Well, Donald Trump’s back in the White House, Vladimir Putin is still waging his horrific campaign against the Ukrainian nation, and too many governments are blaming foreigners instead of oligarchs for the collapsing state of public services. Back in 1993, the then Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin observed, after yet another policy failure, “хотели как лучше получилось как всегда”. Literally translated, it means “we wanted the best, but it turned out like always.” But I’ve never found an English version that fully captures the poetic irony of the Russian original. 

THE NEW CLASS OF MULTI-CENTIBILLIONAIRES

In 2020, I marvelled at the concept of the “centibillionaire,” someone whose wealth was worth more than $100 billion. Back then, the OG centibillionaire – Jeff “Amazon” Bezos -- had just gained his first comrades, ushering in a whole new class of the super-rich.

It’s not even half a decade later, and that already looks hopelessly dated. Pah, everyone and his gran has got $100 billion these days. Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison have already seen their net worth vault past $200 billion, while Elon Musk has more than double that again. This, I think, makes Musk the richest man who’s ever lived, since the previous presumed holder of the title – Mansa Musa, the 14th-century emperor of Mali – owned  a mere $400 billion in current terms, much of which he spent on a spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca.

ONE DOLLAR, MANY VOTES

Wealth inequality will be a major issue this year, partly because the creation of a new class of American uber-mega-super-oligarchs is inherently interesting, but also because – as Elon Musk’s unhinged interventions in British and German politics makes clear – this has real consequences for the rest of the world. 

Too much discussion of inequality focuses on incomes, such as this piece in the Financial Times with the misleading headline “Inequality hasn’t risen. Here’s why it feels like it has”. If you look at how much people own, however, it’s another story. Since 1977 -- the year I was born, as it happens -- the richest one percent in America has increased its share of the nation’s stuff from 22.7 percent to 34.9 percent. That is a lot of money.

And money is power, as Francis Bacon didn’t say. If you are wealthy, you get a wildly disproportionate amount of attention, which means you can bend laws, corrupt politics, and reshape the world to suit your vision. It’s often said that modern democracy isn’t one man/one vote, but instead one dollar/one vote. In reality it’s worse than that. A hundred billion dollars buys you a lot more than a hundred billion votes.

This must be great for the centibillionaires but, for those of us who believe in democracy as a vehicle for representing the views of everyone, it’s all the more reason to try to build and/or rebuild defences against the oligarchs.

THE TRANSPARENCY BATTLEGROUND

The dirty secret of the international financial system is that the tools used by Putin and other kleptocrats to hide, move and multiply their stolen wealth were designed not for them, but for Western tax-dodgers. Once shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, Swiss bank accounts, trusts and all the other paraphernalia had been created, financial criminals realised that they liked convenience, value and discretion just as much as tax dodgers did. 

Wealthy Westerners haven’t stopped wanting to dodge taxes and scrutiny just because Putin’s a baddie, and transparency measures have proved distinctly unpopular among the one percent as a result. “Sure, I want to stop corrupt crooks from taking over the world via anonymous shell companies, but why should that mean I can’t use them?”

It explains the bizarre ping-pong that was played with the US Corporate Transparency Act at the end of last year. The CTA, passed in the dying days of Trump’s last term in office, obliges states to collect information on who actually owns companies, thus ending the race to the bottom that has allowed Delaware and Nevada, for instance, to demand less information from applicants for corporations than for library cards. This piece of legislation was a big deal. It has taken four years for FinCEN, the Treasury Department’s financial crime experts, to craft the detailed regulations that would make the law a reality, and finally – at the start of 2025 – it was due to start collecting information about who owns what.

The CTA would not actually require this ownership information to be published, it would just be collected and made available to law enforcement agencies. Even that was too much for the improbably-named Texas Top Cop Shop Inc, which sells “tactical gear” to police officers and is suing to stop the CTA.

• “Though seemingly benign, this federal mandate marks a drastic two-fold departure from history. First, it represents a Federal attempt to monitor companies created under state law — a matter our federalist system has left almost exclusively to the several States. Second, the CTA ends a feature of corporate formation as designed by various States — anonymity. For good reason, Plaintiffs fear this flanking, quasi-Orwellian statute and its implications on our dual system of government,” the complaint states.

(Off topic, but, I think we may soon need an international legal treaty decreeing that anyone who calls something Orwellian should lose their case automatically. This might sound a bit, well, Orwellian but a hard line is needed.) 

In early December, a Texas court responded to Texas Top Cop Shop Inc by granting an injunction, preventing the U.S. government from requiring companies to provide ownership information as the CTA demanded. On December 23, a higher court stayed the injunction, and the law was back on. But on December 26, a different panel of judges (who presumably hadn’t had much of a Christmas) stayed the stay on the injunction, and the law was paused again, so the government has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. And that’s where we are at the moment.

