Wealthy Elite Tells The Truth About Wealthy Elites

Multi-millionaire professor Scott Galloway tells the unadulterated facts about the decline of modern capitalism and extreme inequality.

“We are effectively in a kleptocracy. Russia is the role model. We are becoming more like Russia every day; that’s where we are.” This is the last thing one would expect to hear from a capitalist entrepreneur with a net worth of over $40 million. But that’s the type of extreme irony you run into when American capitalism has declined so much over the past forty years.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a program that saw its ratings fall off a cliff after the election, Scott Galloway was interviewed to discuss the recent controversy with Meta revising its platform to please the elected Trump administration.

Listen to the sound bite I reference in the next section here:

Scott Galloway is an unusual figure in the finance media. He has a unique speaking prose, coming off as very assertive and arrogant, yet he always self-deprecates to present as more humble, a skill he likely picked up from his years in marketing and sales. Galloway, despite amassing more wealth than one knows what to do with, something he admits often, has spent the better part of his career advocating for higher taxes on the rich, higher corporate taxes, and robust antitrust measures. That sentiment has seemed to grow stronger as he recites the same inequality statistics with more urgency each time in his typical white-collar Wall Street demeanor. This has become Galloway’s game. He played it again on Morning Joe, where he converted the conversation into the broader picture of the American economy and its apparent decline into oligarchy.

Galloway takes a question about Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, who suddenly took a very lenient stance on Donald Trump and did what can only be described as the ultimate capitulation. In a book released in 2024, Trump threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison after he perceived that he was censored on Facebook and Instagram, leading to his loss in 2020. During that same time last year, Zuckerberg praised Trump as a “badass” because of the assassination attempt and then donated $1 million to his inauguration fund after Trump won. Last week, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would revise their policies on hate speech and fact-checking to please Trump before he gets into office. Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, took a similar route. At first, Musk pretended to be politically neutral, but starting sometime last year, he hopped on the Trump bandwagon, donating $277 million to his election campaign. In an obvious quid-pro-quo, Musk will now be appointed part of his cabinet. Galloway connects all of this to the fact that the country broadly has allowed the owners of monopolistic corporations to amass so much wealth that they can essentially bend and control government at their will. He cites the fact that Musk, by investing only a couple hundred million into Trump’s campaign, saw his net worth gain an unfathomable $170 billion post-election. While the Russian oligarchy has been no secret for a long time now, something that’s not even a controversial statement, calling the ruling capitalist class in America an oligarchy is somehow still a debate today. While Galloway is right to point this out, later referring to the post-New Deal Era as a time when America was far more equitable, he’s wrong to think American capitalism was ever anything short of oligarchical.

Even during the New Deal Era, when the working class was the strongest it’s ever been, and the government went to great lengths to control corporate greed, major players like General Motors, Standard Oil, and the many steel companies generated massive profits from the war effort. Companies like Bethlehem Steel and Anaconda Copper were expanding new mine development into Latin America, profiting from other countries’ resources. In 1941 alone, the Mellon family with their empire took in net income of $291 million, the du Pont oil family $267 million, and the Rockefellers $145 million, all worth multi-billions in today’s dollars. But these aristocrats didn’t go anywhere. Only their first names changed. All three families today are worth a combined $42.5 billion. To think that these few people didn’t have the same influence over government then as Musk and Zuckerberg do today would be simply naive. Over the years, America has launched countless covert operations and wars over oil resources in Iraq, coal mines in Chile, opium in Laos, and cobalt in the Congo, to name a few, all to benefit private corporations and their owners. It happened back then, and it’s still happening now.

When asked if he thought that Zuckerberg, by licking Trump’s boot (paraphrasing), was trying to get an easy deal from the FTC, Galloway agreed. Lina Khan, the progressive FTC chair, has been very assertive in her enforcement over the past four years and is currently prosecuting Facebook for monopolization. Galloway also mentions that Zuckerberg’s decision to abandon moderation is a cost-saving measure, saying, “It’s the ultimate quiet firing. Because, rather than a series of bad press releases or uncomfortable all-hands meetings, if you just decide you’re moving your safety and security from California to Texas, you’re naturally going to lose probably 30 to 50% of the employees.”

After this, Galloway laments, “What’s the point of having all this money?” speaking about the lavish wealth of Bezos, Cook, Huang, and Zuckerberg. He continues,

“We don’t need more mergers and acquisitions. We need more breakups. One company owns 2/3 of all social media globally: Meta. One company has 93% of all share of all searches: Google. And if you don’t think every day we don’t pay higher prices, one company has 50% of all e-commerce: Amazon. The percentage of revenues that have gone to Amazon from third party retailers has gone up from 24 to 50%.”

