed him away from their party.”
End quote.
Adam: Now, I replied to this on Twitter, saying to Ro Khanna,
please articulate a reason Democrats need to “pull Musk towards democrats” that isn’t just some iteration of “he’s very rich”.
I tweeted out a poll showing his unfavorables of 54%. He is
estranged from his own children and routinely says extremely racist things that could alienate core democratic constituents.
To which Khanna said,
Sure. His flooding zone along with lot of techies helped Trump win. If we can get them to flood zone with criticisms of the horrible bill, ban on international students, blanket tariff policy, revoking of clean energy tax credits, that’s a good thing in pushing back on Trump.
To which I replied,
Buried in your response is the goofy, disempowering premise that the point of politics is to suck up to and win over illegitimate oligarchical power rather than combat it. He’ll want something in return as he did w/ Trump. What is that something? Let us be transparent. Any ideas?
To which he did not get back. So there’s this idea that, again, people are just swimming in this ideology. They’re swimming in the water of ideology, without even realizing they’re doing it. If you think that, to be some savvy, hard-nosed pragmatist, you have to suck up to oligarchical power, we’ve already lost. We’ve already lost the plot. Because that’s not a democracy. Democracy, in principle, is not supposed to confer or afford undue power on people just because they’re rich. And if you want to live in an oligarchy where rich people have disproportionate power and land votes and money votes, then let’s just have that then. Then let’s end the pretense here.
And that’s the problem with this presumed media posture of leading authority and business leaders and billionaire nonprofit types who assert authority and a number of verticals just by virtue of the fact that they create a foundation and give to those so-called causes, is it’s deeply undemocratic. There’s no other process of validation to confer expertise other than the fact that, like Batman, they’re just rich.
Nima: Well, right? And, I mean, look, it is by now no secret that the majority of Congressmembers are millionaires, so they have themselves amassed great wealth. But also, of course, this is not just a Democratic problem. This is a bipartisan problem. For instance, the AP on January 28, 2025, wrote about how Donald Trump has been filling his administration with billionaires, and in that article written by Bill Barrow, is this piece, quote,
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is overseeing a new Department of Government Efficiency. Billionaires or mega-millionaires are lined up to run the treasury, commerce, interior and education departments, NASA and the Small Business Administration, and fill key foreign posts.
“He’s bringing in folks who have had great success in the private sector,” said Debbie Dooley, an early 2015 Trump supporter and onetime national organizer in the anti-establishment Tea Party movement. “If you need to have brain surgery, you want the proven brain surgeons.”
End quote. Now, again, Adam, a successful businessperson is not someone who has made, quote-unquote, The Economy, capital T, capital E, work for everyone. It means they have figured out how to make it work for themselves or their business, right?
Adam: Always, by exploiting labor and abusing labor and driving down costs.
Nima: Right. The idea that a billionaire is to a brain surgeon as the economy is to brain surgery makes no sense. But that is the narrative again, this trickle-down success narrative, you have, these exemplars, these ultra-wealthy, rare, rare, rare, rare exemplars of winning, the quote-unquote capitalist “economy,” right? They have succeeded and amassed great, great wealth for themselves in their industry. But in what way does that then confer authority or expertise or even interest in doing so for other people, let alone for millions of other people?
Adam: Yeah. And so the last example of this, where you see this kind of “economy” framing is around the media panic around Zohran Mamdani winning the New York City mayoral Democratic primary. His main opposition is consistently framed not as some meaningful constituency or voting bloc. They tried the so-called Jewish voters being concerned, but poll after poll kept showing Jewish voters supported Mamdani, so they sort of gave up on that, which is really just Zionist pressure groups. So now their new thing is to talk about the sort of economic experts, right? Business leaders. Business leaders are wary of Mamdani. The New York Times wrote in July of 2025, quote,
Mr. Mamdani’s surprise victory in the primary over former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a business-friendly candidate, set off a cascade of alarms last month. A few business executives even warned that Mr. Mamdani’s mayoralty could lead to some investment firms moving from the city.
Unquote. Which, of course, is not a genuine worry. It’s a threat. It’s a threat of capital strike. This is the same panic that rich people do all the time. CNBC’s Squawk Box aired similar fears. CNBC is just a revolving door of rich people complaining about Mamdani. This particular broadcast in mid-July featured Kathryn Wilde, the president and CEO of the aforementioned Partnership for New York City, founded by David Rockefeller. Let’s listen to that clip. The first voice you’ll hear is that of Kathryn Wilde. The second is that of co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin. So let’s listen to that right now.
[Begin clip]
Kathryn Wilde: He’s a very compelling, charming, smart young man, and gives you a sense of, he’s honest, means what he says, and he’s full of hope.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Okay, so here’s my question, though, there were, in terms of the reporting that I saw on this, a lot of folks who thought he was charming and a great candidate, clearly, he’s a good candidate in that he was able to attract a huge base and could speak in a way that attracted a group of people to vote for him. Having said that, there was also a sense, at least for some of the reporting that I saw, and folks that I talked to, that a lot of the people in the business community might have thought he was charming, but fundamentally disagreed with his underlying views of how to attack the city’s problems.
