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A mini-series which journeys into the lives of the planet's ultra-rich moguls and discover how their influence has shaped our lives.
Take a fascinating journey into the lives of the USA's billionaires and discover how their innovations have shaped our lives. From hard-working dream chasers to tech futurists we explore how America's unique socio-political climate has created so many ultra-wealthy Tycoons.
Take a fascinating journey into the lives of the USA's billionaires and discover how their innovations have shaped our lives. From hard-working dream chasers to tech futurists we explore how America's unique socio-political climate has created so many ultra-wealthy Tycoons.
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00:51porque eles não tiveram que pagar as taxas.
00:55E como eles estão formando o futuro da América e do mundo?
01:00É uma forma de poder político.
01:02E agora, o poder está totalmente em suas mãos.
01:05E isso é muito, muito, muito, muito, muito, muito, muito.
01:08América.
01:22O país do mundo na Terra.
01:26É a terra do tycoão.
01:29Agora temos mais de 700 bilionários na América.
01:33O tycoão, de social media até o fabricante,
01:37definitivamente define a forma que nós trabalhamos e tudo que nós fazemos.
01:41Os men e mulheres começaram com um desejo de fazer algo novo e extraordinário.
01:47Cada vez que há uma revolução tecnológica,
01:50fazemos grandes grandes quantidades.
01:52Riding a wave da tecnologia de tecnologia
01:54é o coração da América do tycoão.
01:57Eles são calculadores de risco.
02:00Eles são capazes de colocar tudo.
02:02Eles são capazes de perder tudo.
02:04Mas eles fazem isso em uma forma que é um objetivo
02:06para chegar a uma visão, uma ideia.
02:13E o mundo é um homem que está sempre em busca de novo.
02:23No mundo na história de Forbes tracking bilionários
02:26tem sido worth as muito quanto Elon Musk.
02:29Elon Musk risco tudo
02:31Elon Musk risco tudo
02:33cada vez que ele começa a fazer um novo projeto.
02:37Elon Musk diz que ele pode apenas fazer isso nos Estados Unidos.
02:40Muitas outras sociedades não têm muito dinheiro
02:42e eles não têm muito dinheiro
02:43e eles não têm muito dinheiro para os riscos.
02:45Tesla é agora a mais validação da empresa
02:48do mundo.
02:49R$1 milha do mundo.
02:51Porém, lançou a vizinho para a transformação.
02:53Ele começou uma empresa de caro do que era o que era melhor.
02:54Os autos de vizinho
02:55do que era um carro que não parece bom,
02:57está rápido e não tem muito rápido,
03:00não tem alta performance.
03:01Nós queremos que fosse queilança o molde.
03:02Tesla makes less than a million cars a year and yet it's worth more than the world's nine largest car companies put together.
03:11I think what we've done here is for the first time created an electric car that you actually want to buy.
03:18But Tesla could so easily have been a different story.
03:22Instead of making Musk the world's richest man, he could have lost everything.
03:27Risk taking is like the Promethean fire. You can get close and use some of it, but you can't use too much of it.
03:36Elon Musk has had moments when it was on the precipice of disaster.
03:41Everywhere you look the color is red and no one it seems can stop the bleeding.
03:49In 2008, the financial crisis meant the global economy was on the brink of collapse.
03:54Mayhem, carnage, a bloodbath. Call it what you want, but what we saw on global stock markets today was ill-disguised panic.
04:04It became impossible for startup Tesla to raise capital.
04:08Elon Musk was broke. The most sensible thing would have been to sell.
04:12So Musk tweets that Tesla is only three days from bankruptcy, that he doesn't own a house, and that he has to borrow money just to keep the company afloat.
04:25That's how close they were to disaster.
04:27Musk took a huge risk and secured a $40 million loan and put it all into Tesla.
04:33It's extremely unusual for somebody to put their money on the line, risk bankruptcy, and make these projects work.
04:47He had the courage to do that.
04:49Really introducing the first true mass market electric vehicle to the American market is a triumph that Detroit couldn't pull off, and now Detroit is following suit.
05:03There's a bit of a revenge of the nerd going on here with the amount of wealth that he has created.
05:10Elon Musk grew up in South Africa, which was to shape his desire to succeed at all costs.
05:22Elon Musk has a rather interesting background. His mother often said that she didn't know what was wrong with him as a child.
05:31He later revealed to us that he had Asperger's.
05:33And he was bullied. At one point, some of the school kids pushed him down the stairs, and he ended up with a fair amount of injuries.
