The Tribune

By Charlie Harper

Wealth.

It’s all around us in The Bahamas. It’s a key part of our nation’s basic business plan. No secret there. On New Providence, there’s wealth north, south, east and west. Private investment in this country is critical to support infrastructure and government services.

Many of us are proud and pleased that some of the world’s wealthiest people choose to live here.

Wealthy people here get involved in politics. They pursue philanthropic causes. They seek to influence candidates for office, both before they are elected and afterwards. Their success in accumulating wealth leads them to involvement in public affairs, often in pursuit of our national self-interest, prosperity and advancement.

Public-minded philanthropy is an important factor in our lives. It’s broadly acceptable to many of us.

Generally speaking, the deployment of wealth here is a subtle endeavor. People don’t go strutting around, showing off their wealth and influence. “Showboating” can quickly erode public acceptance and even admiration for the pursuit of wealth.

The discrete disbursement of wealth in the United States has also long been broadly acceptable.

Consider the foundations established by wealthy people in many professions and circumstances. As millions of Americans suffer from inflation and other after-effects of the world’s worst public health crisis in over one hundred years, public figures can gain a real measure of acceptance for their wealth.

Sports stars are currently perhaps the most visible of these. From quarterback Patrick Mahomes of the world champion Kansas City Chiefs to all-time basketball star LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers, many of America’s superstars do good by doing well.

Their public giving burnishes their reputations. But there are also other advantages. They often quietly accumulate tax breaks. There is relatively little public resentment of their wages and other benefits like endorsements that make young men – and some young women – almost unimaginably wealthy at what still seems to most people to be a very early stage in their charmed lives.

Some sports stars combine their salaries and especially their income from endorsements to gain so much wealth that they are able to become franchise owners. Consider Michael Jordan, Tom Brady and Magic Johnson.

These men are basketball and football stars whose athletic accomplishments, sensible earnings management and public image has led them to gain entry into one of the most exclusive clubs in the world – professional sports team ownership.

Jordan was the principal owner of the NBA Charlotte Hornets until recently selling the team for a big profit. Johnson is a legitimate capitalist and has been for many years, expanding his investment portfolio to include part ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Brady was just accepted as a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders.

These are serious public figures, wealthy and influential. But they are also notable for their lack of outward public involvement in political affairs.

In the United States, the tech revolution that began in the 1990s and continues today has spawned perhaps the greatest explosion of personal wealth since the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in America.

Then, legendary public figures like John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie built enormous fortunes as the US entered the industrial age. There were public and private scandals involving inordinately wealthy people, and reputations were tarnished and fortunes lost.

But many of these industrialists also smartly made certain that their names were associated with large donations of their wealth to support obviously meritorious endeavors such as building public libraries. Foundations in their names continue to be relevant today over a century after their underlying fortunes were accumulated.

All of which brings us to this morning, five days before an American election that seems inordinately consequential for the main protagonists and may turn on the margin of mere thousands among 150 million votes that may be cast.

Wealth has been a consistent subtext to this election and to the previous two elections. Donald Trump’s persistent candidacies have ensured that.

Trump’s opponent reminds her audiences at every opportunity that she grew up in a middle-class family where both parents worked in traditional roles and she and her sister were able to enjoy a comfortable youth.

Kamala Harris talks about this all the time. She says her background gives her a personal understanding of the difficult circumstances faced every day by millions of Americans whose financial situations are and have for years remained parlous.

“I understand where you are, and I will devote my presidency to helping you to achieve your dreams,” Harris assures her large and enthusiastic audiences.

Like most politicians, Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. He earned a lot of money in a career as a Los Angeles litigator. Good for them.

Harris doesn’t pretend that they are not sufficiently wealthy. She, like the overwhelming majority of national politicians and people of wealth, is publicly modest and discrete about her finances.

She credits hard work, help from others and dedication to family, faith and other unexceptionable values for her prosperity.

Trump, by contrast, boasts incessantly about his wealth. It’s his own badge of honor. It’s how he values himself. And whatever you may think about his wealth and his business acumen, he has reportedly taken a start-up bequest from his also successful father of $400m and boosted his wealth to what Forbes Magazine now estimates to be $2.3 billion.

Forbes in March of this year rated Trump as number 1,438 on its list of the current 2,545 billionaires. The US is home to about one-third of these wealthiest people, followed by China and India. Canada ranks eighth; the UK sits in tenth place. Forbes reports that among those joining the billionaires’ club this year were Magic Johnson and Taylor Swift.

Fortune Magazine has built a brand by assigning an estimated 50 reporters to compile its annual list of the world’s wealthiest people. Trump is perhaps its most prominent member. According to the magazine, the list excludes royal families and dictators whose wealth is either bestowed by the good fortune of their birth or by illegally commandeering an entire nation.

It’s impossible to dismiss as accidents of birth the fantastic accumulation of wealth by the men sitting today at number two and three on Forbes’ list. They are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. (Number one is the French owner of luxury brands such as Dior and Louis Vuitton.)

While not enjoying the worldwide notoriety of Trump, Musk and Bezos have inserted themselves into the American presidential race in virtually unprecedented fashion in recent weeks.

Musk, whose genius has spawned the fantastic Tesla electric vehicle brand among other successful ventures, has been edging for a while toward outward support of Trump. Now Musk is a huge donor to the former president, and appears at rallies with him.

After dabbling on the fringes of politics for 20 years after he became a US citizen, Musk bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, and, according to the BBC, “quickly soured on President Biden over issues including unions – Musk is opposed to efforts to organize his car workers. And perhaps more importantly, he agrees with Trump on government censorship and persecution, complaints about the media, opposition to immigration, and anger at ‘woke’ ideas.”

Bezos is a counterpoint to Musk. Founder of the world’s most valuable company, the Amazon owner bought the Washington Post 11 years ago and has kept this liberal beacon financially sustainable since then.

Bezos the Post have consistently criticised Trump and his fascist tendencies, so an endorsement of Harris was assumed. But Bezos announced on the weekend that the newspaper would not endorse a presidential candidate. Liberal outrage flooded the paper’s phone lines and website. 200,000 subscribers reportedly cancelled.

Here’s Bezos’ own explanation of his decision, from the Post: “Most people believe the media is biased, and that The Washington Post and other newspapers needed to boost their credibility.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

Bezos is correct. The media generally and prominent newspapers like the Post have seen their credibility erode. They must fix this.

And in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it would be good if wealth slipped back into the shadows of American politics.