Kathryn Wilde: Totally, you didn’t let me finish. That was my, that was my ‘but.’
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Okay.
Kathryn Wilde: But no, he’s clearly totally inexperienced. They raised the issue of, you know, it’s a city of 300,000 people, it’s a very complicated management experience. What have you done? What’s prepared you? He said, Well, I’d surround myself with good people and follow the Mike Bloomberg principle of letting them do their job. That was a good answer, but I don’t think it was, it made up for the lack of experience. And on policy issues, you know, he’s sourcing from sources that they don’t believe in, in terms of the fiscal realities, the tax impacts, etc.
[End clip]
Adam: Again, the people voted for him, but what about these other people that have super power?
Nima: He’s not taking advice from Larry Summers, so therefore he can be discounted.
Adam: Now we saw this unchecked ideology manifest in one tweet by Liz Hoffman, a writer for business and finance at Semafor, who wrote, after Mamdani’s meeting with the aforementioned Partnership for New York City, the sort of CEO lobby, she wrote, quote,
Tough meeting for Mamdani with the Partnership for NY (CEOs) today I’m told. Stood his ground on “intifada” language and wouldn’t commit to keeping NYPD Comm. Tisch, whom this crowd likes, in the job. (Also did not recognize her father, Jim Tisch, when he rose for a question)
So here we have a tough meeting from Mamdani because he didn’t sufficiently prostrate himself to the business class of New York. And it’s just taken for granted by our business media, and several different outlets reported on this meeting and similar meetings in the exact same way, it’s just taken for granted that Mamdani needs to win over business leaders, the implication being that he needs to moderate, he needs to change his positions, that the Democratic primary voters voted for, that there’s this kind of extra-democratic, extralegal, shadowy fourth estate that has to validate and approve of our politicians.
And we see this during the early primary stages every year, right? So-and-so politician running in 2024, or 2020, or 2016, kicks off their candidacy by going to raise money in the Hamptons or Silicon Valley. There’s this kind of ritualistic groveling to wealth that is required for democracy to work. And then, not only is this kind of taken for granted, right? It’s sort of assumed to be just something you do, no one really questions it. Reporters aren’t supposed to question whether or not that ought to be the case, because that’s, you know, Ooh, that’s too ideological. It’s seen as a sign of seriousness. Not even in editorial voice, not even in kind of opinion voice, but in straight reporting, it’s seen as a sign of seriousness that this candidate is not a fringe radical. They’re to be taken seriously because they’ve gotten the blessing or approval, or at least kind of reluctant acquiescence of the so-called business community, which is just to say lobbying groups for very rich people.
And you don’t see this ritualistic process, you know, occasionally Democrats will kind of check the box with labor, like, big labor unions, but you don’t really see this for any constituency of poor people, for obvious reasons. They don’t have lobbying groups, by definition. But there’s not a sense that Mamdani needs to go win the teachers of New York. He’ll do it because he’s running a populist campaign. But it’s not presumed of something he has to do. It’s not presumed he has to win the sanitation workers’ union. It’s not presumed he has to win.
Nima: That’s not what is deemed essential.
Adam: That’s not what’s deemed essential, but it’s also not what’s deemed serious. It’s seen as a box that liberals check because they have no choice. But it’s not seen as something serious, and in the absence of that, they’re not harangued over it, right? It’s not like candidates who don’t get the approval from this or that union, or this or that advocacy group who supports homeless people or whatever, it’s not as if it’s seen as somehow a liability or a box that has yet to be checked. It’s just taken for granted, and this presumption, in a weird way, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because some jaded listeners would listen to this and say, Well, yeah, I mean, the fact is rich people do have a disproportionate say in our politics. That’s just a reality. But what we’re arguing is that the job of media is not to be savvy and jaded and sort of reassert dangerous ideologies because of some accepted worldview. Their job is to sort of at least pretend that in a democracy, rich people should not have a wildly disproportionate impact on politics, that that is just an ideological thingamajig. It is not a feature of reality. It is not something that we have to take for granted. It is something that is asserted and reasserted through ideological production, and that when media assume that we’re supposed to go grovel before rich people or their lobbyists, that that is actually reinforcing that premise, and that that is a premise for which media does not need to participate in reinforcing.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’re going to be joined by Rob Larson, professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Tacoma, Washington. His analysis has appeared in outlets like Jacobin, In These Times, and Current Affairs, and he is the author of the books Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, and Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More, both of which were published by Haymarket Books. Rob will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by Rob Larson. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Rob Larson: Absolutely, guys. My pleasure.