05:45I think part of his ego is based on the way he was treated as a child. He has a lot to prove.
05:52His ex-wife, Justine, had an incredibly difficult time with Elon. She said that he was the most obsessive person that she'd ever met.
06:01And lift off with a Falcon 9.
06:05And what Musk did next was obsession on a whole new level.
06:13He's built this space company that was started off as kind of a, seemed like a side hustle. You know, this extra thing he was doing.
06:20That has become a major contractor, a major player.
06:23He's built this space company.
06:24Human space flight is the reason that SpaceX was created, and we're currently honored to partner with NASA.
06:33Again, it was touch and go whether he'd lose everything.
06:36He had three failed launches and one rocket left to try to show that he could get them into space and supply the space station.
06:55Four, three, two, one, zero. And launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as NASA turns to the private sector to resupply the International Space Station.
07:12And the fourth one succeeded. And it was really a defining moment.
07:19You want to do projects that are inspiring and that make people excited about the future.
07:35Musk's out-of-the-box thinking has come under fire, though.
07:40His plan to rescue trapped children from a flooded cave in Thailand with a mini-sub built from rocket parts was a PR disaster.
07:49And his ideas for the future of car travel have run into problems.
07:53Some of his ideas, it's not certain how realistic they are.
07:59The boring project to create tunnels underground that cars could zoom through at incredible speeds would take an enormous amount of work.
08:09And I think a lot of people are not sure how feasible that really is.
08:16Musk's plan to send one million people to Mars by 2050 is also viewed with deep skepticism.
08:24The ideas that drive tycoons to wealth can also be the ideas that drive them to disaster.
08:31We should expect that he might remain a tycoon, but that he's spreading himself too thin and making too many risky bets at the same time.
08:41But whatever the future holds, Elon Musk is just the latest in a long line of American tycoons who've staked their all on the potential rewards of a new technology.
08:51To fully understand the role tycoons have played in the country's history, you have to return to the 19th century to the pioneers of US capitalism.
09:04The robber barons were a group of men who ran the industrialization of the United States.
09:15In those days, there weren't many rules constraining what they could do.
09:18Called the robber barons because of their ruthless behavior, they made their wealth from the new technology of the industrial age.
09:29The richest of them all was John D. Rockefeller, who made his fortune from oil.
09:41John D. Rockefeller was present at the creation of the oil business, and he rode that horse to become the biggest richest man in the world in its time.
09:51Rockefeller's fortune was bigger than Bezos, bigger than Musk. It was enormous.
09:58In today's money, he is the tycoon who was the closest contender to being a trillionaire.
10:04In 1915, John D. Rockefeller could have paid off the national debt of the United States and still have been the richest man in the world.
10:12But like many US tycoons, Rockefeller started out with nothing.
10:21His father was a ne'er-do-well, someone who was always hustling, but not necessarily doing it in the most legal of ways.
10:31Many billionaires are individuals who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.
10:36And that motivation is what leads them to actually become people who transform the system and make a lot of money for themselves in the process.
10:48Going from rags to riches is the essence of what's called the American Dream.
10:53The American Dream to me means the ability to become wealthy.
10:59It provides the hope that drives people to work hard.
11:03You work your way up from nothing. You don't come from money. You don't come from family.
11:07And the idea that if you hustle enough, you can do anything.
11:11And one family from Arkansas defined the American Dream.
11:23The Waltons are the richest family on earth, thanks to their stake in the retail chain Wal-Mart.
11:29Founder Sam Walton's three surviving children have consistently been in the top 20 of Forbes' Rich List.
11:36And Alice Walton, his youngest child, is worth $65 billion alone.
11:42Alice Walton is the richest woman in the United States.
11:46She inherited most of her money, but she also invested her money.
11:50She remains involved in many of the Wal-Mart businesses.
11:55Sam Walton became the richest man in America in 1985, a position he held for four years.
12:04Sam Walton is the true rags to riches story.
12:07Mostly it's a matter of believing in our people, working with our people,
12:11and really trying to do everything we can for their best interest.
12:16And they in turn come back and take care of our customers and take care of ourselves.
12:20Walmart now has around 11,000 stores worldwide and is the largest retailer across the globe.
12:27This retail giant started with a small shop in Arkansas.
12:32And once again, he made his fortune by using new technology.
12:37He was one of the first people who used computers to track his inventory.
12:43It allowed Wal-Mart to become so extremely successful with a very tight control of inventory.
