Mo' money, no problems
Ted! Bill! Rupert! How business
moguls became America's biggest celebrities
by Jason Gay
ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, Ted Turner stood in front of a roomful of people and
made a Polish joke.
About the pope.
Turner was speaking before the National Family Planning and Reproductive
Health Association about one of his favorite topics -- population control --
when someone asked him what he'd do if he got a chance to speak to John
Paul II on the subject. "Ever see a Polish mine detector?" Turner replied,
raising a foot.
It was a stupid, somewhat perplexing crack -- not to mention a non-answer to
the question -- but it was hardly shocking. After all, Ted Turner is a man with
a penchant for ramming a hoof down his larynx, a man who has said, among other
things, that Christianity is "for losers," that "the United States has got some
of the dumbest people in the world," and that his difficulties in starting a
network made him feel like "those Jewish people in Germany in 1942."
Despite being the American plutocracy's reigning enfant terrible,
however, Ted Turner has been canonized in popular culture. And why not? Here's
a guy who built the world's most successful satellite network from little more
than small cash and popsicle sticks. He recently pledged $1 billion to the
United Nations. He's married to Jane Fonda. His visage appears along with
Mahatma Gandhi's and Albert Einstein's in Apple Computer's "Think Different"
advertising campaign. So when Turner feels like taking on a world leader or a
holy man, he does it. Because Ted Turner is not only a media mogul. He is also
a celebrity. And we love him for it.
We are living in an age when being really, really rich is considered really,
really cool. America has always had a certain soft spot for the entrepreneur,
but today's wealthiest businesspeople are enjoying the kind of public adoration
traditionally reserved for movie stars and sports heroes. Men like Turner, Bill
Gates, Rupert Murdoch, David Geffen, and Warren Buffett -- and a few women,
such as Oprah Winfrey -- are cherished as much for their financial
accumulations as they are for their accomplishments. Everyday people idolize
these individuals, read about them, invest in their companies. Many aspire to
be just like them.
Call it "mogul worship": the renewed American celebration of the industry
titan. Mogul worship is manifested in the dozens of glossy magazines publishing
breathless accounts of the latest superdealings of the superconnected
superrich. It's the ongoing obsession with power lists and rankings, from the
Forbes 400 to the Vanity Fair New Establishment to the
Entertainment Weekly Power 100. It's the public's giddy fascination
with expensive gadgetry and accouterments that most people will never be able
to afford: Gulfstream jets, apartment lap pools, personal train cars.
Moguls, of course, can afford all this. And it's secured them a
prominent place in the American celebrity Zeitgeist. If the age of the
supermodel is dead, moguls -- spectacles, jowls, and all -- are the new
supermodels. We even refer to them by their first names: instead of Cindy!
Christy! and Naomi!, we now have Bill! Ted! and Rupert! Stories about moguls
pop up in style pages and fashion spreads; perhaps in reaction, once-tweedy
business publications are starting to look more like Gucci ads, with hip,
flashy photographs of titans and titans-to-be dressed in smart, well-designed
ensembles.
Even in the serious media, coverage of today's entrepreneurs is approaching
the kind of kiss-blowing vapidity usually seen in the pages of Teen
Beat. Consider this exchange from an interview with Nathan Myhrvold,
Microsoft's chief technology officer, in an article on the "Top 50 Cyber
Elite," published in Time Digital (a spinoff of Time) this past
October:
Time: How are you spending your vacation?
Myhrvold: I have spent a bunch of time this
summer digging up dinosaurs and working on several projects in paleontology.
This fall I will go fly fishing in Mongolia. Meanwhile, I just installed a new
microprocessor for my barbecue cooker that is just amazing.
Hot wings for everyone! Nathan rocks! You won't, of course, find anything in
this obsequious coverage about Myhrvold's hand in Microsoft's various
questionable business dealings, which have landed the company in the most
expensive antitrust trial in US history. Neither will you catch anyone calling
Myhrvold on his obnoxiousness, either. No one's going to point out to him that
many Americans today can't afford a barbecue cooker sans microprocessor, never
mind a dino-digging jaunt or a Mongolian fly-fishing expedition.