Adam: So the premise that extreme wealth confers expertise by definition in a number of fields, from development in Africa to education to healthcare to the, quote-unquote, “economy” to crime, whatever, that we laid out on the top of the show is simply taken for granted by mainstream media. Some multibillionaires adopt a cause, they pour some tax-deductible money into that cause, again, usually just breaking even as a kind of ideological play toy, and then poof, overnight, they become an expert because they lead some foundation or fund a lot of nonprofits or whatever. But as we argue in this episode, they’re just some guy. They’re just some guy. They’re not an expert in the field. And while we don’t want to be too fetishistic about the concept of expertise, because obviously that can be exploited, we’ve talked about that in the show before, they have, like, no expertise at all. They’ve never worked in the field. They have no concept of education. Bill Gates never taught anything. Of course, he’s not a health expert. He’s a guy that developed a software, another billionaire, social media companies or some kind of other technology that is completely unrelated to the thing that they’re supposedly an expert on.
Nevertheless, they’re given space in CNN, highly cherished New York Times op-ed columns. I want to sort of begin by discussing this dynamic and how it’s completely unchecked, which is, if you’re just very rich, you can kind of become an expert or a sort of thought leader on pretty much anything you want to, even though it’s the equivalent of basically vanity publishing, right? There’s not even a pretense of meritocracy.
Rob Larson: Yeah. Well, I mean, the real answer to this, why these wealthy people and philanthropic donors? The reason why they’re seen as experts, of course, is that they’re wealthy and powerful. They are our betters, and we need to listen to them to know what we should think about different situations. I joke around, of course. It is true any time one of these figures comes on after putting a yes, very tax-favored amount of money into one or another foundation that they probably control, the way they’re treated is with just naked ass-kissing sycophancy. It’s pretty gross to see. It is kind of worse than them just being some guy. It’s true they have no academic background. They aren’t educated in the subject. They haven’t spent years working on public health or the environment or whatever. But they’re very wealthy, and usually, as you said, they’re often wealthy partially from contributing to the problem that they’re setting out to solve through, you know, various ways. I mean, climate is an obvious one we can get into there.
And so that kind of is the background of this, along with just the fact that we live in a, of course, in a society that wall-to-wall worships wealth and wealthy people. And a big contributor to this also is the most recent iteration of wealth hagiography, which is celebrating all the alleged innovations that wealthy people and their giant tech platforms are supposed to bring to us, even though, if you look at the record, and as I talked about in my book on Big Tech, most of the foundational technology comes from public-sector investments, developing the internet, mostly through the Pentagon and university systems, you know. So we tend to look at these people and say, Well, you’re, you know, you’re very rich. You gave some money to this foundation. You must be very knowledgeable in creating new, important technologies. You’re just a smart guy in general. So it makes sense for us to have you on and take your opinion seriously. When usually what you’re seeing is guys who are in the right place at the right time to make some sleazy app or online platform riding on those decades of Baby Boomer-era public-sector investments in building up that technology.
And maybe one aspect of this too we shouldn’t overlook, is that very commonly, especially over the last several years, many of these very wealthy figures, especially through their foundations, have a whole side process of subsidizing media rooms and giving grants or other sorts of favorable economic favors towards broadcasters, and especially struggling print media above all, and as some journalists have tried to report on this, entities like the Guardian and others who you might think would know better will take money from, for example, the Gates Foundation, and maybe disclose it at the very bottom of a web article. Or maybe not. Tim Schwab, the journalist, has a book, The Bill Gates Problem, which looks very thoughtfully at this issue, just how broad some of these foundations are in their programs of just straight up cash gifts, and sometimes free tech support and so on, that they give to these platforms. And then these platforms, or their journalists will interview these people whose foundation it is, with just a fairly naked conflict of interest there, and maybe you get a disclosure on the website, certainly not in the digital content itself, and maybe you don’t even get that. So I feel like there’s a number of fairly gross currents that feed into that.
Adam: Yeah, we covered that on Episode 45 on Bill Gates, ‘The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire.’ Because I think the way they describe it, or at least the way they defend it, is they say, We’re not promoting his business interests. We’re promoting his foundation. So it seems less conflict-y. Like you said, The Guardian, NBC News, CBS, Paramount, had a deal where they were weaving TV plotlines into shows, which we discussed in great detail. And then, you know, if it’s something like promoting condoms or something, you’re like, Okay, well, that seems benign enough. I guess that’s fine. That doesn’t seem very sinister. But then you see, Oh, it’s weaving anti-teachers’ union plots into Law & Order. And you’re like, Oh, okay, well, that’s actually kind of sinister, and without disclosing it, and like you said, the default sycophancy is also either explicitly or implicitly, Hey, can you give us some money? You know, we can call it a media partnership, or whatever you want to call it, but ultimately, like, you’re this really, really, really rich man who can basically keep our media outlet alive.
So the default position becomes, we’re going to suck up. You saw this with Vox a lot. Vox has so many sycophantic interviews with Bill Gates, I can’t even count them where it’s like, Vox, you know, Bill Gates is a great idea for solving this. And it’s like, yeah, he’s just a guy, though. He’s just a guy that happens to, again, his foundation happens to invest in an overlap with a lot of Vox interests. Undisclosed, of course. And then it’s part of a broader media ecosystem where, even if they’re not necessarily directly taking his money, there’s kind of like a, Hey, what do you think?