12:52So they would buy it at the last minute, sell it as quickly as possible, keep the goods moving.
12:57Once Wal-Mart became a giant, they were able to push their suppliers and force their suppliers to sell it at, you know, lower prices.
13:07He used glossy commercials to attract families.
13:10Wal-Mart everyday low prices means everything. Every day.
13:14Every day low prices really mean something at Wal-Mart.
13:17Every single item in the store, every day.
13:19Passing all savings on to consumers to make Wal-Mart the cheapest place to shop was always Wal-Mart's aim.
13:25He also reinvested profits, allowing the company to grow quickly.
13:31So Sam Walton became a cult figure. People saw Sam Walton as the embodiment of the American dream.
13:39And everyone in the company said, Mr. Walton, you've got to perform. We did it. Now you do it.
13:46But when Sam Walton died in 1992, some saw it as a turning point.
13:52Wal-Mart became more of a big, empty corporation after Sam Walton's passing.
14:01Instead of helping their communities, it came to look like Wal-Mart was just making money from their communities.
14:07Wal-Mart also attracted criticism for its working practices.
14:12So they tried in a first sense to make themselves more community friendly.
14:17They also tried to address a number of very damaging exposés about the mistreatment of their labor, the low wages they paid.
14:25Aware of this growing criticism, in 2008, Wal-Mart decided to rebrand and give themselves a more caring image.
14:33They tried to raise their wages and do things to make Wal-Mart a healthier, happier place for people to work.
14:41And they wanted to tell that story.
14:45The growth of Wal-Mart keeps the Walton family the richest in the world.
14:50But their domination of the retail sector still provokes controversy.
14:55Fundamentally, when a Wal-Mart comes to a town, Main Street dies.
15:02Who's going to compete with Wal-Mart?
15:05The story of Wal-Mart shows that size isn't everything.
15:16Tycoons getting too big and too powerful has been the great American dilemma since the time of robber barons.
15:23How to balance business success with the greater good.
15:28At its height in the early 20th century, Rockefeller's Standard Oil controlled 90% of America's oil business.
15:38Monopolies meant that a few people were getting wealthy from it, not the vast majority of Americans.
15:45And so they're not living the American dream.
15:47Because companies have gotten too big and too powerful, it's clear that something needs to be done to create some rules of the road.
15:55The Sherman Antitrust Act, back in 1890, allowed the government to dismantle monopolies.
16:02This included the breakup of Rockefeller's Standard Oil.
16:15Governments continued to regulate tycoons throughout the 20th century.
16:20But in 1981, a new president decided to change everything and set the tycoons free.
16:27I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.
16:34So help me God.
16:37Reagan thought things were being over-regulated, and that was stifling economic opportunity and profit-making.
16:45In the 1980s, Reagan undertook to repeal many of the limitations on wealth creation and business entrepreneurship in the United States.
16:54In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
17:03Reagan cut taxes and deregulated markets, hoping the wealth created would improve everyone's standard of living.
17:20Reaganomics did create an updated version of the American dream.
17:25Reagan's policies actually increased inequality in the U.S.
17:32However, over 16 million jobs were created, and the booming economy made Americans feel good about themselves again.
17:41They were ready to buy houses, TVs, fridges, cars, and fast food.
17:51Oh, the 80s were great for billionaires. One of the truly great eras of prosperity in American history.
17:58Reagan's policies also paved the way for a new type of tycoon, one who didn't actually make anything.
18:16Instead, he made his fortune by investing in other people's companies.
18:21Warren Buffett is an example of this new breed of tycoon who becomes immensely wealthy not by building things, but by investing in things.
18:35By buying stakes in undervalued companies, Buffett, for a time, became the richest man in the world.
18:41Buffett is very good at reading kind of what sectors of this new market, this service economy, the post-industrial economy,
18:49what's going to grow and what's going to be profitable.
18:52Thanks to deregulation and a booming economy, Buffett made his first billions in the 80s.
18:58Instead of following the stock market, he studied financial reports from his office in Omaha, looking for undervalued businesses.
19:06I've never had a computer in there, I've never had a calculator in there, and I've never had a stock ticker in there.
19:14He once spent a billion dollars buying Coke shares, which then quadrupled in value over four years.
19:20Warren Buffett epitomizes the 1980s because from his little office in Omaha, Nebraska, he's now able to move capital around without limitations.
19:31Before the 80s, it wasn't possible to move money that way.
