amateurish, faded charms of English high summer have been replaced by a professionalised, slick operation, supercharged by oceans of international cash.”
But the irony of this overseas acquisition is that while the debutante balls and hunts and regattas of yesteryear may not be quite obsolete, they are certainly headed in that direction. The real community life of the twenty-first-century plutocracy occurs on the international conference circuit. “We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how else do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” Andrew Zolli of PopTech, an ideas forum and social innovation network, told
The best known of these events is the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, invitation to which marks an aspiring plutocrat’s arrival on the international scene—and where, in lieu of noble titles, an elaborate hierarchy of conference badges has such significance that one first-time participant remarked that the staring at his chest made him realize for the first time what it must be like to have cleavage. The Bilderberg Group, which meets annually at locations in Europe and North America, is more exclusive still—and more secretive—though it is more focused on geopolitics and less on global business and philanthropy. The Boao Forum, convened on Hainan Island each spring, offers evidence both of China’s growing economic importance and of its understanding of the culture of the global plutocracy. Bill Clinton is pushing hard to win his Clinton Global Initiative a regular place on the circuit. The annual TED conference (the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an important stop for the digerati, as is the DLD (Digital-Life-Design) gathering Israeli technology entrepreneur Yossi Vardi cohosts with publisher Hubert Burda in Munich each January (so convenient if you are en route to Davos). Herb Allen’s Sun Valley gathering is the place for media moguls, and the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival is for the more policy-minded, with a distinctly U.S. slant. There is nothing implicit, at these gatherings, about the sense of belonging to a global elite. As Chris Anderson, the curator of the TED talks, told one gathering: “Combined, our contacts reach pretty much everyone who’s interesting in the country, if not the planet.”
Recognizing the value of such global conclaves, some corporations have begun hosting their own. Among these is Google’s Zeitgeist conference, where I have moderated discussions for several years. One of its recent gatherings was held in May 2010 at the Grove, a former provincial estate in the English countryside whose three- hundred-acre grounds have been transformed into a golf course and whose high-ceilinged rooms are now decorated with a mixture of antique and contemporary furniture. (Mock Louis XIV chairs—made, with a wink, from high-end plastic—are much in evidence.) Cirque du Soleil offered the five hundred guests a private performance in an enormous tent erected on the grounds; the year before that, to celebrate its acquisition of YouTube, Google flew in overnight Internet sensations from around the world.
Yet for all its luxury, the mood of the Zeitgeist conference is hardly sybaritic. Rather it has the intense, earnest atmosphere of a gathering of college summa cum laudes. This is not a group that plays hooky: the conference room is full from nine a.m. to six p.m. on conference days, and during coffee breaks the lawns are crowded with executives checking their BlackBerrys and iPads.
The 2010 lineup of Zeitgeist speakers included such notables as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, London mayor Boris Johnson, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (not to mention, of course, Google’s own CEO, Eric Schmidt). But the most potent currency at this and comparable gatherings is neither fame nor money. Rather, it’s what author Michael Lewis has dubbed “the new new thing”—the insight or algorithm or technology with the potential to change the world. Hence the presence of three Nobel laureates, including Daniel Kahneman, a pioneer in behavioral economics. One of the business stars in attendance was then thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, who had sold his Zappos online shoe retailer to Amazon for more than a billion dollars the previous summer. And the most popular session of all was the one in which Google showed off some of its new inventions, including the Nexus phone.
This geeky enthusiasm for innovation and ideas is evident at more intimate gatherings of the global elite as well. Take the elegant Manhattan dinner parties hosted by Marie-Josee Kravis, the economist wife of private equity billionaire Henry Kravis in their elegant Upper East Side apartment. Though the china is Sevres and the paintings are Old Masters, the dinner table conversation would not be out of place in a graduate seminar. Mrs. Kravis takes pride in bringing together not only plutocrats such as her husband and Michael Bloomberg, but also thinkers and policy makers such as Richard Holbrooke, Robert Zoellick, and
In fact, the idea conference is so trendy that a couple of New Yorkers recently hosted an ideas wedding. When David Friedlander and Jacqueline Schmidt married in Brooklyn in December 2011, their guests were issued name tags that asked them to declare a commitment. Another card urged, “Name one action you can take in the next twenty-four hours that is aligned with your commitment.” Instead of boozy speeches about the bride and groom delivered by nervous family and friends, the main entertainment was a series of TED-style talks, complete with PowerPoint presentations, about issues the couple cares about—neuroscience, the environment, and holistic healing.
A thought-leadership wedding just might be going a step too far—the Friedlander/Schmidt nuptials were snarkily chronicled in the
George Soros, who turned eighty in the summer of 2010, is a pioneer and role model for the socially engaged billionaire. Arguably the most successful investor of the postwar era, he is nonetheless most proud of his Open Society Foundations, through which he has spent billions of dollars on causes as diverse as drug legalization, civil society in central and eastern Europe, and rethinking economic assumptions in the wake of the financial crisis.
Inspired and advised by the liberal Soros, Pete Peterson—himself a Republican and former Nixon cabinet member—has spent $1 billion of his Blackstone windfall on a foundation dedicated to bringing down America’s deficit and entitlement spending. Bill Gates, likewise, devotes most of his energy and intellect today to his foundation’s work on causes ranging from supporting charter schools to combating disease in Africa. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has yet to reach his thirtieth birthday, but last fall he donated $100 million to improving Newark’s public schools. Insurance and real estate magnate Eli Broad has become an influential funder of stem cell research and school reform; Jim Balsillie, a cofounder of BlackBerry creator RIM, has established his own international affairs think tank; the list goes on and on. It is not without reason that Bill Clinton has devoted his postpresidency to the construction of a global philanthropic “brand.”
The super-wealthy have long recognized that philanthropy, in addition to its moral rewards, can also serve as a pathway to social acceptance and even immortality. Andrew “The Man Who Dies Rich Dies Disgraced” Carnegie transformed himself from robber baron to secular saint with his hospitals, concert halls, libraries, and universities; Alfred Nobel ensured that he would be remembered for something other than the invention of dynamite. What is notable about today’s plutocrats is that they tend to bestow their fortunes in much the same way they made them: entrepreneurially. Rather than merely donate to worthy charities or endow existing institutions (though they of course do this as well), they are using their wealth to test new ways to solve big problems.
Their approach is different enough to have inspired a new phrase, “philanthro-capitalism,” which is also the title of a book by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. Bishop and Green explain: “The new philanthropists believe they are improving philanthropy, equipping it to tackle the new set of problems facing today’s changing world…. [They] are trying to apply the secret behind their money-making success to their giving.”
“What they are doing is much more trying to copy business techniques and ways of thinking,” Bishop told me. “There is a connection between their ways of thinking as businesspeople and their ways of giving. If you compare it with previous eras, in each era going back to the Middle Ages the entrepreneurs have been among the people leading the response to the destruction caused by the economic processes that made them rich. You saw it in the Middle Ages, you saw it with the Victorians, you saw it with Carnegie and Rockefeller. What is different is the scale. Business is global and so they are focusing on global problems. They are much more focused on how do they achieve a massive impact. They are used to operating on a grand scale and so they want to operate on a grand scale in their philanthropy as well. And they are doing it at a much younger age.”
A measure of the importance of public engagement for today’s super-rich is the zeal with which even emerging market plutocrats are developing their own foundations and think tanks. When the oligarchs of the former