Rob Larson: Yeah, and even, honestly in media circles, the ability to say that you’re taking money from a billionaire’s foundation is almost a brag, because media is such a notoriously insecure, thin margin, prone to major disasters and retrenchments as a sector, that even all the concessions that come from admitting that you have a wealthy sponsor, people would rather say, Well, look, we’ve got a guy, and maybe he won’t just directly fire us and shut us all down tomorrow, which is what market forces are doing to these entities. It is amazing, and Gates is a fascinating case, because just two or three years ago, he had his book about climate change come out, which is pretty rich. I have to say. I look at just some of it very briefly in my newer book on the ruling class, but it’s fascinating. Gates is one of the most profligate known, kind of visible users of private jets, and travels all around the world constantly on his private jet. And this is one of the most emissions-intensive forms of travel that there is.
But he has book on climate change, and if you look through it, there’s very little about taxing people of his wealth echelon, and more about how AI and future innovations will fix climate change. But we need to take it seriously. Maybe my foundation should have even more prominence in this process, when all you’re seeing is someone who’s contributing far more than even the average American to the problem. But again, watch their interviews. I haven’t read his interviews with Vox, but I’m confident in guessing that they’re unlikely to call him out, because you need that relationship. So many of these entities don’t survive without one form or another net flows of income from a rich patron. And Bill Gates, I mean, Bill Gates can be the difference between keeping your media entities lights on or them going off. You know, it’s just such a clear economic proposition.
Nima: Yeah, it winds up being, kind of, the social safety net for media outlets is philanthropy, right? And so obviously there’s some kind of relationship there, even if, you know, as we’ve been saying, it’s not explicit. But, Rob, I want to talk about one other aspect of this, which is the idea of neutrality or objectivity or disinterestedness of these philanthropic experts. Now, when I say philanthropic, I also want to make clear it’s not actually always just, you know, Bill Gates and other billionaires, basic-ass rich guys and Wall Street types, hedge-fund managers in general, are frequently presented as, quote-unquote, “experts” on–what else? — quote-unquote “The Economy.” And I say quote unquote with a capital T and a capital E. The Economy. We see them on CNN. We see them on CNBC, most annoyingly, perhaps, on MSNBC. Oh, sorry, rebranded now to MS NOW. Morning Joe, which really has a revolving door of random 65-year-old rich white guys pontificating on–what else? — capital T, capital E, The Economy.
Now this is kind of where we see this expert class, just by virtue of being some rich person, so therefore you’ve won the economy, which means you must understand it. So we see these folks, these, quote-unquote, “experts” on cable-news programs, oftentimes feigning concern for, you know, Joe Six-Pack, but really what they’re talking about is their investment portfolios and kind of what the economy is going to do for their own wealth. Yet they’re presented as these disinterested experts, when clearly they have skin in the game here, right? They have literal things to earn, things to lose. So, Rob, can you talk about the ways in which being rich is seen as kind of per se evidence, as being good at the economy, which then validates your own commentary, rather than seeing rich guys, rich people, Wall Street investors, as being themselves deeply conflicted orators of expertise who are really there to kind of defend their class interest?
Rob Larson: Yeah, absolutely. So that is a very prevalent thing. Yeah. If you are an investor or a person of any economic means, you are seen to be successful, and you are seen as, you must be someone who made a lot of good decisions and understands the economy well enough to get rich. The main culprit for creating this idea is, of course, me and my people, by which, of course, I mean economists. If you take a very conventional Econ 101 class, as you must do to get many high school degrees in a lot of US states, or if you take it in college, you know, on an undergraduate basis, you’re going to hear about how the market rewards success and your marginal productivity. And if you are rich, you must have worked very, very hard or invented some very valuable technology or reinvented some new process to make it more efficient. And that’s how you got wealthy.
The reality, of course, is totally different from that. But Econ 101, I mean, our specialty is laundering every hideous feature of capitalism and making it into a sweet little farmer’s-market-looking scenario. But the reality is, of course, these figures, it’s very insane to discuss these, as you said, run-of-the-mill, kind of Wall Street hedge-fund dudes as being people who won the economy, when on the most basic level, remember, many of these people were born into money, real money. That’s incredibly common. All of your big-name billionaires are like that. Trump, Musk, Harlan Crow, Bill Gates himself, of course. Or people who are at least PMC, coming from a professional, prosperous class background, like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, for example. So these are, of course, people who came in with a leg up on the game, or starting, you know, on second or third base, as the metaphor that people often like to use.
And we should remember too, that especially for these tech figures particularly, and they sort of are especially important, you know, because in this era, the tech billionaires and the Silicon Valley companies have kind of risen to the highest level of capitalism in terms of their wealth and their prominence and their ability to influence the debate. I usually argue these days that Silicon Valley is actually kind of co-dominant now with Wall Street in the kind of the cockpit of American capitalism, you know those tech networks. I mean, they vary, but typically they’re based on connecting users in some way. And all it is is those markets are based on something we call the network effect. This gets into economics. People can check out the book if they want to learn more about that. The short version is, it means that if you have early success in a market, you attract more users, more developers, and more customers. And early success tends to breed just continued, continued growth, and no one else can really break in. So YouTube, Google search, Windows back in its heyday, you know, before mobile internet.
