From Rockefeller and Carnegie to Musk and Zuckerberg: The Evolution of the Public Billionaire

The world’s first confirmed billionaire was fossil-fuel magnate John D. Rockefeller, who reached that rarefied height of stupefying wealth in 1918. Back then, Rockefeller’s billionaire status took him a long way. In 1913, his personal wealth reportedly accounted for about three percent of the USA’s GDP.

As he vaulted past Croesus on his way to the top of the American cash heap, Rockefeller drew scores of detractors and a few bitter rivals. Such animosity rarely stemmed from envy. Through ownership of Standard Oil, Rockefeller was an unsentimental monopolist, steamrolling would-be competitors and holding the market to ransom. He made no apologies for his hard-nosed approach to business, which he saw as a Social-Darwinist battle of attrition in which only the fittest would emerge triumphant. In his later years, he turned to philanthropy.

One of Rockefeller’s most intense foes was steel magnate and industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who also became a notable philanthropist later in life. The business competition between Rockefeller and Carnegie was covered breathlessly by the contemporaneous press (there was no social media back then), reflected in countless column inches of articles and in the caricatures of cartoons. There is no record, however, of these obscenely wealthy industry titans challenging one another to a boxing match under Marquess of Queensberry rules. (Like the Internet and social media, WWE cage matches had yet to make an appearance).

Now let’s take a jump cut to the present. Nobody would say that billionaires are a dime a dozen today, but, compared to the early decades of the 20th century, our world is seemingly awash in them. Scan any list of billionaires, and you’ll see an international cavalcade of the exceptionally wealthy. We even have hectobillionaries, individuals with staggering net worth of at least $100 billion.

I wonder about the accuracy of these lists, though. Where are the Saudis, for example? The Saudis seem to have enough disposable oil loot on hand to acquire and reconfigure professional sports — not just individual athletes or teams, but entire associations and leagues (witness the fate of the PGA). As of last week, Saudi Aramco (the oil behemoth) had a valuation second only to Walmart’s, surpassing Apple and Amazon. In its latest quarter, despite profits declining 40% from the prior year, Aramco still cleared $30 billion in earnings. The Saudis are investing at enormous scale in nearly everything, including electric vehicles, AI startups, and their own futuristic desert cities.

That digression aside, let’s get back to the reputed state of today’s billionaire class. According to estimates from Forbes, we might have reached a temporary “peak billionaire” plateau. In the year 2000, the world played host to 470 billionaires, and the count gradually grew until 2009, when the full effects of the financial crisis reduced the membership of the billionaire ranks to 793 from 1,125 in 2000. Since then, however, the billionaire count has grown steadily, hitting a high in 2021 (during the COVID pandemic, incidentally), when 2,775 billionaires accounted for $13.1 trillion in aggregate net worth. The 2022 and 2023 billionaire numbers and overall net worth are down slightly, but with an AI bubble approaching at warp speed, we can confidently anticipate that the world’s billionaire class will resume robust growth. We needn’t begin soliciting charitable donations on behalf of the superrich.

Not Quite Back to the Future

I mentioned earlier that early billionaire John D. Rockefeller and his almost equally rich nemesis Andrew Carnegie never challenged one another to a boxing match. I’m sure these men enjoyed the occasional spectacle, but they studiously refrained from being the spectacle. Today, though, there’s more intramural truculence in the billionaire club, and at least a couple members aren’t reticent about personal public exposure. As some of you might have heard – you’d need to be a digital recluse to have escaped the news — Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, two prominent billionaires in the realm of techdom, have reached a point of ostensible mutual acrimony where they are challenging one another to a physical fight, a cage match, in Las Vegas.

The fight might never happen. Musk, in particular, seems to be particularly flippant about the proposition. He’s now, as of yesterday, citing a bad back and potential surgery as an inhibitor to the mano-a-mano showdown.

Musk, in his online persona, seems to treat nearly everything and everybody with frivolity and irreverence these days. He’s like somebody working up an experimental comedy act for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Musk’s Twitter (sorry, X) presence seems to be getting more contrived and performative, analogous to Boris Johnson’s buffoonish Bombolini act in UK politics.

Zuckerberg, too, makes his private life public on Meta’s own social-media properties, including Meta’s Threads (an X competitor), offering curated vignettes of a Zuckerberg persona that might or might not correspond with the off-stage life he keeps to himself. Jeff Bezos, though not involved with the two aspiring combatants in their cage-match publicity campaign, poses shirtless for paparazzi at every opportunity, all over the world, flaunting his administratively developed musculature.

I can’t be the only one who thinks the ostentatious and sometimes juvenile behavior of the digital realm’s ruling class is, well, a bit odd. Overexposure can backfire, as Hollywood agents can well attest, and some members of Musk’s online fan club have begun to wonder whether he’s the unalloyed genius they thought he was.

All of which raises the question: Why are Musk and Zuckerberg doing it? Why are they submitting to, even actively encouraging, the fixed attention of the public gaze? In the not-too-distant past, the richest of the rich would live in society’s shadows, not wanting to draw attention to themselves or their invidious wealth. What we’re seeing now is of a different order. While the addictive pull of social media and the seemingly universal quest for always-on fame might partly account for the current sideshow, Musk and Zuckerberg are the owners and operators of social media’s three-ring digital circus. They have no obvious or material need to perform for the crowd, but they’re doing it anyway.

If the cage match actually comes to pass, at least the two combatants have agreed to donate the proceeds to charity. That’s the only positive development in this farce, and it inspires an idea: Perhaps we could arrange for all the world’s billionaires to compete athletically in an “Olympiad of the Super Rich,” with all resulting revenue — from onsite attendance and worldwide streaming —destined for charitable causes to be determined by public online voting. Who wouldn’t want to see Bill Gates competing in the hammer throw, Jeff Bezos in weightlifting (on recent appearances, he might do well), or Larry Ellison in the 100-metre sprint? We can’t put Ellison in the sailing event; it would be unfair to his competitors, akin to market monopolization.

At any rate, all of this must mean something, right? Then again, back when the first billionaires, led by Rockefeller, were reaching the heights of their personal wealth, a subsection of the world’s artists responded to the horrors of World War I with Dadaism, an absurdist repudiation of the social conventions and logical reasoning that were supposed to preclude the devastation of wars. Today, Musk jokes about war as a reflexive macho imperative, and despite the impressive technological progress of recent decades, we’re left to wonder how far we’ve actually evolved since the rise of the first billionaires.