That's because moral outrage -- or any kind of moral stance -- has no place in
mogul worship. Mogul worship rests on the belief that an individual's value to
society can be measured on the basis of net worth and stock performance. That's
the mindset behind the Apple campaign that puts Ted Turner and Virgin Atlantic
chairman Richard Branson on the same level as Martin Luther King Jr. It's
also the mindset that allows people to actually care which pampered
mega-millionaire makes it around the globe in a hot-air balloon.
The problem is, though, that moguls aren't just celebrities. No matter
how much they get the movie-star treatment from the New York Times
Magazine (which recently treated readers to an exposé of mogul home
amenities, such as backyard putting greens and fake-ivy-covered walls) or the
New Yorker ("In the increasingly corporate world of global
entertainment, Geffen is a throwback to a more individualistic era. He's the
free man in Paris, in the words of the song Joni Mitchell once wrote about
him," John Seabrook wrote last year.), moguls can't really be viewed the same
way as Leonardo DiCaprio or Gwyneth Paltrow. Mogul worship isn't harmless,
frivolous fun, because moguls, above all, are businesspeople -- responsible
first not to the public, but to the bottom line. When you worship a mogul,
you're worshipping not just a person but a philosophy. And though that
philosophy goes by a lot of names -- progress, entrepreneurship, "vision" --
after a while, it starts to look a lot like greed.
THE CURRENT FRENZY isn't America's first brush with mogul worship, of
course. Historians and social critics like to point out that some of the titans
of the 19th century made contemporary moguls look like a bunch of plebes. When
American Heritage magazine last year named its 40 wealthiest Americans
of all time, Gates, the Microsoft chief and currently the world's richest man,
came in a paltry fifth. (Though with his net worth currently approaching
$100 billion, Gates seems intent on rising in the ranks.) Stock-market
kingpin Warren Buffett, number two on the Forbes 400, lumbered in
at 13th. By comparison, Standard Oil's John D. Rockefeller -- essentially, the
first American-born-and-bred mogul -- came in first with a net worth of
$189.6 billion in today's dollars. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie finished
second on the list, at $100.5 billion.
Vast industrial accomplishment has always stirred a certain amount of national
pride. To many, self-made tycoons are an affirmation of the capitalist system
-- and the notion that individual smarts and discipline, not birthright or
class, can create financial opportunity. The more common an upbringing a mogul
has, the better. Men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Henry Ford -- poster
children for social Darwinism -- were the embodiment of American possibility:
if they could do it, the theory went, so could anyone.
"Instead of wealth being seen as a sign of a profligate life, or vice, it
became a virtue," says Boston College sociologist Paul Schervish, director of
the school's Social Welfare Research Institute. "Given that, the new hero of
the age was no longer the prince or nobility, but the entrepreneur."
GENERAL PROSPERITY, of course, fuels the fire, not only by allowing the
growth of huge new industries, but by creating a substantial "business class"
of consumers whose jobs and finances are directly tied to the performances of
companies and their respective leaders.
"If you look at the '20s, the '50s, and then the '90s, there are a number of
characteristics that I think form the backdrop to mogul worship," says Ron
Chernow, the author of Titan, the recent biography of John D.
Rockefeller. "You need a sustained economic boom; a roaring stock market; often
the introduction of new technologies, whether it's radio in the '20s or the
Internet in the '90s. That creates a lot of excitement -- there's a sense that
the economy is not only growing, but is being transformed before people's
eyes."
There's another important factor fueling mogul worship, too. While the
business world churns with excitement -- the mergers, the venture capital, the
rapid blossoming of the new high-tech/infotainment industry -- the political
world is offering . . . nothing. You don't have to live in Washington
to sense a leadership void; the landscape isn't exactly dotted with budding
Churchills. Nor are there any prominent social activists or reformers tugging
at the culture. The closest thing we have to a national conscience right now is
probably Jay Leno's nightly monologue. The country's energy, clearly, is in
commerce. And right now, Americans place more faith in businesspeople than in
other kinds of leaders.