I mean, these firms have monopolies that last for decades on end, and bring them many tens of billions a year in profit all the time. So you could say that they’ve won at the economy, but there’s not much in here that’s based on their cunning or their superior economic understanding. If you’re sort of in the right economic moment, and have access to some capital from your family or from connections you made in your elite prep academy, you will be in a position to make those investments, again, riding on the back of all those public-sector investments building up the technology. So it’s pretty gross.
You know, the expert, I would say, first, the deference is totally undeserved, but then also, closer to your point here, these are all figures who, as you said, they’re presented as being sort of disinterested, thoughtful guys. You know, they’re sort of detached, and they just want to give us some advice on this news channel or our online news media about what we should do. Most of these people, as you said, have what we call a real interest, a material, we often say, interest. They have money at stake. I really feel that we should avoid cumbersome government regulations or rushing to tax rich people like me. That’s just my detached, technocratic assessment. It’s not because I would directly stand to lose economically. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to buy my fourth vacation home. That would be terrible.
And what it really reminds me of, honestly, is something I’ve learned a lot about on you guys own show, specifically with regard, for example, to how media cover issues of chronic homelessness in American cities, and discussing, obviously, everyone recognizes homelessness is bad, but then how do we deal with it? Well, let’s bring in people who are commercial and business owners in the city, and people from the Chamber of Commerce, people who don’t want the unhoused looking unsightly or bothering their customers for a penny when they’re walking into my business. And we treat these people, again, You’re the business. You’re kind of independent of all social influence and human vice. What it is is people who have the most to lose in the subject, they have the most interest. They have a money or a class interest. So it is fascinating, isn’t it, how we’ll turn people who have the most interest, and then, just with a straight face, talk to them as if they’re, you know, You’re a dispassionate observer who just arrived on this planet. How? What should we do about this?
Adam: It also undermines the ways in which ideology becomes self-sustaining within their own economic interests. The person who’s on MSNBC talking about how we need to not raise taxes on the rich, who themselves are rich, may think they’re being objective, right? Because that’s how they develop that ideology, by virtue of being rich. But it’s funny, you mentioned that Bill Gates is the nepo baby. The other day, I was watching this Howard Schultz interview, and he was talking about how when he bought Starbucks, the idea of Starbucks, and wanted to raise, I think, a few million dollars to sort of grow it. He’s like, Yeah, so I walk across the street to Bill Gates, and I’m talking about this, and I listen to the story, and this takes place in the late ’70s. And I’m like, Bill Gates, late ‘70s? He must have, he was, like, 15 years old. And I’m like, Oh, wait, no, he’s talking about Bill Gates senior, his father.
[Laughter]
So it’s like, this is the person who, again, is so brilliant that he has to control from the 2010s the Department of Education, basically, as one Washington Post article put it, I think that’s fairly accurate. During the late Obama years, he basically controls public health in Africa. And of course, some of that’s winding down, but it’s being put into other foundations and other forms of influence. But I want to talk about what the media is fawning over these mega-billionaires as insta-experts says about something much bigger. To me, it’s sort of one part of a broader superstructure as a culture. And again, it’s something we have talked about on the show before, and I think it sort of merits emphasis that by treating these philanthropy as natural and inevitable, again, meaning the media that do so were themselves based on this model, right?
It truly is a very anti-democratic premise. Because again, why does Bill Gates have control over millions of people’s lives in Africa or in the United States or in specifically poor school districts? Why does Bill Gates get to determine environmental policy? Why do Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk get to determine how we go to space? Something that should be democratic if it happens at all, right? And it’s just sort of taken for granted. It’s naturalized. It’s seen as obvious. And then, not only that, of course, it’s spun as benevolence, that they’re actually doing us a favor. They’re bestowing their money and presence upon us, and we’re fortunate. Us, the sort of ignorant plebes who weren’t smart enough to come up with Amazon or Microsoft or, in you know, Jeff Bezos’s case, get a million-dollar loan from his father.
This is something that is so ingrained and so anti-democratic, because nobody voted for these people like Bill Gates and I didn’t have to win an election, you know, say what you will about the sort of pitfalls of populism and elections, at least someone voted for, you know, this person or that person. No one voted for these guys. They just assert their influence and power by virtue of being rich when they are, in fact, capital J, capital S, capital G, Just Some Guys.
Rob Larson: [Chuckles] Yeah, that is a really good question, because, as you sort of say at the beginning there, it’s sort of treated like it’s natural. Like, Oh, well, of course. You know Bill Gates. He’s rich, he’s kind of old now, he looks kind of grandfatherly. And I hear on media that I half-listened to that he has a big foundation and he gives money to poor people and stuff. So that’s nice. So why wouldn’t he be in charge? It’s kind of natural. And indeed, that’s often a major rationalization for the rich in general. I look at this a little bit in my new book on the ruling class, or I have a whole section looking at the various flimsy justifications used to justify these guys and their insane levels of privilege and power, that naturalization has always been a big part of it. And again, economics as a discipline plays a big role in this. We usually wouldn’t use the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in an econ setting these days. That’s seen as being kind of a little bit basic, but it is sort of the idea that the most efficient firm and the most canny investors will win out.