LOOKING AHEAD

Offshore tax havens that also sell anonymous companies have long been able to point to the dire state of corporate transparency in the United States and use it as an excuse not to take action themselves. This means secret shell companies are still available for the Russian regime to hide its ownership of oil tankers behind, thereby circumventing Western sanctions and continuing to fund its war against Ukraine. Around a fifth of oil tankers are now in this “shadow fleet”, which poses a huge environmental threat, as well as a financial one.

Just over two years ago, a similar challenge to transparency measures in the European Union managed to halt them for a while. Fortunately Brussels is pushing out a new package of anti-money laundering measures, which would open up corporate registers to journalists and other bona fide researchers. That’s not to say that the EU has become closed to dodgy money, as this troubling investigation from September revealed, but at least it is trying to expose who owns it.

In the year ahead, I’ll be keeping an eye on government efforts to stop financial crime and the legal challenges against them brought by the Texas Top Cop Shops of this world. I suspect there will be many and perhaps, when it turns out like always, an English-language equivalent will be found for Chernomyrdin’s wistful cynicism.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post The age of the multi-centibillionaire appeared first on Coda Story.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Isobel: Your book is called “The Hidden Globe.” Can you tell us what that means to you? 

Atossa: It’s a book about loopholes and how people, companies, and even countries use them, especially those with significant money and power. The idea of a loophole, the etymology of it, is actually a slit in a castle wall that you can shoot arrows out of while you're obviously protected by the wall. And I think that that's really important to remember when you're thinking about how these loopholes work today. They allow those employing loopholes to hide behind the wall while taking advantage of the provisions that are afforded to them.

Isobel: These loopholes — this hidden globe — often exist as a physical space though. How does that work? 

Atossa: Visualizing the physicality of these spaces was key in trying to express what it was I was thinking about. For years and years I had this hunch that there was something weird going on between countries. Something we were not talking about that didn’t totally correspond to our idea of a nation state. Power was being wielded in ways that didn’t adhere to our concept of national sovereignty. 

So if you look at the map of the world, you'll see 192 countries. But what isn't shown on the map is all the stuff in between and above and beneath. Maps don’t show that laws don’t necessarily go hand in hand with territory.

In a lot of cases, it does—if you rob a bank, for example, that’s a physical crime that would be prosecuted based on your location. But for more transnational activities where jurisdiction isn’t clear, it’s not necessarily “you’re in country X, so you’re bound by the laws of country X.” You might be in a free zone with its own laws or on a ship with a flag of convenience. There’s this uncoupling of land and law, where countries create alternate rules when it’s convenient.

Isobel: Dubai is an example of this. Can you explain how?

Atossa: Dubai has its own civil and Islamic laws, but they carved out a space for finance companies to operate in a familiar legal environment. They created a court from scratch and simply imported judges and rules. This new court—the Dubai International Financial Center—uses common law. Essentially, they made up new rules and created a new jurisdiction within the existing one, almost like nesting dolls.

Isobel: And sometimes these judges aren’t even physically present…

Atossa: Right, they don’t even always import the judges; some work remotely. I open the book with Swiss mercenaries, and there’s an analogy between those mercenaries and these judges who adjudicate cases over Zoom. They’re trained in one country and then “borrowed” by another. Mark Beer, one of the judges, actually lived in Dubai, but the others hopped around in places like the Caribbean, the UK, and Singapore. Countries want to hire these judges because companies want a familiar legal environment—not necessarily favorable rules, just consistency, so that they don’t risk fines or shutdowns over compliance issues. But it’s strange that companies can make up a court for themselves, while I don’t get to choose where to adjudicate my parking ticket.

Isobel: You grew up in Switzerland and you talk a lot about freeports — these hidden spaces in Geneva, the city of your childhood, where people can hide goods and assets. Did you ever go inside one of these places?

Atossa: I never actually got to visit the Geneva Freeport, even though it’s only a mile from where I grew up. I could get into places like northern Laos and Dubai, but not the Freeport. The idea of works of art hidden away where no one can see them—that was almost more offensive to me than, say, a country compromising its sovereignty. 

Art does what it does; it can be beautiful or disturbing. But then we layer abstraction on top of it—its speculative market value, its value to an individual or as part of the art market. Putting art in crates, where people can’t look at it, for tax reasons or so someone can obscure its value from an ex-spouse feels deeply wrong. 

Historically, freeports were for storage of things like grain, which had a shelf life. You couldn’t let goods sit in a freeport indefinitely, neither here nor there. But with art, due to both the nature of the items and storage technology, they can remain there for an incredibly long time. That’s the loophole—not that there’s storage, which is fine, but that an artwork can be both “in transit” while not moving at all. This is a legal fiction that exemplifies the world I’m writing about.

Isobel: I used to naively think that people bought art because they loved art or found pieces beautiful. I didn’t fully grasp, before reading your book, that actually art collecting often has very little to do with being an art lover.