"The driving force for change in the world is business," says Alan Webber,
cofounder and editor of the Boston-based business magazine Fast Company.
"It isn't government, or social action, or legislation -- it's people creating
change through technology or corporate activity."
But more than anything else, moguls are allowed to become de facto social
leaders for one simple reason: people want to be like them.
"I think that the underlying dynamic of all of these periods is a culture of
envy and emulation," says Chernow. "People see their neighbors getting rich, or
they see someone on television who has just made a fortune, and so people who
might not have felt that money madness before, they're suddenly infected with
the fever -- there's something contagious about the scramble for money."
Indeed, everyone likes to talk about America's growing pool of wealthy
people. Nearly one in 36 American families is worth a million or more; a
current best-selling book, The Millionaire Next Door, touts the
prevalence of seven-figure assets (another bestseller, Die Broke, touts
losing those seven-figure assets before you kick). The new mogul culture
doesn't put the superrich on a pedestal: they're everyday people, only more
so.
"That's why the criticism is muted," Paul Schervish says. "Most of these
people are not robber barons. They are the millionaires next door."
Schervish is right about the public's perception. Yet this idea is not only
fraudulent (Bill Gates is not like you), but it helps corporations and
their leaders disguise the obvious: that the gap between them and the rest of
us is only widening. Real wages are down, many people cannot match their
parents' standards of living, debt is skyrocketing, and personal bankruptcies
are at an all-time high.
What's more, business, by definition, does not set out to solve those kinds of
social problems. Moguls themselves are hardly political creatures: we can't
elect them, and we can't vote them out of office. In fact, moguls are more or
less imposed on the public -- we build their wealth with our buying decisions,
but even then, we're picking a product, not an individual.
But that doesn't matter much, you see. As long as the moguls have those
personal movie theaters and private islands -- and as long as people get just a
whiff of possibility -- we want a piece of the action.
THE MOST STARTLING element of contemporary mogul worship is its
intimacy. Whereas the titans of past ages zealously guarded their privacy, most
of their modern counterparts are happy to let us in the front door and give us
a tour of their lives. One minute, we're pricing Gulfstreams with Microsoft's
Myhrvold (who unsuccessfully tried to remain anonymous in a memorable 1998
Vanity Fair piece about plane-shopping), and the next we're chilling
seaside in the Virgin Islands with Richard Branson, who lent his personal
paradise, Necker Island, for the 1999 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue,
and received a gooey profile in exchange. ("Whether it's ballooning across
oceans or in a dogfight with British Airways, Richard Branson lives, works, and
plays on the edge.")
Or we're dining at a nearly-empty Indian restaurant in a Seattle strip mall
with Bill Gates, as Time magazine executive editor Walter Isaacson did
in 1997:
Even while eating, he seems to be multitasking; ambidextrous, he switches
his fork back and forth throughout the meal and uses whatever hand is free to
gesture or scribble notes.
MOGULS, OF COURSE, do not award this kind of access without knowing
something's in it for them. Magazines may put their faces on the cover to move
copies, but the moguls are selling something too: themselves. Executives have
concluded that promoting an individual personality gives a company and its
products a more customer-friendly feel. Disney, for example, sugarcoats its
famously cutthroat reputation with the silk-tied visage of Michael Eisner, who
slays his enemies in the boardroom and then shows up for movie premieres in
mouse ears.
Daddy Warbucks is gone; now everyone wants to be Ben or Jerry. Even Fidelity
Investments, long the epitome of the faceless financial powerhouse, has started
using its most prominent face, Peter Lynch, in television ads, despite the fact
that the white-haired ex-whiz of the Magellan Fund hasn't picked a stock in
eight years.
You can almost put a finger on the moment when the corporate monolith began to
wear a human face: in 1979, when a former Ford executive named Lee Iacocca took
control of the struggling Chrysler corporation. Not only did Iacocca turn it
into a winner, but he starred in the company's commercials playing an
aw-shucks-friendly CEO who was just trying to sell you a good old American car.
His 1986 autobiography, Iacocca, was the number-one-selling nonfiction
book of the decade. Iacocca also helmed the restoration of Ellis Island -- the
physical embodiment of the American Dream if there ever was one.