So naturally, the people who are wealthy and powerful, at least in the economy, it’s natural they should be there because they out-competed everyone else. But it’s really annoying, because, personally, my undergraduate work was actually in biology before I changed fields, like you do. And it’s annoying. If you learn about evolution in actual nature, in nature, you might have very successful parents, you know, who competed well in their environment, but all they can pass on to you is good genetic material. They can’t pass on to you, Here’s your giant pyramid of food that we piled up over our lifetimes. Now that belongs to you. They can’t confer big material success or assets generally to their offspring the way that we humans absolutely do. So again, the fact that, yeah, Bill Gates, how about that? I love that story about Schultz. That’s very funny. You know Bill Gates, you have to admire him. He parlayed a fortune of mere millions into billions of dollars. Wow, amazing. From riches to significantly bigger riches. It’s sort of amazing there.
But I think the reason why we see it as sort of natural, or why media are able to naturalize it for audiences. It’s just because, after all, we have a very undemocratic economic system at the base level. You know, it is capitalism. As you said, no one votes for these guys to take over. They take over because they’re able to crush their competitors, maybe through honest competition, maybe through not incredibly honest competition, you see all kinds of things in markets. But if you already have these guys, and you have monopolists or oligopolists in fields and between a few CEOs, they decide what investment will be, what we will invest our huge social wealth in, and what the economy of tomorrow will look like. Right now, we’re taking the trillions of dollars that we really should be spending on green energy and the climate transition and putting them into the climate-worsening effects of AI. No one’s voting on any of that shit. I mean, I guess occasionally stockholders do for some of these firms.
But of course, what we’re seeing is just like when we outsourced all of US industry, or when we decided that we would have subscription models for entertainment that we didn’t have to use to put up with, we’re very accustomed to decisions that can really affect our lives in healthcare and in your job, and we’re so accustomed to this little thin oligarchy of executives who are able to make the decisions on this basis, as long as they please the market, why wouldn’t they also take over health in Africa, or dealing with climate change, or supporting media? They’re already such huge, powerful autocrats that media are working so hard to make out like they’re cool Tony Stark types, why wouldn’t they also run this other stuff? You know, it’s very normalized by the rest of the system that it just seems second nature for these guys to take over other sectors, I think.
Nima: Well, yeah, and this has really kind of been a system and a structure that was established, I think, during the first Gilded Age, right, the Robber Baron era, because we see it really kind of laid out, and very little has changed in Andrew Carnegie’s article entitled “Wealth,” which he published June of 1889 in the North American Review. It’s now known as “The Gospel of Wealth.” Initially it was just called “Wealth,” and it sums up his argument about why wealthy people, and in his case, the extremely wealthy in our society, should be basically in charge of dispersing funds to ameliorate the plight of the working and poorer classes. And he kind of sums this up in this way, and I think we see this play out day in and day out now, still over a century later, he writes, quote,
The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race which it is clearly seen that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year by year for the general good.
End quote. And so this idea of stewarding wealth on behalf of the, quote-unquote, “wider community” for the, quote-unquote, “general good” has been kind of the mode of wealth and thus philanthropy for well over a century, and very little has changed. I think there are some changes here and there, in the way that certain funds are distributed, sure, but this basic idea of, The wealthy are the best of us. They are the best minds, is exactly what we see play out on our cable news panels, right, and in our op-ed sections and in the policies of Bill Gates- and Zuckerberg-funded grantee programs, we see this play out again and again, very little has changed.
So, Rob, you have done so much academic work on this. You have done so much work on this. Where do you see any cracks in this foundation, pun intended, perhaps, showing these days, are there ways to maybe shift the way that this works, or is it just this is what capitalism is and late-stage capitalism cannot operate any other way but this, which is why a fundamental change needs to happen?
Rob Larson: Yeah, that’s a great question. I love that example of Carnegie. Boy, he really is the liberal face of capitalism. You know, all these beautiful libraries and museums across this country, you know, I’m from the Midwest, and half the institutions have Carnegie’s name on them or something related to him. It’s amazing. And you read his, yeah, that extract is so perfect. You know, we run, it’s the wealth of the community administered better than you dumb, illiterate proles ever could. Like, right away, We are your betters. Well, how did Carnegie get to be in this position of being this big-hearted steward of the public wealth?
Carnegie was an unbelievably ruthless bastard building his industry, just as a little side note here. Crushing competitors, waiting for an unfair moment when they were weaker, and then bidding them out, organizing rings of other steel producers and then breaking the ring the moment it was in, like a collusion ring, and breaking it at the moment it was convenient. And of course, leaving to Scotland so he didn’t have to be there when he told his managers to break up strikes, like the Homestead Strike, and many workers end up dead in these processes. So using abject ruthlessness and exploitation and violence against labor. Now, though, I am an enlightened dictator, and I will raise you up better than anyone else ever could. Not incredibly convincing, just on the face of it.