19:34I'm having the time of my life.
19:36I mean, I get to do every day exactly what I like to do with people who I love and who seem to like me pretty well.
19:43And it doesn't get any better than that.
19:46He now has thousands of followers for whom he invests money.
19:51They call him the Oracle of Omaha.
19:54Despite his huge wealth, his lifestyle remains modest in the extreme.
19:59Warren Buffett is interesting because he kind of bursts onto the scene at a time when the images of wealth are often flashy and, you know, fur coats dripping with jewels.
20:09And Warren Buffett's not that at all.
20:12He is a folksy Midwesterner from Nebraska, lives, you know, not someone who flashes his wealth.
20:21Buffett still lives in the same house he bought more than 60 years ago.
20:26How would I improve my life by having 10 houses around the globe?
20:30I mean, if I'd wanted to become, you know, a superintendent of housing or something of the sort, you know, I could have gone into that as a profession.
20:36But I do not want to manage 10 houses and I really don't even want somebody else doing it for me.
20:40And I don't know why the hell I'd be happier.
20:42Nothing really changed in the Buffett household as Warren Buffett got richer.
20:46His kids found out that they were wealthy because they read about him in Forbes magazine.
20:56Now, as well as advocating for higher taxes on the rich, he's also sworn to give away most of his fortune before he dies.
21:04The 1980s was also the beginning of a new technological revolution.
21:22The digital age.
21:24It saw the birth of the tech tycoon.
21:26Just as in the 19th century, entirely new industries and sectors grew and you have the arrival of the commercially available personal computer.
21:38Computers make possible things that before were not possible.
21:42And that includes the accumulation of enormous fortunes.
21:46Bill Gates saw the boom in home computers, but his genius was not to build them, but to write the software.
22:04Microsoft is the second most valuable company in the world and is worth around two trillion dollars.
22:12Gates understood how technology would change our lives.
22:15Foreseeing the impact of smartphones before most of us were even using a computer.
22:21Virtually everyone in 10 to 15 years time will be able to carry around a wallet PC.
22:28You can have thousands of pictures of your children if you like.
22:32Easy to call up.
22:34You'll be able to receive messages, news bulletins.
22:37In fact, the machine over time will learn what you're interested in.
22:41An individual like Bill Gates is someone who sees a future before it's occurred.
22:47Their ideas help them to imagine a different kind of world.
22:51And they're investing and taking risks to try to get to that world.
22:55Gates wrote his first software program at the age of 13.
22:59He's a nerdy brainy guy.
23:02So even growing up, he was a bookworm.
23:06They had a rule at the Gates house.
23:09No bill, no more books at the dinner table.
23:12He's sort of one of these child genius type of type of kids.
23:19He dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to set up Microsoft.
23:24Gates was creating a company that was selling something that previously had been given away for free.
23:30Gates had a very different vision, and he was right. Software was a business.
23:36Gates' big break came in 1980 when IBM chose Microsoft software for their computers because it was user friendly.
23:45Bill Gates' software made it possible for you and me to understand how to operate our computers.
23:51Microsoft did a deal with IBM that also allowed them to sell the same software to other computer companies, putting them ahead of the competition.
24:00He didn't always have the best software on the market. There were other programs that were better, but he knew how to get them out there.
24:09Like Rockefeller before him, who ran 90% of America's oil business, at its height, 90% of the world's PCs were running Windows, making Bill Gates America's youngest billionaire at the age of 31.
24:24One of the characteristics that Bill Gates has in common with a lot of other tycoons is he's intensely competitive.
24:31Part of Microsoft's success comes from that real intense, take no prisoners, we're gonna, you know, we want to win.
24:39We're not here to make friends.
24:41And it also is something that contributes to their getting in trouble with the Department of Justice.
24:47By 1998, when Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, worth $51 billion, Microsoft was being accused of illegally creating a monopoly in the same way the robber barons were in the 19th century.
25:05How many of you use a PC without Microsoft's operating system? Gentlemen, that's a monopoly.
25:14Because he bundled his own web browser, Internet Explorer, with Windows software, he was accused of crushing his rivals.
25:22Silicon Valley companies referred to Microsoft as the Death Star and, you know, saw it as this sort of enemy of everything that was right and good.
25:31The antitrust controversy was most certainly the greatest obstacle in Bill Gates's Microsoft journey.
25:39His attitude under questioning was a PR disaster.
25:42Did you actually read what was in there?
25:46Gates is a very difficult person to get along with.
