Billionaire Paradoxes: Wealth, Power, and Isolation

As billionaires hoard more control over our politics, it seems more important than ever to ask: What makes them tick? Four reporters gather after hours at a wine shop to discuss – over drinks – what they’ve learned from covering billionaires for years, and how it can help us hoi polloi make sense of what the ultra-rich are doing right now.

Featuring Vicky Ward, who has covered the Kushner family and Trump, and who, in 2002, was the first journalist to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s finances in a profile for Vanity Fair; John Hyatt, who covers billionaires, with a focus on Elon Musk, for Forbes; Douglas Rushkoff, who's written about tech billionaires preparing for the end of the world; and Edward Ongweso, Jr., who covers the impact of the exponential growth of large tech companies for outlets like Vice and The Nation. 

(Douglas Rushkoff said in our conversation that his trip to a hedge fund conference in the desert happened in 2018, but the trip was actually in 2017.)

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“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

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