But I really do think there are, sort of, to my own surprise, some cracks forming. I mean, the thing that people would point to, of course, is figures like Zohran and our still very small, as it were, a Democratic socialist fringe in governance. Ten years ago, we didn’t even have that. You could make a case that that for whatever those figures can achieve, and they certainly do let us down sometimes, don’t they? Gaza. [Clears throat sardonically] The fact is, this puts left-wing views and perspectives and policy ideas even in the simplest social democratic level, like Medicare for All, it puts them in the public debate and forces media to grudgingly discuss them. I think that represents a crack that we could work to widen.
Maybe a better one, though, is to look at the labor movement, which maybe you can’t say it’s going through a resurgence yet, but at least a renaissance. We’re having significant turnaround in public support for labor, significant victories by contemporary standards for some of the big legacy international unions, and also just seeing union leadership and the rank-and-file getting more pissed off and willing to break out of the mold more. Many of your audience members probably followed earlier this year when we had the Canadian flight attendant strike. Crazy, outrageous labor demands, as always. They want to get paid for ground work.
Nima: Exactly.
Rob Larson: Ground work, of course, is everything flight attendants do when you take a commercial flight before the door closes for the cabin, you know. So all that work of boarding people, organizing the plane, doing God knows how many little technical tasks to get all that crazy circus into the air. None of that is paid. We call it ground work, and the flights can’t go unless you do it. And if they don’t do it, they get fired. But we shouldn’t pay them. So the flight attendants were striking for this, and Air Canada went to the government and said, Will you please force these workers into arbitration? Which, as you guys have discussed, arbitration is a nice way to make sure no new benefits can possibly be added to the negotiation, like pay for work that you’re doing before the door closes on the airplane machine. And the government ordered them into arbitration, and the union refused to go along with it. They refused to submit to arbitration, and now Air Canada is actually negotiating with them. That is more like it.
And especially right now, we’re watching Trump and Elon Musk through his lawsuits, trying to really finally break down what remains of the New Deal labor supports, like the National Labor Relations Board, just losing court cases. It’s unclear right now what kind of authority they’re still going to have in five or 10 years. This is a great time for labor to be breaking out of rules that it submitted to in the New Deal era, when you could argue it was to their benefit, perhaps not really, as the neoliberal era of them getting crushed shows, seeing them break out of those rules, I think, is an encouraging crack in the system, and seeing social democrats being able to get an amount of purchase that surprises people, like all the rest of us are very domesticated by what our commercial media will allow us to see, seeing figures like those break out and way over-perform like Bernie in ’16 or Zohran right now. Those things represent, whatever you might individually make of those specific moments, it shows that this edifice is not without cracks and weaknesses that we could try together to exploit.
Nima: Well, I love that optimism, Rob, it’s rare on this show, so I really appreciate it. I think that’s a great place to leave it. We’ve been speaking with Rob Larson, professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Tacoma, Washington. His analysis has appeared in outlets like Jacobin, In These Times, and Current Affairs. He is also the author of the books Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, and Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More, both of which were published by Haymarket Books. Rob, thank you so much again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Rob Larson: Absolutely, guys. My pleasure.
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Adam: The entire premise of the, If you’re good at building a tech company or a software company, or sitting on some social-media IP or whatever it is, it sort of confers or implies or bestows expertise on literally any other subject, is such a great sort of dumb guy’s version of what smart people being smart is, right? It just so happens to be that the market rewarded this thing, again, assuming you started with a bunch of capital like Bill Gates did, like Jeff Bezos did.
Nima: Like Trump did.
Adam: Like Donald Trump did, right? You start with a bunch of capital, that pretty much eliminates 99.9% of the competition. And within that .1–
Nima: All I was handed was a million-dollar loan.
Adam: Yeah? And within that .01% of the population, you, yeah, you got lucky. I’m sure you worked hard, you know, I’m sure you had some late nights. But again, a lot of people work hard. That doesn’t really mean much. And that therefore makes you an expert on literally anything, by virtue of the fact that you have money. And this should be a premise that media ought to be challenging. It should be a premise that media says, Well, wait a second. Why is this person who started a software company in the ’80s, suddenly an expert on public health in Africa? Did he go back to school and get a PhD on it? Is it something he sort of bootstrapped his way in and worked his way up through? Because, again, we want to be clear. We’re not resumé humpers. We don’t believe necessarily that the only people who should be experts in things are those who’ve gotten institutional credentials necessarily, but at least that has some modicum of meritocracy, right, or at the very least you sort of organically developed expertise within a subject. There’s lots of people who are experts on the economy who are not formally trained economists, right? There’s lots of people who are experts on various niches who didn’t necessarily get a degree in it, but they put in the work, they published, they advocated, they did, you know, they sort of worked within a system and developed expertise in some kind of quasi-organic fashion, whereas, in this case, literally just one day in 1999, Bill Gates rolls out of bed and says, I’m now an expert in education. Well, okay, how?