25:49He has a tendency to try to denigrate people that he's debating with.
25:55You're saying to me that there's more in there and you're just reading me part of it.
26:00He did not take seriously the arguments of those who believed Microsoft was too big, who believed it was too predatory, who believed it was stifling innovation.
26:09So you were asking me about it without reading me the whole thing?
26:13He came to represent the example of the spoiled narcissistic leader, not the innovative entrepreneur.
26:21This court ruling finds the company guilty of acting as a monopoly and stifling competition.
26:30Microsoft was ordered to split in two, but on appeal, the decision was reversed.
26:35Gates has since said he was naive back then and that he made some mistakes.
26:40Even though Microsoft itself was not broken up in the way Standard Oil was, the gold was now tarnished.
26:49After the antitrust proceedings, Apple was cool, Microsoft wasn't.
26:57After the trial, Bill Gates devoted increasingly more time to charity work through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
27:05After the lawsuit, just like Rockefeller and Carnegie, Bill Gates went into philanthropy to deploy their great wealth for a greater good.
27:15And so the Gates started engaging in some smaller scale philanthropy in the late 90s and then in the early 2000s founded their foundation, which became immediately the largest in the world.
27:26And the goal is by 2040 to eliminate this disease.
27:31So the scientists here are part of an incredible, exciting undertaking that will make malaria history.
27:37To date, the foundation has given away over 50 billion dollars.
27:42Bill Gates has also recruited fellow billionaire Warren Buffett and others to make a pledge to give away their wealth as well.
27:51As a philanthropist, he's really had this second act that's very different.
27:56His foundation has done extraordinary work at scale, kind of this massive, these massive interventions in global health.
28:04Bill Gates' philanthropy is an example of how many tycoons are extending their reach into other areas of American life.
28:12They're becoming public figures in a way that exceeds their previous reputation as just business people.
28:24In the 2020 presidential election, an unprecedented three tycoons ran for office.
28:33I think Americans of 1910 would have had great reluctance to, you know, let John D. Rockefeller run for president.
28:42And I think that there should be the same trepidation about the billionaire dominance of politics now.
28:49But it's not just running for election. It's influencing policy as well.
28:56Oil barons Charles and his brother David Koch, who died in 2019, are perhaps the biggest examples of billionaires using their wealth behind the scenes.
29:07They have funded some of the most conservative politicians in the country.
29:12So, Koch's money is still very much attached to taking resources out of the ground that often have a negative environmental consequence.
29:22And so he has a very strong interest in limiting any government interference in the activities that produce these environmental consequences.
29:32They've spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars supporting candidates who spread lies that climate change is a conspiracy.
29:40These two brothers are trying to buy America.
29:46You could argue that the Koch brothers have been two of the most influential political actors in the world in the last 20 to 30 years,
29:54yet neither of them has ever held an elected office.
30:01The influence over American life also comes thanks to favorable U.S. tax laws,
30:07which have enabled tycoons to build their immense fortunes.
30:12So a new report reveals the 25 richest Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk,
30:17they paid relatively little and sometimes nothing in federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018.
30:25Both Bloomberg and Bezos have endorsed the call for a corporate tax rise.
30:30One way tycoons legally avoid income tax is by owning shares in their company instead of taking a salary.
30:39In 2018, Elon Musk paid no income tax.
30:44After the ensuing outcry, he polled his Twitter followers and chose to pay $11 billion in 2021.
30:51The American tax system is a grotesque thing right now.
30:58It's amended about 4,000 times a year.
31:00And of those 4,000 amendments, almost all of them are little favors to people.
31:07Congressmen need campaign funds.
31:11They have a mutual back scratching society.
31:14I mean, you help me get reelected and I'll help you solve that tax problem.
31:23In 2021, 55 of the largest companies in America paid no federal corporate tax.
31:30Others have been criticized for not paying enough.
31:34Among them is one company whose founder sits just off the top of the rich list.
31:43Amazon now ships 15 million parcels a day and has 1.5 million employees across the world.
31:52The company dominates online retail and this is all thanks to Jeff Bezos' obsession with customer service.
31:59People ask me, are your customers loyal to you?
32:02And I always say, absolutely, right up until the second that somebody else offers them a better service.
32:08And I really believe that.
32:10Bezos understood from the start that online shopping gave customers much more choice, but also more power.
32:16Online, the balance of power shifts away from the merchant toward the customer.
32:21It's because customers have great information online.