Atossa: There’s been some recent reporting that art isn’t necessarily the investment it was once thought to be—not all works will appreciate like a Picasso might. But if you’re very wealthy, there are only so many places to put your money: real estate, stocks, and art is just another asset class. When financial affairs are handed over to accountants or family offices, art isn’t exempt; it’s yet another commodity. Owning a piece of art allows you to take out loans against its value or use it as collateral. So, while many rich people may appreciate art as we do, art also serves a function as part of a portfolio.

This is where freeports come in. If art is viewed as an asset, you don’t want it to get damaged, and you may not want people to know it exists. If there are only ten da Vincis, they’re worth more than if there were fifty. So there’s a game of obscuring value, existence, and location. There’s also a tax element: you may not declare it in the same way as other onshore assets if, for example, there’s a sales or use tax associated with it.

Isobel: Tell me more about growing up in Geneva. What was it like? 

Atossa: When I was a teenager, a lot of the kids I grew up with had parents who were diplomats, so they had diplomatic plates on their cars and some degree of immunity. I remember an ex-boyfriend who was speeding and nothing happened because of those plates. Or someone would be smoking pot and the cops would say, “I know who your mother is, I know who your father is,” and then do nothing. 

It’s not like they were doing anything outrageous, but there’s this awareness of different worlds within Geneva.

Isobel: You’ve lived in New York for two decades now but you wrote about how much you missed Geneva during the pandemic — how it was almost calling to you. What’s your relationship with Switzerland like now?

I don’t think Swiss people see me as truly Swiss. It’s that classic expat feeling: in Switzerland, I feel American; in the U.S., I feel Swiss. And with Geneva, you have this city that seems quiet and boring on the surface but, as my book discusses, there’s so much going on behind the scenes. Switzerland does have a lot going for it, and Geneva is now a more progressive city than other Swiss cities. It’s not just a capitalist hellhole. But I still don’t feel entirely at home there. It’s like a haunting, almost spooky feeling. Geneva’s a place that can freak you out if you overthink it. Most people don’t do that, but I have. 

Isobel: You called Geneva the “City of Holes,” which fits this idea of a place that’s quiet but full of hidden dramas.

Atossa: Exactly. It’s strange how everyone carries on as if it’s normal. But when you realize how much of the world’s coffee or finance goes through Geneva, it’s absurd. The city punches so far above its weight class, given its size and demographics.

Once you know about these hidden aspects, you can’t unsee them. You walk past a building with a plaque saying “Offshore Partners LLC,” and it’s hard not to think, “If walls could talk…” There’s so much you want to know, so much that you can’t know. There’s this blankness you encounter—almost like an invisible wall. You want to know, but Geneva has a way of keeping its secrets.

Isobel: I’ve been working on a lot of stories about tech elites, the technopoly and so on. And something I’ve come across again and again is a “bunker mentality.” This idea that the tech bros have that they want to create their own jurisdictions, their own walled-off communities that will protect them from government regulation — but maybe in the future will also protect them from apocalyptic climate chaos, or the ravages of societal breakdown. Can you explain this mentality? 

Atossa: I think these tech leaders have convinced themselves that they’re victims, that everyone hates them and they need to protect themselves at all costs. It’s a classic persecution complex seen throughout history among monarchs and dictators. With power comes paranoia.

Some of these people aren’t stupid; they see that things aren’t working for most people. That can lead to a reasonable fear of being pursued or facing consequences for their actions.

For the tech guys, their identity is tied to being hackers. They think of themselves as clever problem-solvers, whether it’s with code or social issues. They live in a world of nations that don’t align with their ideals, so they look for shortcuts to create a future they envision. The appeal of charter cities is that they feel like a hack. The original concept of charter cities came from [Nobel Prize-winning American economist] Paul Romer, who had some honest intentions. He believed that foreign laws could bring better infrastructure to developing economies.

But for the tech elite, they thought: “We don’t even need to lobby Washington; we can create our own rules.” These charter cities would be business-friendly, with no taxes and streamlined bureaucracy. The catch? It’s not democratic. If a corporation runs a charter city, that corporation effectively becomes the ruler.

This appeals to certain tech types who are disillusioned with democracy, probably because they fear the consequences if democracy were to take real effect.

Isobel: In your book you mentioned the longevity movement — this obsession with living forever that has gripped tech bros — and how it’s connected to the idea of charter cities. What’s going on there?

Atossa: Right, the longevity hackers are frustrated with regulations, like those imposed by the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], which slow down testing for new treatments. They want faster processes and are seeking places where they can expedite those trials. This is already happening in a Honduran charter city called Prospera. 

Isobel: You discuss outer space as a potential ultimate charter city. Can you elaborate?

Atossa: Absolutely. The ultimate charter city—or tax haven—could be in space. It’s an interesting thought, as it represents a frontier where these tech leaders could establish their ideal conditions without the constraints of current Earth-based systems.

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

The post The super-rich and their secret worlds appeared first on Coda Story.