Admittedly, it’s incredibly odd to hear a multi-millionaire businessman on cable television who isn’t flat out lying to justify their wealth. But everything Galloway is talking about is correct. Undoubtedly, it is not only a moral failing to concentrate so much wealth at the top of society, but for Galloway, it’s also a problem of self-preservation, as we’ll soon find out. Galloway still strongly believes in capitalism at its core but prefers a version where corporations are far less hegemonic and more responsible and equitable. Don’t we all. But therein lies Galloway’s innate contradiction. While he deplores the current state of American capitalism, he doesn’t realize that, first, it has always been this way, and second, hoarding wealth and monopolizing industries is built into the capitalist system.

In disgust, he asks, “At what point do the men show up here?” but the people he is talking about aren’t going to give up their immense wealth; they’re willing to do everything they can to maintain it. There is no Ebenezer Scrooge nightmare that can wake them up, start paying workers more fairly, stop exploiting resources in the global south, and start helping people in need. To maintain control of their capital, these wealthy oligarchs must keep increasing shareholder value by increasing their profitability. If, miraculously, one of these billionaires does start selling large portions of their assets to help society, shareholders will leave, their company will start losing value, and another oligarch, who also has an extreme addiction to accumulating wealth, will take their place. That tendency is the nature of an economic system based on ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘might makes right’ rather than one that seeks to maximize human equality and happiness. So naturally, only the most ruthless profit seekers who, uncoincidentally, are also the most anti-social must suspend any empathy they have to squeeze the most profit out of their workers and consumers. And to working people who say ‘this is how the system is supposed to work,’ they couldn’t be more correct– the system is working as intended– it was not created to provide people a free, stable, healthy, happy and dignified life, it was created protect the power of the rich.

We must identify this ‘squeeze’ as well. The idea that ‘wealth will trickle down’ has long been dead. Giving more power to the wealthy only increases the rate of extraction of poor and working people. This became abundantly clear in the 2021 inflationary period, which created a market boom, lining the pockets of the wealthy while workers struggled to afford essentials. And that became a large driver of Trump’s victory, someone who postured as anti-establishment even though it was his tax cuts and deregulation that gave corporations the power to cause this situation in the first place. In any market system, workers and the owners of capital are in an antagonistic relationship with opposing interests. This relationship is why workers are denied raises in companies that make record profits year over year, why unions are crushed, and why pensions or healthcare are not guaranteed. This is the fist of capital squeezing us for profit.

The only way to eliminate this adversarial relationship is by abolishing the capitalist system and moving beyond the barbarity of greed by socializing the means of production. We know that capital, the abundance of wealth and its owners at the top of society, must grow its profits continuously by any means necessary. You cannot separate this fact from the capitalist system. Capital can only do so by conquering new markets, expanding, monopolizing, and further extorting worker wages, or else it will fall apart. Eventually, when the continuous growth of profit becomes too difficult to maintain, when the conditions for workers become increasingly unbearable, there are market crashes, more fear, more crises, and more political unrest. Although Galloway doesn’t know he’s alluding to this, he fears capitalism will fail, and it will be either socialism or barbarism that takes its place, something theorized by Rosa Luxemburg over a century ago. By restricting the growth of profit and preventing monopolization, Galloway believes you can avoid this, but he doesn’t understand that the incentive to aggressively grow indefinitely is outside the responsibility of people– it’s in the capitalist system as a whole. The only way to end this is to abolish private capital and private property. Otherwise, it will keep trying to come back like a malignant cancer to expand, monopolize, conquer governments, change laws, and exploit workers.

For context, despite what right-wing talk shows and propaganda outlets want to portray, MSNBC is fundamentally a right-wing news outlet. They present a centrist, unbiased aesthetic, but when we consider that America is, at its root, already a right-wing country, upholding the status quo is just a right-wing worldview. Host Joe Scarborough comments, “You’ve talked though for some time about how this entire system is rigged. It’s rigged against working Americans, and rigged for billionaires… Talk about how this is accelerating. And how this– and I say this is a small government conservative– this is a threat to American capitalism.” We begin to see how incoherent Scarborough’s politics are when he says that he’s a ‘small government conservative,’ while simultaneously acknowledging that a lenient tax policy on the ultra-rich is detrimental to our society. You can’t have both. This isn’t to say that the government ought to be larger or even as big as it is currently, but you fundamentally cannot claim to be conservative and believe that the wealthy have too much power. This sort of ‘both-sides-ism,’ which is so prevalent among centrists and liberals, is not only spineless, but it betrays what is necessary to prevent the far-right and oligarchs from taking over. You can’t fight the right wing by pretending that both sides are sensible when one wants an equitable, democratic society and the other wants a hierarchical, oppressive society. In that second part, Scarborough is correct. Now that the oligarchy has taken the mask off, even though it’s been apparent for decades, it is a threat to capitalism. What comes next is an authoritarian regime resembling fascism, a more legitimate oligarchy where corporations merge with the government or a slow progression into revolution. After making a halfway decent point, Scarborough then rambles on, absurdly saying that Lina Khan trying to break up monopolies is like Karl Marx.