32:24They can price compare very easily, all sorts of things like that.
32:27Also, the customers can tell each other what they find out.
32:31And they can use the Internet as a megaphone.
32:3330 years ago, Bezos was a banker in New York.
32:40He saw the number of people using the Internet, then a brand new technology, grow over 2,000 percent in a year.
32:48He realized it was a chance to make his fortune.
32:51The biggest sacrifice which Jeff Bezos took was, of course, leaving his career on Wall Street.
32:59He had been incredibly successful in finance.
33:02By going into this online space, which was relatively unknown at the time, he was taking a massive gamble.
33:09So the billionaires who really make it big, they're the ones who take advantage of a new technology and connect their ideas to that technology.
33:31And so he drops out of the Wall Street rat race, instead moves across the country to Seattle, because it's got a good stock of software engineers, because Microsoft is in Seattle.
33:48He rented a house and set up in the garage with a door for his desktop.
33:53He wanted to be seen as, you know, a frugal, bare-bones startup that wasn't going to waste money.
34:03In just two months, sales at Amazon reached $20,000 per week.
34:08The personal qualities that make a tycoon a tycoon is in thinking very big and thinking very long-term.
34:15Jeff Bezos is a great example of that.
34:18The plan from the beginning was to grow big, quick, by investing everything back into the business.
34:24His other great insight was that a successful company in the late 20th century was not a company that made a lot of money, but a company that had a lot of revenue.
34:34Investors would be investing in growth. That's what they want.
34:37If you look at our U.S. books business, it was profitable in the month of December of 1998, and that was a critical mistake.
34:47Because the management team of the company should have been able to figure out, and that was me, by the way, should have been able to figure out ways to invest that money.
35:02Amazon's success has had a huge impact on main streets across the world.
35:08But from the early days when Bezos was mainly selling books, he's been unapologetic.
35:15Complaining is not a strategy. Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.
35:23It's not just bookshops. Now, with around 12 million products sold by Amazon, all areas of the retail sector are under threat.
35:33Amazon have very aggressively gone into more and more sectors. This, of course, isn't a sign of the future at all. It's a sign of Jeff Bezos' ambitions and also his continuous drive for growth.
35:52Like most tycoons, Bezos has kept his family life private. That is, until 2019, when he divorced his wife, Mackenzie. She is now the fourth richest woman in the world, and he's living a more celebrity lifestyle.
36:14He now lives a much more Hollywood-oriented lifestyle, but an extraordinarily expensive home in L.A.
36:23His new girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, was a model before becoming an entertainment reporter and news anchor.
36:30He now has yachts in St. Bart's, where he hosts models and celebrities. You can find him jetting all over the world. He's constantly found in designer clothing with his new girlfriend.
36:42And generally living what is called a more jet-set billionaire lifestyle. Many have said that they believe that Bezos might be having a midlife crisis. Something's definitely going on with Bezos.
36:58But some tycoons go beyond buying yachts and supercars with their unlimited spending power.
37:19Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the man on whom the classic film Citizen Kane was based, built his wildly extravagant Hearst Castle in California. It was packed with unusual antiques.
37:35Here's the original itself, as the $50 million Hearst art collection goes on sale. Articles from 35 cents to $200,000. 15,000 objects in all, spread over 80,000 square feet of floor space. The fruits of 50 years of search for art treasures.
37:54Eccentric business tycoon Howard Hughes spent his billions building record-breaking aircraft.
38:01Builder of the monster, Howard Hughes, stormy petrol of aviation, surveys the 320-foot wing of the Colossus, whose weight is 200 tons and whose length is 200 feet.
38:13There are tycoons now with ambitions beyond the material world. The billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, wants to live forever. He plans to freeze his body after death so he can be brought back to life when the technology exists.
38:34Others don't just want to save themselves. They want to save the planet.
38:45We have sent robotic probes now to every planet in the solar system. And we know without any shadow of a doubt that Earth is the best one. This is the best planet.
38:56Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, they certainly have a dream. They want to explore space.
39:07Both men want to use space to solve Earth's problems.
39:17Bezos plans to tackle climate change by moving heavy industry to the moon.
39:23Elon Musk wants to secure the future of mankind by colonizing Mars.
39:28History fundamentally bifurcates in one of two directions. Either we are a multi-planet species and out there exploring the stars, or we are a single planet species waiting around for some eventual extinction event.
39:42We need those bold ideas and big thinking.
