Six Questions for Brooke Harrington on the Utopian Dream of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to Create a Broligarchy Where Billionaires Rule Like Pharaohs

New Book "Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,"to govern the earth We’re like the financial Red Light District for foreign oligarchs

Brooke Harrington is a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College and the author of Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, which was published in September by W. W. Norton & Company and is on the Financial Times’s list of the best books of 2024. Harrington, who also wrote Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, spent eight years infiltrating the cloistered world of high-net-worth individuals by training as a wealth manager, traveling to leading offshore havens from the Caribbean to the South Pacific, and learning the tricks of the trade by interviewing private bankers, lawyers, and other specialists who help oligarchs hide their money.

Evan Osnos of the New Yorker has said it’s impossible to “understand the world of the super-rich without reading Brooke Harrington,” who recently replied to six questions about her new book and the brave new world of the broligarchy. Our interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

1. Is the current age of oligarchy in the US different from the Robber Baron era, or is it basically just an updated version of a society marked by an intense concentration of wealth?

The Robber Barons of old just wanted to be left alone —no taxes, no regulations. Today’s broligarchs – billionaires from the high-tech, financial services and Big Pharma industries – won’t leave us alone. They’re hell-bent on executing a hostile takeover of American democracy based on a political vision informed by junk libertarianism, comic books, and sci-fi/fantasy novels. Broligarchs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen are all on record, in their own words to multiple media outlets and published in manifestos, saying their visions of how life should be were formed by reading Judge Dredd and Lord of the Rings, which I wrote about in The Atlantic last month.

2. Are there unique features about the current model of oligarchy in the US? Is economic and political power even more centralized in other countries, or is the US an extreme example?

Not yet, but it’s definitely heading in that direction, hurried along by the broligarchs. According to political scientists, places like Russia and Saudi Arabia are much more extreme politically and economically than the US is, but four more years of Trump is likely to change that.

As for uniqueness, the US might have a unique story in being a prosperous, democratic country that literally gave itself away to oligarchs. Russia went straight from the Czars to the Bolsheviks to the oligarchs; even today, 20 percent of Russians have no indoor plumbing, but there wasn’t a time when the majority of the population was substantially better off. Saudi Arabia has never known democracy or been a prosperous society. A few citizens live lives of extreme luxury on the backs of what are essentially indentured servants, who have no hopes of escaping their condition unless they leave the country.

We had a democracy in the US and were lurching forward by expanding the franchise and upward mobility of the kind that made my family’s story. My great-grandmother was an illiterate peasant who kept a goat in her Chicago tenement backyard, had a daughter who had to drop out of high school and work as a maid, her firstborn son, my father, was the first person in the family to attend college, and I was able to get a PhD from Harvard and become a professor. That was a system worth preserving and building on, but instead we threw it away and now we’ve handed over the reins of the biggest economy and nuclear arsenal in the world to a malevolent con man who nearly destroyed the country last time he was president.

3. What do today’s oligarchs want? What are their broader political and social goals?

They want to be able to rule over us all without constraint and monopolize the earth’s resources. Some believe they are descended from the Pharaohs and are destined to govern the earth, one wealth manager who works with billionaires told me and I heard similar things from others. Many oligarchs also want to become immortal, or at least extend their lifespans by a century. I wrote an article years ago for The Guardian whose thesis was that if these people weren’t filthy rich, we’d call them insane and lock them up.

A major goal of the broligarchs is to buy and control nation-states. We just saw that with Elon Musk spending a quarter of a billion dollars to buy the presidency for figurehead Donald Trump, dispensing with all pretense and simply dictating terms—via tweetstorm!—to our elected representatives in Congress.

The subtitle of my new book is Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism because the broligarchs are trying to re-colonize the world, not in the name of any nation-state, but in their own right as little emperors. Thiel and Andreesen have backed so-called “network state” initiatives where they buy up land in distressed countries like Honduras and El Salvador, and declare the creation of new countries governed by corporate contract with no law other than the broligarchs themselves. This model is making inroads on US soil, with broligarchs trying to create a private autonomous country called “California Forever” on land they bought in Solano County. These projects are outlandish and cartoon villain-ish but they’re test runs for what the broligarchs want for the US and the world and they have the money and political power to force it on the rest of us.

Meet Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the benevolent rulers of Broligarchy, the island fiefdom formerly known as Australia. Now shut the fuck up and clean Camp 16’s outhouse until you can eat off of it or you’ll be hanged, drawn and quartered. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

4. What’s the primary advantage of parking your wealth offshore? Is it tax evasion and other financial benefits, or something bigger than that?

