Andrew Ross Sorkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…So that’s one difference. Did they do philanthropy better? You have the Morgan Library in New York, everything Carnegie did, which seems quite remarkable. Are today’s wealthy business leaders living up to that track record? Or somehow they’re failing to? That’s a fascinating question, too. I think, first of all, a number of those people in the 1920s actually were not that philanthropic yet, and then, of course, lost so much of their fortune that they were really never in a position to be that philanthropic. I remember coming across an article as I was working on this book, with the headline — it was in 1929 — “Our Second Billionaire.” That was the title. It was Henry Ford. Our first billionaire was Rockefeller. These are, of course, not inflation-adjusted figures. These are real. I’m not sure that the actual leaders, whether it was a John Raskob or a Mitchell or any of those characters, frankly, were that philanthropic, in part because they were new money in the 1920s. It was sort of a new thing, and they were not philanthropic yet. Maybe they had ambitions at some point to become such, but then the crash happened, and most of them, frankly, lost it all, so I don’t know. You look at, obviously, a Bill Gates — very philanthropic. Then you have people like Jeff Bezos, who’s engaged in some philanthropy, and Elon Musk. But both of those — Elon and Jeff Bezos — I think that they’re using their fortune to go to space. While that may turn out to be fabulous business in the end, we’ll see. I think they thought of it first, at least, as their own version of helping humanity. I know there’re lots of people who have lots of different views of both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Without speaking for them, I think if you actually talk to them, I remember talking to them years ago, that was at least the initial conceit, that they were helping humanity if they could do this. Should we have allowed interstate branch banking back then? The US essentially bans it. Canada has it. No Canadian banks fail in the Great Depression. Couldn’t we have been in that position?…

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