"Iacocca was a classic case of the right moment," says Brandeis University
social historian Stephen Whitfield. "During the Reagan years, the notion that
an American business could come back struck very deep chords . . . he
was able to personify not only a company, but an industry."
In addition to giving Chrysler a face, Iacocca proved that a successful CEO
could still seem like one of the little people. Many of today's moguls, too,
display a kind of accessible informality: Intel CEO Andrew Grove sits in
a cubicle, just like all of his drones; Branson shows up in drag to announce
the opening of a Virgin megastore. The other day, I watched Gates and Buffett
on C-SPAN
talk to students at the University of Washington School of Business. Both men
wore khakis, cotton polo shirts, and casual shoes; despite a combined wealth of
more than $100 billion, they looked like a couple of overaged clerks at
Sneaker Stadium.
And this informality extends to the corporate image as a whole. This is the
generation of business leaders that has brought us casual day, the company
retreat, and the cube-to-cube masseur. We deify the laid-back company and the
chilled-out executive. Every magazine editor seems to love the wacky tech
start-up where the employees wear Tevas and tie-dyes, shoot Nerf guns at each
other down the corridor, and get a little sloshed when the boss (known only by
his or her first name) rolls out a keg on Friday afternoon. The more a mogul
can drape himself in this culture of informality, the better for his public
image. (Hey! Aren't you the boss of that company where no one has to wear
socks?!) Not only does it make him seem fun and sexy, but the unbuttoned
image helps defuse class resentment. "If you have the right style, and if you
don't seem to be putting on airs, you can get away with screwing the masses and
living like a king," says New York University media-studies professor Mark
Crispin Miller.
It's not enough just to be casual, either. A mogul -- and especially a
would-be mogul -- must claim some higher purpose than just selling something.
In a recent issue of Success magazine ("The Leading Magazine for
Entrepreneurs"), there is an article about Gary Hirshberg, the president of the
Stonyfield Farm yogurt company. Hirshberg, a handsome man with thick black
hair, a square jaw, and blue eyes, is photographed sitting in a pasture in a
plush turtleneck sweater, gazing into the distance. The article touts
Hirshberg's attempts to compete with the big boys by selling something more
soulful than just bacteria-curdled milk. The caption next to one photo reads:
Stonyfield Farm's Gary Hirshberg creates an emotional bond with his
customers through socially aware messages printed on the lids of his yogurt
cups.
The whole thing is so over-the-top that you almost forget it's about, well,
selling yogurt for profit. Indeed, the focus on the personal and the
philosophical gives readers the sense that moguls are interesting, important,
noble people, while cloaking their most irrefutable attribute: their desire to
make money.
Not surprisingly, moguls love this stuff. Who wouldn't love such unbridled,
unquestioning ink -- the ability to build your own mythology? Alan Webber, the
Fast Company cofounder -- who says his magazine actively avoids
profiling moguls -- says the notion of the publicity-shy titan is pretty much a
myth: most industry leaders covet feature stories, and scan the magazines and
power indexes like a budding pop band checking out its rank in the
Billboard Top 100.
"It's a phenomenon that started to feed upon itself," says Webber. "The more
CEOs started to see themselves turned into celebrities, they more they started
to like it."
MOGULS HAVEN'T ALWAYS been treated so well. The titans of the late 19th
century, for example, accumulated critics in droves. They were condemned by the
government for being too powerful and monopolistic, and by the clergy for being
ostentatious and immoral. Their accomplishments may have been prized in certain
quarters, but they didn't get the sweeping rock-star adoration that most of
today's moguls enjoy.
"These men never really went through a honeymoon," says Ron Chernow. "They
tended to be controversial from the outset of their careers. Rockefeller starts
Standard Oil in 1870, and by 1872, he's being burned in effigy in Western
Pennsylvania amid calls for a congressional investigation. It went on that way
for 40 years. There was not just the unmixed love and hero worship that, for
instance, Bill Gates enjoyed for many years. Until about a year or two ago, you
could scarcely find a syllable of criticism about Gates, while the moguls of
the Gilded Age never went thought that kind of a period."