What comes next is Galloway unleashing a calculated rant, reciting pretty much every grievance he’s had over his career with the state of American capitalism. It’s quite believable, too. Galloway begins by praising what he calls the invention of the middle class, which has been forgotten about and is disappearing in America. The middle class was never invented; it came about thanks to social policy that redistributed the immense wealth at the top and gave people better working conditions, state retirement funding, and healthcare coverage for the elderly. People talk about the middle class far more than they do about the working class, and why is that? First, the term doesn’t reflect the reality of wealth inequality, where a third of Americans have a subzero net worth, and half of households together own just 2.5% of the total nation’s wealth. Second, the term ‘middle-class’ is essentially a manufactured buzzword to give working people a license to blame the poor for their problems instead of the ultra-rich. Galloway says that the typical way to correct this inequality is “war, famine, or revolution,” which is a bit overstated, but there is rising economic and political anxiety; it’s just that there’s little action. Lucky for the rich and powerful, they’ve done a great job pacifying the masses and redirecting this angst toward the bottom, not the top.

Galloway continues, talking about tax policy, saying, “There are super earners and super owners,” where owning huge assets is virtually tax-free while making huge incomes is highly taxed. Whether he meant it or not, it feels directed at Scarborough– someone who is only a ‘small government conservative’ because they’re taxed at 50% and doesn’t see themself as part of the problem. Galloway discusses how wrong it is that someone like himself pays virtually no taxes selling a $160 million company and that the corporate tax rate is at its lowest in over eighty years. While his sentiment is correct, it’s essential to add that this is not just a problem with the tax system, although in an isolated sense it is broken, it’s a problem with capitalism as a whole, where buying the government is an inherent incentive of the wealthy to gain more wealth. Galloway almost gets there in his following statement, “It’s the tax code which has gone from 400 pages to 4000. And that 3600 pages, quite frankly, is there to screw the middle class and continue to transfer more money to the super-wealthy.” Still, he is unable to realize that so long as there is a profit incentive, the wealthy will always try to do this.

Galloway keeps going, hitting another crucial point, “The Achilles heel is that the bottom 99% who are getting screwed don’t mind these policies because they believe at some point they’re going to be in that 1%.” We, as Americans, have tied so much of our identity to the pursuit of wealth. American culture, for a long time, has idolized money and the idea that anyone can pull themselves out of poverty while ignoring the systematic oppression that makes that impossible without immense luck. It’s a toxic and self-defeating trend that must be reversed to be a culture of mutual solidarity instead.

Galloway then reiterates the need for a more progressive tax policy, such as in the mid-1900s when top earners were taxed at upwards of 90%. He then says something that isn’t understood well enough– that the difference between $30,000 and $50,000 for low-income earners is massive, while the difference between $10 and $15 million is negligible for happiness. I would go further and say that it isn’t just happiness but material needs. People who make under $50,000 are more than likely living paycheck to paycheck; if not, they’re certainly not saving much. Especially for families, that tax burden is the difference between college savings, a vacation, new clothes, groceries, or paying for summer camp. I’d include that no one under the 50th income percentile should be paying a dime in taxes since they only contribute 2.3% to the total national income tax. Galloway then supports his statement with “low-income households have higher resting blood pressure,” and I’d add, more simply, that there is a direct correlation between income and life expectancy. The fact that the wealthiest people live, on average, 10 years longer than the poorest is another abhorrent abuse of the capitalist system.

The Equality of Opportunity Project: Life Expectancy vs. Income in the United States (April 2016)

The final leg of Galloway’s rant is him at his most transparent. He says, “We risk revolution.” This is the aforementioned point about self-preservation. Galloway is an incredibly wealthy business professor who has admitted before that he had immense privilege getting the opportunities he got in a time when America was less brutal for the working class. So, while he puts a lot of the blame on singular things like elitism in education and university acceptance rates, it’s clear the real reason he wants to fix inequality is to prevent revolution. Political unrest is the wealthy’s main concern because, for Scott Galloway, revolution is a ‘risk’ and not a way to benefit the overwhelming majority of society. Galloway says it all in this interview: revolution is the only way to correct this level of historical inequality, and for him, that’s a risk. In his own words, I agree that a political revolution is necessary. Unfortunately for us, it won’t happen overnight, and certainly not any time soon if we don’t start agitating for change.

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