The most sobering thing about Max Abelson’s rolling interview with an anonymous, white billionaire over the course of the pandemic is that despite how he comes across in it, you just know that when he read it he felt no sense whatsoever of shame.
I thought about the rage at bosses he’d described on our last call and asked him if I could float some ideas about the source of that anger. Was it the sheer size of the gap between the rich and the rest of us? He shrugged that off. “You’ve always had that gap,” he said. “Now everybody knows about it.” I pointed out that inequality had gotten worse. He insisted that the most significant change was how much attention we’ve been paying to the gap. He blamed social media.
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I reminded him that his views on some things had evolved since the pandemic began. Could he eventually change his mind about this? “It’s not ‘the system,’ ” he reiterated. “Everybody’s got to stop with ‘the system.’ ” He didn’t sound exasperated, just amused. His voice had the same tone of charmed mellowness it’d had five or so weeks earlier. It’s a rich sound.
“Grasshopper,” he said. “Grasshopper, I’ve got to teach you.”