The Haves and Have-Yachts - by Evan Osnos

Book Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From National Book Award-winning author Evan Osnos comes a timely and provocative collection of essays exploring American oligarchy, billionaire culture, and the modern Gilded Age, offering a wry, unfiltered look at how the ultrarich, from Silicon Valley billionaires to Wall Street power players, shape--and sometimes warp--our social and political landscape.

The one percent now hold more of America's wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. In this incisive work of investigative political journalism, Osnos paints an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions that define today's wealth inequality in America: from superyachts and luxury bunkers to elite tax havens, political influence, and private security teams. This is the new face of the American elite class--armed with unimaginable fortune and unprecedented power.

With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about indulgence, incentive, and the psychological distortions of vast wealth. In each essay, Osnos lifts the curtain on a world rarely seen, from the outrageous to the surreal: a private wealth manager betraying an American dynasty; pop stars performing at billionaires' parties for children; status anxiety spilling from marinas in Monaco and Palm Beach--like real-world episodes of Succession or The White Lotus.

You'll meet disgraced moguls in a "white-collar support group," unravel a Ponzi scheme, and explore the global ambitions of tech tycoons, including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. A celebrated political reporter, Osnos documents the rise of the modern oligarchy, examining how the wealthiest people in America wield influence--and the backlash it provokes.

Originally published in The New Yorker and revised for this edition, these essays offer an urgent, entertaining, and unsettling look at the economic power and privilege shaping our world. The Haves and the Have-Yachts is essential reading for anyone interested in wealth and power, social critique, or the high-stakes reality of the new Gilded Age.

Review Quotes

"The Haves and Have-Yachts explores growing wealth disparity and the subtle self-delusion embraced by the ultrarich. . . . The jump from believing yourself worthy of an enormous fortune to believing yourself broadly superior because of it is not a hard one to make." --Bloomberg

"[Osnos's] reporting is sharp, and his prose is charming. He has an especially keen eye for redolent detail." --Washington Post

"A multifaceted portrait of the habits, proclivities, and insecurities of an economic stratum so rarified it's nearly inconceivable--and virtually inaccessible--to just about everyone else." --NPR

"A thoroughly reported and spryly narrated--and deeply maddening--tour of extreme wealth," --Kirkus Reviews

"An amusing and enraging glimpse into the lives of the überwealthy. . . . succeeds most of all as an exposé of the grotesque excesses of the elite." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An eye-opening account of superyachts, the billionaires who buy them, and what it all means for the rest of us. . . [A] droll and timely analysis of extreme wealth." --The Guardian

"Fun to read. . . . There is plenty of serious analysis amid the tales of the rich behaving badly." --The Times (UK)

"The Gilded Age had Mark Twain, the Jazz Age had F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Age of Trump, luckily, has Evan Osnos. In The Haves and the Have-Yachts, Osnos reveals the secret lives and preoccupations of America's increasingly powerful oligarchs and probes their outsized impact on the rest of us. Osnos is an astute political reporter and a wonderful and witty stylist, making this menagerie of modern-day Robber Barons equal parts entertaining and appalling. Anyone trying to understand who really rules Trump's America must read it." --Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money

"Toggling between extravagances like simulated World War II battles and dueling luxury disaster refuges, Osnos takes the reader deep into our new Gilded Age." --The New York Times

About the Author

Evan Osnos has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. His most recent book, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury, was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, where he shared two Pulitzer Prizes. He lives with his wife and children near Washington, DC.