Digging Into the Upper Crust

How do Americans think of our wealthiest fellow citizens? Are they to be scorned or admired? The answer may be even more radical: Perhaps we think they are not so different from the rest of us. A 2003 Gallup poll said 31% of Americans expect to be rich within their lifetime. In a poll conducted this year, 73% of teenagers said they expect to earn “plenty of money” as adults.“All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make — and Spend — Their Fortunes” (Knopf, 416 pages, $26.95) is at its heart a book tailored to these readers, who think they have a shot at someday appearing in the magazine’s pages. Published to mark the 25th anniversary of Forbes magazine’s annual list of the nation’s wealthiest, the book is both respectful and a bit removed. Authors Peter Bernstein (editor of “The Ernst & Young Tax Guide”) and Annalyn Swan (co-author of a 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Willem de Kooning) avoid discussion of what the accumulation of great wealth means. The book seems to say, God bless those titans of industry — now how did they do that? It lets us marvel discreetly, without judgment or overmuch awe.It’s generally a useful approach, since the Forbes 400 is by definition a chronicle of outliers. The best candy salesman, the top garbage collector, and, increasingly, the outstanding investors and movers of other people’s money: There are not many sweeping points to be made about what these men and women have in common. The first of three major sections, “What It Takes,” is an overview of some of their shared characteristics: drive, self-confidence, responsible risk-taking, and the rest of the usual stuff of cubicle-wall inspirational posters. But other than that, those who make the list are wildly different: They have started as bush pilots and actors and paperboys, become Ivy League alumni or college dropouts (four of the current top five didn’t graduate). They have gone on to be philanthropists and misers, showboats and private family men. They come from 35 different countries; Google’s Sergey Brin is the richest immigrant, worth $14.1 billion in 2006.During its short lifetime, the list has undergone some real demographic changes, and those provide at least some hope for that optimistic group that believes they will someday be rich. In the list’s first year, 212 members had conjured their own fortunes, but by 2006, the number had grown to 280. Heirs make up a dwindling percentage, and more of the wealthiest are making their own fortunes.The list has also become even more overwhelmingly male, which the authors characteristically note without judgment. The few women who have stumbled onto the list have almost all inherited their money, so with the decline of inherited wealth, the number of women on the list has dropped somewhat precipitously. There were only 47 on the list in 2006, down from 75 in 1982. Here’s one theory: It’s possible that fewer women than men could apply to themselves, without qualification, the self-description offered by investment giant Warren Buffett: “I was wired at birth to allocate capital.”The first list — more feminine and genteel — resembled Mrs. Astor’s 400: There were 24 DuPonts, along with such names as Ford, Frick, Rockefeller, and Whitney. In 2006, the DuPonts were off the Forbes list altogether, and the Rockefeller fortune is spread thin. Now California has more members than New York does, and technology and finance have replaced oil and manufacturing as the list’s top sources of income.Not all of these titans of industry have been pleasant fellows, and that’s where Mr. Bernstein and Ms. Swan get some of their best anecdotes, most of which come in the last section, “Spending It.” Oracle’s Larry Ellison, for one, comes across as almost sociopathically unpleasant and competitive. Hilariously, he once ordered a 453-foot yacht whose length was specified to be longer than rival billionaire Paul Allen’s (hello, Sigmund Freud). And at least 13 members have been convicted of crimes, as one of dozens of readable charts and graphs explains. That number includes Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman; Leona Helmsley; WorldCom’s Bernard Ebbers, and Martha Stewart.The CEO of Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer (1898–1990), laundered money to finance Soviet intelligence projects in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, and even served as a Soviet agent himself. Kenneth Feld, who owned Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, once convinced another company to hire a freelance journalist to work on a project that would distract her from working on a book she wanted to write about Feld’s father. As told, these tales are diabolical but fascinating, though there are some cases in which some editorializing would not have been out of place.Indeed, the authors’ small-bore approach can leave some of the big questions dangling. Can the fortunes of the very richest continue to increase? What are the consequences of that trend? Is there a moral obligation to philanthropy? And, as William Paley, a nine-year member of Forbes 400, asked near the end of his life, “Why do I have to die?” In that, of course, we are all on the list.Ms. Graham is an editor at Domino magazine.

Digging Into the Upper Crust

Digging Into the Upper Crust

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