39:46At the same time, the idea that colonizing Mars is the better answer than attending to the problems on Earth is related to believing that technology can make things better.
40:02We can engineer our way out of a problem, whether it be climate change, or social inequality, or disinformation on the internet, that there must be a better fix.
40:14Sometimes the answer isn't always more technology.
40:19These men are driven by a sense that they are right, that they know what others don't know.
40:25And they don't see their own shortcomings. They don't see their own limits.
40:30This is especially true in the age of social media, where the rapid development of new technology has led to unintended consequences.
40:45Social media has changed everything about modern society. We now live our lives online.
40:57Facebook, which also owns Instagram and rebranded under the name Meta, has connected almost 3 billion people, over a third of the world's population.
41:14I mean, the mission of the company is to make the world more open and connected, because we believe that everyone is going to have a much better experience when they're doing different things with their friends.
41:29The problem is that it is a platform that has prioritized more inflammatory content, privileging the loudest voices in the room. And that contributes to polarization.
41:41As head of the company, in 2018, Zuckerberg was called before Congress to address mounting concerns.
41:50I think it's time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things.
41:56Facebook has grown so big, so fast. Not much influence comes with enormous social responsibility on which you have failed to act.
42:11He can't control the ill of society. He can't control online harm.
42:16But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.
42:22And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.
42:30We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.
42:36And it was my mistake. And I'm sorry.
42:39I started Facebook. I run it. And I'm responsible for what happens here.
42:48The overwhelming evidence is that Mark Zuckerberg sees the world only through Facebook's eyes.
42:54That he believes his company has the right to do what it does because it's popular.
42:59He's shown very little evidence of really taking seriously the concerns people have about hate speech, about data mining.
43:09Your every click and everything you do and everything you look at, that is data.
43:14And that data is being taken in and being used to sell ads to advertisers.
43:19But in doing that, you don't know how much privacy you're surrendering or how much they know about you.
43:29The rise of Facebook has been astonishing, but its origins were very modest.
43:38In 2003, while still at Harvard, Zuckerberg wrote the software for Facebook in a week.
43:45It was an immediate hit.
43:48I remember in the first week alone, I'd come home from classes and see that 10% of students at Harvard were logged on at any one point in time.
43:57And that was just really cool. So then by the second week, we had all these people from other colleges around us, like MIT and other colleges in the neighborhood,
44:06were emailing in asking if we could release Facebook at their schools too.
44:12He dropped out of Harvard, moved to Silicon Valley, launched Facebook worldwide, and within a year hit 5 million users.
44:20Mark Zuckerberg, of course, turned down various offers to sell his company.
44:27The hardest one was really when Yahoo offered us a billion dollars, because that was the first really big offer.
44:33And, you know, at the time I knew nothing about business, right?
44:37So I knew nothing about what a company would be worth, and I had to make this argument to people that somehow this was going to be the right decision.
44:44Tycoons are against the conventional wisdom. They always want to get rich, but it's the idea, the passion, that often separates the tycoons from other business people.
44:57When he floated Facebook on Nasdaq age 28, he had gone from a student to being worth $20 billion in seven years.
45:08On this special day, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I just want to say to all the people out there who use Facebook and our products, thank you.
45:18But the phenomenal growth of Facebook continued to bring a raft of unintended consequences.
45:24The problem now is that all these platforms, nearly all of them, are so large that they're impossible to moderate.
45:31They simply can't be this big and have either human or computer-driven moderation that is effective.
45:38Facebook is in a lot of trouble right now. I don't think the government will shut Facebook down,
45:44but I think they will intensively regulate Facebook and break it up.
45:49At the end of 2021, Facebook user numbers dropped for the first time as users found fresh alternatives.
45:57Zuckerberg rebranded as Meta and announced grand plans for a virtual reality metaverse, hoping to lure them back.
46:06Markets weren't convinced though, and Meta lost a quarter of its value in just one day in early 2022.
46:21Social media platforms have changed the way we interact.
46:24Riding the smartphone revolution, platforms including Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok have accessed billions of users across the world.
46:35Social media has taken us beyond the world of newspapers and radio, where the more you circulated something, the more you could sell, you could make millions.
46:46Now with social media, you can instantly make perhaps billions, because you can reach more people more quickly at lower cost.
46:54Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is worth $6.6 billion.
47:01Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel is worth $7.8 billion.
47:06As well as turning these entrepreneurs into hugely powerful billionaires,
47:11social media has also given unprecedented power to influencers who know how to harness it to create their own fortunes.