Rockefeller and his peers, of course, were reaping the benefits of an
industrial economy that thrived on a large, poorly paid work force. The
separation between the highest and lowest economic levels was staggering;
moguls became an aristocracy in a nation founded by people who'd fled the
aristocracy.
This disparity did not go unnoticed. It was attacked by the muckraking press,
which coined the term "robber barons"; by Christians, who were religiously and
morally suspicious of excessive wealth; and by socialists, who considered the
capitalist system exploitative. People listened, too. "Socialists have largely
disappeared from the landscape now," says Stephen Whitfield. "But in 1912,
[Socialist Democratic Party presidential candidate] Eugene Debs got nearly a
million votes." And such criticism left its legacy in progressive social
movements, particularly organized labor.
Today, however, the critics are much harder to find. Part of it is the
aforementioned barrenness of the political landscape. And part of it is
attributable to the media -- the more that articles and TV segments extol
moguls and their private lives, the less people focus on their business
practices.
But there's also something else at work: mass participation in the stock
market. In the 1920s, there were roughly two million people investing in the
market; today, there are 100 million. That means that more people's
livelihoods are linked at least in part to the performance of corporations and,
by extension, their leaders. And that builds an interested -- not to mention a
sympathetic -- audience.
"[The market] is a really big thing, because a hundred years ago, there was
more of a sense that great fortunes were being made at the expense of the
people, and that if someone was getting very, very rich, then someone else must
be getting very, very poor," says Ron Chernow. "Whereas today, people might
say, `Well, Bill Gates is guilty of monopolistic practices, but I can buy
Microsoft stock, so I can profit with him.' There's this sense that you can
actually share in the good fortunes, and I think that when people invest in the
stock market, there's a tendency to root for the companies and identify with
the people who are running the company, and there's also a tendency to see the
work from the point of view of the company."
Indeed, it is not a stretch to say that the reason today's moguls get off so
easy is that so many people have a piece of the action, no matter how small
that piece actually is. It makes people protective not just of the specific
corporations and individuals they invest in, but of the market as a whole.
We're all eating off the same plate, the theory goes, so no one should upset
the table.
"There is this feeling that the economy is more democratic than ever," says
Alan Webber. "And to the extent that people put it down as a casino economy,
it's a casino economy in which anyone can win."
Not everyone wins, of course. Not everyone can afford to invest, and if they
can, the relationship between CEO and shareholder can hardly be called equal.
If Ted Turner makes a profit, you might get a few bucks; Ted Turner, however,
gets to do what he wants with the culture at large.
Still, the "If Ted wins, I win" mentality propels a worshipful attitude,
especially within the media. Publishing is driven by demographics, and media
decisionmakers have concluded that a sizable segment of the population wants to
know how Michael Eisner and Mike Ovitz spent their vacation (biking in France
together, in 1996). Let's ignore for a moment the fact that many of the media
decisionmakers are moguls themselves, or at least work for Rupert Murdoch.
After all, it's not just rich people who read the Robb Report ("For the
Luxury Lifestyle"). And more than 400 people buy the Forbes 400.
And if we can share a bit of the money, why not a bit of the lifestyle, too? A
whole segment of consumer culture is dedicated to making the rest of us feel
like moguls, at least a little. Think of cell phones, pagers, PalmPilots,
laptop computers, and speakerphones. Think of the Sharper Image, or of cigar
bars, martini lounges, and downtown clothing stores where $400 "casual day"
sweaters are arranged like canapés.
What these stores are really selling -- and what the media are peddling in all
those fawning mogul profiles -- is false hope. It's the idea that if we have
the toys, if we can walk the walk, we're somehow on the winning end. If we know
what's in Ted Turner's head, or how Nathan Myhrvold operates his barbecue,
we've got a share of their success.
What's most dangerous is that apart from the occasional academic or iconoclast
(Noam Chomsky, et al.), contemporary mogul worship lacks any kind of
meaningful, organized challenge. Unlike titans of the Gilded Age, most of
today's superrich entrepreneurs enjoy a happily unquestioning public, even as
the chasm between the haves and have-nots widens. How much attention, for
example, is paid to the fact that the vast majority of moguls are male? Or
white?
