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 reportage, Osnos paints an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions that define today’s elite class: superyachts, luxury bunkers, tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations that bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power.

This is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age. 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 lavish parties for children; status anxiety spilling from marinas in Monaco and Palm Beach like real-world episodes of Succession or The White Lotus.

Originally published in The New Yorker, these essays have been revised and expanded to deliver an “eye-opening account” (The Guardian) of raw ambition, unimaginable fortune, and the rise of America’s modern oligarchy. In the wake of the Epstein files fall-out, Osnos’s essays are a wake-up call—a case against complacency in the face of unchecked excess, as the choices of the ultrarich ripple through our lives.

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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.

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Are you interested in a lively in-person discussion about Evan Osnos' book

The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich ahead of this talk?

Join the meeting of the Democracy Book Group at Amerikahaus on Thursday, April 16, 2026, at 7p.m!
 

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Photo (c) Pete Maravich