47:20Kim Kardashian has risen from nowhere using reality TV and social media to become one of the most famous, influential and wealthy people on the globe.
47:39Kardashian was kind of famous for being famous.
47:43She was a friend of early reality TV star Paris Hilton.
47:46And then this reality show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, really kind of put her and her family on the wider map of popular culture.
48:00I can't even deal with my mom doing a keg stand, like there are no words.
48:11The show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians ran for 20 seasons.
48:16I need someone to make me laugh.
48:19Where's Kim?
48:20It followed the lives of mom, Kris, and stepdad Bruce Jenner, along with their kids.
48:26Stop!
48:31The celebrity it bought her allowed her to promote company's products.
48:36And this is like one of the stores that I love to come to.
48:39And it just has like all different styles.
48:41I come with my, yeah, my two sisters.
48:44There's so many.
48:45I get them all mixed up.
48:46And we always, we have such different styles.
48:49And we always find stuff at Intermix that fit all of our personalities.
48:53Yeah, Kim Kardashian is someone who's leveraged social media to make her fortune in really kind of clever ways that have been extremely influential.
49:00Where you establish a following, you have a certain level of celebrity, and so you start selling things.
49:06Her next step was to start selling her own brands using honest demonstrations of her products on social media.
49:13I always had so many products, and I just wanted like a little defined kit of all of my favorite products that could just be really easy.
49:22I always do the tip of my nose because it just shortens your nose and makes it look so cute.
49:27Many of the beauty trends that have emerged in the last 10 years have come from Kim Kardashian.
49:33Her followers are women who want to be like her.
49:37She's got a beauty company, KKW Beauty with cosmetics.
49:43And then perhaps her most valuable creation has been this bodywear, shapewear company called Skims.
49:52The Skims bodywear company is now valued at $3.2 billion.
49:59It's kind of like an idea factory.
50:01She comes up with the idea.
50:02She outsources the manufacturing to somebody else.
50:06She does the marketing on her social media.
50:09And there you have it.
50:11Next thing you know, she's a billionaire.
50:14Kim Kardashian now has 280 million Instagram followers, making her one of the most influential people in the world of fashion and beauty.
50:25But running a business driven by a social media star can be tough.
50:30It's hard to stay relevant.
50:32I mean, one of the things about being on social media and being a social media star is you've got to give your viewers something new and different to see and ogle about.
50:41So I imagine she'll keep reinventing herself and creating new companies.
50:45She's young. She's only 41 years old.
50:47The American dream was built on the back of tycoons and their groundbreaking ideas.
51:08Few Americans begrudge them their success.
51:18But in recent years, the size of their fortunes has caused increasing concern about wealth disparity.
51:24The public perception of billionaires has changed very drastically.
51:30They were once seen as figures of American pride.
51:34But now we know how much tax they pay and how much they're putting back into the economy.
51:39We will see the level of wealth continues to flow to the billionaire class.
51:44We have long been a very unequal society.
51:47But two things have changed.
51:49One, the disparities in wealth are so evident. They're so obvious.
51:54We see on social media and elsewhere how other people live.
51:58So it's in our face. And even more important, there's a concern about mobility.
52:03People will accept inequality if they believe they have a chance.
52:06This is the American dream, right?
52:08In American society today, that's less and less true.
52:12The wealth gap between America's richest and poorest families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016.
52:21The challenge of our moment is that everyone sees a need for better regulation of wealth.
52:26But the people who are in a position to make policy decisions are very dependent on the wealthy.
52:32And so they have a disincentive to make those changes.
52:35But I think it's going to require much broader political imagination.
52:39Thinking, rethinking this sort of same question that American lawmakers grappled with in the early 20th century,
52:47which is how do we find a way to balance capitalism with the needs of a broader public?
52:53Whether governments find a solution to the wealth gap remains to be seen.
52:58However, there's no doubt tycoons will continue to drive the American dream.
53:04The United States still has enormous opportunities, enormous resources, enormous talent, and an enormous will to get ahead.
53:17And I think that'll see us through in fine shape.
53:21Well, there will be many, many more tycoons in the future doing what tycoons of the past have done,
53:28taking new technology, finding a new market for it,
53:32and building their fortunes and fame based on that.
53:35And that's a healthy thing. That's how society changes and evolves.
53:39Take care.
53:40Take care.
53:41Take care.
53:42After some new advice.
53:42Take care.
53:43Take care.
54:08Legenda Adriana Zanotto
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