But mogul worship isn't about substance. It's about star power. When you're a
mogul, all that matters is that people pay attention -- not to what you say or
do, but to you.
"We have come a long way from the idea of the idea," says Joseph Boskin, an
American social historian and the director of Boston University's Urban Studies
and Public Policy program. "The written word and abstract idea no longer have
power in the way they did at the turn of the century. What matters now is show
-- showing you have truly arrived."
AS WIDESPREAD as mogul worship is in contemporary society, it's as
fragile as the economy itself. The recent volatility in the stock market --
along with economic unrest in Asia, Russia, and South America -- has already
started to rattle public confidence. Anxiety about a crash looms.
That could take the shine off the moguls' image. When times are good, Ron
Chernow believes, the middle class identifies with the upper class; but when
the economy sours, the middle class panics and begins to identify with the
lower class. That's what happened in 1929, of course. "When the economy is
contracting, more of the fears and anxieties come out," Chernow says.
It might not even take an actual crash. There are some moguls who the public
already thinks are just too big. Bill Gates, in particular, is increasingly
under siege. Whether or not the Feds win their antitrust case, Microsoft is now
seen as more of a bully than an innovator. There are Gates-bashing books
(Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller's Barbarians Led by Bill Gates), and
Web sites purporting to demonstrate that Gates is the Devil
(http://www.zejn.si/~natan// 666.html). Last year, Gates was memorably "pied"
by a gang of political activists while visiting the Belgian prime minister in
Brussels. (Noel Godin, the mastermind of the creamy attack, said that Gates got
the dessert-in-the-face treatment because he "chooses to function in the
service of the capitalist status quo.")
As Gates has learned from Microsoft's travails, no mogul -- no matter how well
liked -- can fully separate his or her image from his or her company. Nike CEO
Phil Knight can attest to this. Once hailed as a hippie/boomer icon, he has
lately been pilloried for Nike's international labor practices. Mike Ovitz,
once the Hollywood agent with a Midas touch, has been slammed in recent years
for his post-firing severance package from Disney (allegedly worth
$200 million, after 14 months of work) and for his ill-advised takeover of
the theatrical production company Livent, which plunged into bankruptcy shortly
after Ovitz took the reins.
Moguls are hearing it from the public in the area of giving, too. To his
credit, Ted Turner set an impressive standard with his $1 billion pledge
to the UN, but others have not been so generous. In fact, one of Turner's
motivations for publicly pledging ten figures was to inspire other tycoons
("old skinflints," he called them) to pony up. Gates recently calmed the
cheapskate charges by committing several billion dollars to libraries and
world-health issues, but others, like General Electric CEO Jack Welch, continue
to give a relative pittance. The New York Times reported in December
that Welch earned $138.6 million in 1997 but gave away just $134,168, the
largest single donation being $25,000 to the Sankaty Head Golf Club on
Nantucket to provide college scholarships to caddies.
Indeed, says Paul Schervish, the BC sociologist, the public should question
not just how much today's moguls are giving away, but whom they are giving to.
There's a difference between using wealth in a way that benefits society as a
whole and using "philanthropy to advance status privilege and advance
institutions they enjoy themselves, and to set the agenda in a way that
advances the status quo and their own interests," Schervish says.
Whatever the case, there are many reasons to hold titans to higher
standards than movie stars. There's no question that moguls could and should be
held more accountable for their actions (and inactions). Business dealings
should be scrutinized before they are celebrated. Philanthropy should be
expected, not coached. Ideally, there would be less obsessiveness about ranking
and list-making, and more focus on the societal contributions of
business.
But until the current good times end, the age of mogul idolatry
is likely to continue. Mogul worship, ultimately, is less about fame than it is
about the public's faith in continued prosperity. Moguls themselves, then, are
less celebrities than they are canaries in a coal mine: when they sing, we sing
along. When they expire, we're all in trouble.
Jason Gay can be reached at jericson[a]phx.com.