America’s new Gilded Age rhymes with its last in so many ways, perhaps none more so than through its oligarchs and billionaires, with the role of steel being played today by artificial intelligence.
The pre–World War I era at the turn of the century coincided with a surge in modern industrial capitalism that transformed steel barons into America’s first billionaire class, while the new one is minting tech fortunes on a Carnegie- and Rockefeller-size scale, with Elon Musk flirting with trillionaire status in recent months after the historic SpaceX IPO.