The purpose of offshore finance is to escape the rule of law. Escaping taxes is just the tip of the iceberg and it’s not even relevant to the biggest users of the offshore system, who are super-rich residents of the Arab Peninsula countries, who aren’t subject to taxation in the first place. They use offshore finance to protect their fortunes from Shari’a law and maintain the appearance of religious purity in their own lives by avoiding activities that are haram in Islam, such as borrowing money at interest, which is something you have to do in order to participate in the modern financial system, but you can’t be seen doing if you want to become the Finance Minister of Dubai one day. The easy fix is to put your fortune offshore and let your non-Muslim wealth manager deal with your mortgage payments and credit card bills.

Another favorite use of offshore finance by the ultra-rich is dodging their debts because they hate repaying loans almost as much as they hate paying taxes. This is such a huge problem that a global cottage industry has arisen of high-end debt collectors for the ultra-rich. Chapter 2 of my book with opens with a man I call Boba Fett for the Jet Set who chases rich people around the world who give away their locations by posting photos of themselves on Instagram because they can’t stop themselves from bragging about their wealth, and tries to serve them with lawsuit papers before they escape on private jets.

Offshore finance is the main engine driving exploding levels of wealth inequality worldwide—not just income inequality, but wealth inequality, which has multi-generational consequences and is much more dangerous. Economists like Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman show there’s been nothing like this in the US since the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, when there was no permanent income or inheritance tax at all in America. That’s only possible because offshore finance allows the rich to escape laws that constrain their ability to get richer and more powerful, and the US has become one of the biggest, most secretive, and most popular offshore financial centers in the world. We’re like the financial Red Light District for foreign oligarchs.

5. How hard is it to hide money offshore and what’s the risk of getting caught?

“Getting caught” implies that people who use the offshore system are doing something illegal, which in most cases they’re not. That’s why we’ve seen so few prosecutions from the huge piles of secret financial and legal information revealed by leaks like the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Pandora Papers in 2021, which by my count have led to fewer than a dozen convictions. Many people would consider activities exposed by the leaks to be immoral, but a lot of it isn’t strictly illegal.

There’s rarely a bright line between legal and illegal activity without a grey area between the two. The job of offshore wealth managers is to make sure their clients don’t do anything that’s clearly illegal so anyone thinking about prosecuting would be looking at a long and costly court battle with uncertain chances of prevailing. The IRS has been chronically underfunded and didn’t go after oligarchs who were tax cheats because they had much deeper pockets and the fight is mostly about grey areas.

As for your first question, it’s pretty trivial to hide money offshore

If you can afford a wealth manager, because you need a professional expert to make sure you don’t step out of the grey zones into zones of frank illegality. The rock bottom minimum needed to get an offshore wealth manager to work with you – a serious one, not the financial advisors that retail banks try to fob off on middle class savings account holders – is about $5 million in investable assets. That means net worth minus the value of your primary residence, which isn’t an easy bar for the vast majority of people.

The Broligarchian Flag.

6. Does the extreme wealth concentration of oligarchy cause damages beyond the economic realm that may not be as readily apparent?

Oligarchy can’t coexist with a functional democracy or with functional capitalism. That’s why Thomas Jefferson insisted not only on banning titles of nobility in the new United States but also the forms of dynastic wealth concentration that underpinned the nobility in the first place, so “an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society” gave way to an “aristocracy of virtue and talent.” Thomas Paine advocated for a progressive annual wealth tax with a top rate of 100 percent, and when Congress was debating the creation of permanent federal income and inheritance taxes 140 years later during the run up to World War I legislators were still warning that “the Nation must protect itself from the menace of abnormal fortunes” bequeathed across generations. Both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, born into dynastic wealth themselves, repeatedly warned during their presidential administrations of the dangers the oligarchs presented to democracy.

But it’s been nearly impossible to talk about how great concentrations of private wealth distort democracy ever since Ronald Reagan fetishized “wealth creators.” My fellow sociologist Matthew Desmond, of Princeton University, wrote recently that if the ultra-rich simply paid the taxes they owe now – no new taxes, just their statutory obligations as they stand currently – there would be enough federal funding to lift every American out of poverty. That we don’t enforce the tax code, and many other laws, on the ultra-rich is a policy choice that allows broligarchs to keep enjoying the benefits of public goods, such as the research grants that made Google possible and the subsidies that kept Musk afloat through multiple near-bankruptcies, and stick the rest of us with the bill.