Nima: and everyone just falls in line. I mean, I think it’s just that we’ve seen how endemic this is to media promoting these people and their ideas and then the institutions that they create and fund and kind of set the agenda for, set a certain kind of, you know, even if it’s a grantmaking strategy for, then becomes expertise, and this becomes something important to pay attention to.
Adam: And they’re assumed to be post-ideological as well. So there’s, even though things like education and public health are and again, development in Africa, are deeply political issues, they are deeply political and ideological issues with genuine questions about resource distribution and power, it’s just kind of glossed over. And they say, Oh, well, it’s philanthropy. Well, never mind that. I’m sure he has no ulterior motives, right? His heart just bleeds. He went from a rapacious capitalist that consistently pirated and stole other people’s, you know, IP for years, and woke up one day and just decided to give back, right? And there’s this idea that, and again, even if you accept that premise that all these billionaires just again, they got so rich, they sort of don’t need worldly pleasures anymore, and they have no ideologies. They still have their ideological filters and blinders. They have certain ideological axioms that they don’t question. It’s not like Bill Gates goes around and says, I don’t know. What if radical wealth redistribution is the answer? I mean, clearly that’s not on the table of options. It’s not on the menu of options. So again, I think it’s just this idea of the Western, global philanthropist expert is a total ideological–
Nima: And it’s kind of the mirror inverse of the Thomas Friedman-enshrined, Let me ask a random taxi driver in whatever far-flung country I’m in to get the people’s take. There’s like, the expert’s take is now the rich person, and the people’s take is now this one anecdotal person, the working man.
Adam: Well, fortunately, the Thomas Friedman taxi driver is totally made up and not real. It’s just Thomas Friedman. It’s like Chuck Schumer’s couple.
Nima: Right, it’s a pass-through.
Adam: Yeah, it’s a pass-through for Thomas Friedman’s preferred policy preferences, right? And again, no one’s sort of allowed to just have ideology. That’s the thing. It’s a recurring theme of the show. No one’s allowed to say, I have an ideology. Here’s what I believe. Here’s how I believe the world ought to work. Here’s how I believe resources ought to be distributed.
Nima: And then that can be discussed on those merits, with that kind of framework.
Adam: Right. No one’s allowed to have ideology because the ideology is evil, right? If Bill Gates went around saying, I believe strongly in the preservation of intellectual property and global capitalism, and I believe inequality is a natural feature of the world, and people just kind of deserve to be poor, and it’s wealthy people’s job to sort of throw them crumbs, that would sound evil. So you can’t sort of do that. You say, Oh, I don’t have any ideology. I’m just a wonk guy. I’m just going through the numbers, and you know, it happens to be that the numbers came out this way, which, again, happens to reflect all of my ideological preferences.
Nima: Yeah. I’m just a quant, and I’m seeing where there can be market answers to popular problem. Let’s look at the data. That’s how I made my billions. So now that’s how we can save the lives of billions. It’s a total canard that we just see again and again in our media. And so, yeah, I’m glad that we were able to discuss this, especially as it kind of sums up so much of the media worldview, Adam, you know, it’s rare that you get the New York Times opinion editor explicitly saying, We are a pro-capitalist paper, right? Like, oftentimes, that is done just within the reporting itself. It is inherent between the lines. I mean to kind of cite a cliche there. So I’m glad that we were able to discuss this, especially as our season nine premiere. Thank you again, everyone, for listening.
Before we leave you today, I also want to mention, and, Adam, we don’t often talk about ourselves, but I do want to mention this in case folks don’t know, that Citations Needed has actually been included in a new book about podcasts written by Vulture culture critic Sean Malin. The book was published on September 16, 2025, just this month. It is entitled The Podcast Pantheon: 101 Podcasts That Changed How We Listen — From WTF to Serial. And believe it or not, Adam, we are in it. Citations Needed is in the book. We are really, really honored, I’ll say, to be included by Sean in this and just to repeat again, we don’t often talk about ourselves, but you know what? I’m breaking the silence this time, Adam. Apologies, chest-thumping a tiny bit, just to say we’re honored and a bit humbled to be included in the book. Of course, you can pick up the book if you are interested in reading about the 101 podcasts that changed how we listen. It was published by Chronicle Books. And just want everyone to know, because your friendly neighborhood Citations Needed hosts and our crew are in it.
Adam: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s 101. It’s not top 10.
Nima: [Laughs]
Adam: I mean, it’s, you know, it’s a lot of, 101 is a big number. But anyway, yeah, no, we’re in there, and we’re the only good one. The rest of them are horrible.
Nima: Exactly. As everyone who already listens knows.
Adam: To be clear, yeah.
Nima: To be clear. But thank you, everyone, for listening. Welcome to season nine. We will be back very soon with more full-length episodes of Citations Needed throughout the season. Of course, also releasing News Briefs and live shows, etc., etc. So stay tuned for what’s to come. Thanks for sticking with us. And as always, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded and so appreciate all the support we get from listeners like you.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy.
Thanks again, everyone.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, September 24, 2025.
