Plutocrats

service documented something humans have suspected for centuries: power is good for your health. The UK research, which was launched in 1967, found that the higher up in the bureaucracy you were, the longer you lived. That’s equally true of today’s super-elite. They may be anxious and overworked. But it is still a lot better to be a trader or a CEO earning several million dollars a year—and guaranteed a golden parachute—than a minimum-wage cleaner working those same sixty hours a week but without the comforts of a private jet, a housekeeper, or medical insurance. Still, to understand the mind-set of the super-elite, your starting point should be the reality—and their own self-perception—that they, too, lead anxious, overworked, and uncertain lives.

SECULAR SAINTS

The money certainly helps justify those long hours. But the super-elite also bask in a culture that, at least until the 2008 financial crisis, was happy to regard them as the heroes of our age. Their virtue need not manifest itself in any of the traditional Judeo-Christian values—Steve Jobs, who currently dominates the iconostasis, was an egotistical jerk who often treated employees, family (including his daughter), and ordinary mortals who dared to e-mail him with cruelty or disdain. But we do need them to succeed in business because of their sheer superiority to everyone else—part of the appeal of the Jobs story is his second coming at Apple, when he showed up the mediocrities who had ousted him.

Most important of all, the plutocrats, and their chorus in the popular culture, are keen to believe they are not engaged on an entirely selfish mission. Carnegie asserted that knights of capitalism like himself “and the law of competition between these” were “not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race.” No one would talk like that today, but our champions of capital do like to describe their work in strikingly moral terms. Google’s company motto is “Don’t be evil,” and at a recent company conference, Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and now its CEO, said earnestly that one of Google’s greatest accomplishments was to save lives—thanks to the search engine, for instance, people can type in their symptoms, learn immediately they are having a heart attack, and get life-saving help sooner than they would have otherwise. The self-driving car, one of Page’s pet projects, would eventually, he argued, save more lives than any political, social, or humanitarian effort.

“It’s not possible in tech to frame your ambitions aside from those who are making the world a better place,” Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, told me. “I think it has a lot to do with the way Silicon Valley was formed and the university culture. The egalitarian culture. The liberal culture there. People are often surprised by that…. And I always try to explain to people that people actually came to Google not to get wealthy, but to change the world. And I genuinely believe that.”

Another way to believe our plutocrats are heroes battling for the collective good is to think of capitalism as a liberation theology—free markets equal free people, as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal asserts. One of the most convincing settings for this vision is Moscow, where in October 2010 you could hear it ringingly delivered by Pitch Johnson, one of the founders of the venture capital business in Silicon Valley, in a public lecture to business school students about capitalism and innovation.

Johnson, who was a fishing buddy of Hewlett-Packard cofounder Bill Hewlett, is a genial octogenarian with a thick white head of hair, glasses, and a Santa Claus waistline. He has made something of a project of Russia, having traveled there twenty times since 1990 (he got a particular kick out of flying his private jet into what was then still Soviet airspace). As Johnson tells it, capitalism is about more than making money for yourself—it is about liberating your country. “Those of you who practice economic freedom will also cause your country to have more political freedom,” Johnson promised with great enthusiasm. “I would call you the revolutionaries of this era of your country.”

WHO SOLD SUMMER?

The Spectator is the house newsletter of Britain’s conservative establishment, the product of a literary and political hothouse whose writers are known for throwing the best parties in London and causing the occasional political scandal with their high-profile extramarital high jinks. Don’t be deceived by its modest circulation of less than sixty-five thousand; three editors of the Spectator have gone on to serve in the cabinets of Tory prime ministers, and one, Boris Johnson, is currently the mayor of London. The phrase “young fogey” was coined on the pages of the Spectator in 1984, and the magazine remains proud to speak in a posh accent—you’ll learn more in the Speccie, as its devotees call it, about fox hunting than you will about pop stars.

That’s why the Spectator’s pronouncements on elite English culture should be taken seriously. And in a cover story published in June 2011, the magazine announced a sea change. “Who Sold Summer?” the headline asked, with the answer in the subhead: “On how a very English social season became the property of the international elite.”

The author’s point was that the hoary old fixtures of English cultural life—horse racing at Ascot or Epsom, cricket at the Oval or Lord’s, opera at Covent Garden or Glyndebourne—which had once belonged to the Spectator community, had been taken over by the global super-elite. “For the super-rich, the world isn’t divided into countries any more; just rich and poor parts. And, like swallows, their favoured rich parts in summer are now their English bolt-holes in the north,” writes Harry Mount, the author of the essay, who also happens to be a second cousin of David Cameron, Britain’s aristocratic Conservative prime minister, a graduate of Westminster, one of Britain’s most exclusive private schools, and a former member of the Bullingdon Club, the exclusive and controversial private society at Oxford. “Britain now has a Wimbledon economy: we provide the charming venue, and foreigners come over to enjoy themselves on Centre Court. The paradox is that the recession has accelerated the globalisation of England. The English have been hard hit: with half a million jobs lost, and our rich stung—or chased abroad—by the 50p tax and the tax on bank bonuses. But the globalised elite, with their money parked offshore, have emerged almost untouched: their assets diversified, their wealth hitched to the booming East.”

Mount chronicles the global super-elite’s takeover of the English rituals that until very recently belonged to his class and clan. But what he has observed on the playing fields of Eton is actually a worldwide phenomenon. The plutocrats are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

“There’s an interaction between the global elite, as you call them, and the media, as follows, which has to do with sort of the, for lack of a term, sexiness of it all,” Eric Schmidt told me in his Google office in Mountain View. “Magazines are now publishing the destinations that everyone goes to. So, there’s a list, okay? So let me tell you what the list is. There’s Davos. There’s the Oscars. There’s the Cannes Film Festival. There’s Sun Valley. There’s the TED conference. There’s Teddy Forstmann’s conference. There’s UN Week, Fashion Week. In London, there is Wimbledon Week, which is the last week of June.

“These have become global events, when they were local events,” Schmidt explained. “They’re not nearly as much fun as they were when I was reading about them in the paper. Because the pictures were much better than the reality. But because I see myself as a global citizen, I go anyway…. The math is that people want to be where other smart and interesting people are…. There’s a perception you have to be there. And globalization, air travel, allows you to do this. So, the people that you’re describing travel a lot. And they also have multiple homes, right? So, the rigors of travel are not so bad if you have a home in London. I don’t have these things, by the way.”

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No one studies the super-elite more assiduously than their would-be bankers. Like its rivals, every year Credit Suisse publishes a Global Wealth Report, an address book, health checkup, and love letter to the world’s money. In its 2011 edition, Credit Suisse noted the difference between the world’s rising middle class, which remains rooted in and defined by nationality, and the increasingly shared and global character of people at the very top: