THE HAVES AND HAVE-YACHTS: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, by Evan Osnos
I kept thinking about the Weegee photograph “The Critic” while reading “The Haves and Have-Yachts,” Evan Osnos’s collection of his “revised and expanded” New Yorker articles about the “ultrarich.” In the 1943 picture, two socialites, clad in furs, jewels and tight, dignified smiles, walk into the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera while, off to their left, a tipsy, bedraggled woman in a cloth coat gives them a withering stare.
Osnos, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is urbanely critical of the rich who have gotten too rich, but is not Weegee’s Critic. There are constant reminders that the various yacht owners, tech disrupters and hedge funders profiled lead a more lavish lifestyle than does the author — but it’s clear to the reader that he can pass. Osnos is not a hater of success or even privilege; he’s more an anthropologist of unseemly excess.
In the acknowledgments, he thanks one of his sources and inspirations: “a stranger, sitting next to me on a flight nearly a decade ago,” who happened to work in Silicon Valley. This person urged him to examine the “changing conceptions of wealth, government and the future” then metastasizing among the elites of the ascendant tech sector. Presumably Osnos and this deep-pocketed Deep Throat were not flying coach.
Osnos himself grew up in Greenwich, Conn., the son of a publishing executive. After Harvard, he made his way to China first as a student in the wake of the Tiananmen clampdown. By 2008, he was corresponding from Beijing for The New Yorker, at a time when many of America’s business elites were making vast sums of money there. His excellent 2014 book “Age of Ambition” won the National Book Award for its low-high depiction of a country coming of age — which, he writes, most reminded him of the Gilded Age United States.
Back in America, Osnos was put on the plutocrat beat, just in time for a scheme-y new Gilded Age. There’s plenty of excess to gawk at with him here, but the message is always that great wealth is in some way its own trap. Osnos gives us Anthony Scaramucci’s few possible avenues for the rich: “the art world, or private aircraft and yachting, charity-naming buildings and hospitals after themselves — or they can go into experiential.”
Rod Stewart, Usher and Mariah Carey are hired to play at private parties. There’s the guy selling “experiential yachting” programs, which recreate the Battle of Midway to entertain “bored billionaires,” complete with haptic guns. We meet estate planners who keep the rich from paying their fair share of taxes — if any. A good-looking, if mediocre, actor with an impressive social media presence runs a Ponzi scheme pretending to be a successful movie producer.
There is something unconvincing about turning these pieces into a topical anthology. (Does a profile of Mark Zuckerberg really fit with one of the convicted fraudster Guo Wengui?) This feeling deepens when you realize that some of the book’s sermonizing material about how Osnos’s hometown lost its Yankee propriety also appeared in his opprobrium-rich 2021 book “Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury.”
The basic income-inequality foundations of this new book are by now familiar. In a typical statistical aside, Osnos notes that in 1978, “the top .01 percent of Americans owned about 7 percent of the nation’s wealth; today, according to the World Inequality Database, it owns 18 percent.” (The furtherance of that trend seems to be built into the policy aims of the current administration.)
As the rich became richer, they became more concerned with competing with one another — over yachts and rock stars, for luxury refuges in the cases of climate disasters and/or civilizational collapse — and less concerned with the needs of everyone else (a classic conundrum in the book is whether to save the family of the private-getaway-jet pilot in an end-of-the-world situation).
“The Haves and Have-Yachts” is journalistic: descriptive, not prescriptive. It’s a prestige romp in the aloof mode of The New Yorker — a style that keeps passions at a minimum.
In the book’s memorable 2022 title piece, an immersive cavort through yacht culture, Osnos travels to Monaco to hang out among the have-yachts. “The nearest hotel room at a price that would not get me fired was an Airbnb over the border in France,” he writes. “But an acquaintance put me on the phone with the Yacht Club de Monaco,” which “occasionally rents rooms — ‘cabins,’ as they’re called — to visitors in town on yacht-related matters.” From his finagled room, he looks out on the harbor and thinks, “intrusively, of a line from Santiago, Hemingway’s old man of the sea. ‘Do not think about sin,’ he told himself. ‘It’s much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.’”
Reading that, I thought, intrusively, that it is good work if, like Osnos, you can get it. Weegee’s Critic was only remunerated by free drinks.
THE HAVES AND HAVE-YACHTS: Dispatches on the Ultrarich | By Evan Osnos | Scribner | 279 pp. | $30
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