Middle-Class Tycoons
(NPR Commentary)
By Dinesh D'Souza

Something very strange is going on with rich people in America. I was recently at a conference of high-tech entrepreneurs. Most of these guys are worth millions, and some of them have a net worth that compares favorably with the gross national product of Third World countries. And yet, as far as I could see, most of these people didn’t look rich and they didn’t act rich. In fact, they appeared downright middle class.

Many of them wore faded jeans and crumpled shirts. One dot-com multimillionaire wore a baseball camp facing backward, displaying the adjusto-strap to advantage. Looking at him I thought of Bill Gates, in his oversized sweater, and Jeff Bezos of amazon.com, who shows a distinct preference for alligator shirts. Even investment tycoon Warren Buffet continually boasts about his modest house and his old car.

What’s going on here? What a strange country where everybody wants to be middle class. The poor want to move up and enjoy the benefits of a middle class life. Even the rich and the super-rich aspire to be middle class!

Of course some people may say it’s all a pose. Perhaps the rich are simply pretending to be middle-class to avoid that most powerful of hostile sentiments, the hard glint of envy. After all, we know that behind tall gates many of these Silicon Valley types and Wall Street types and Hollywood types live fabulously well. We’ve read about Bill Gates’s $40 million mansion in Seattle. In some entrepreneurial havens there are waiting lists for Porches and Ferraris. One executive who grew up listening to Rod Stewart recently paid $1 million to have Stewart himself sing at his wedding.

Despite all this extravagance, I think the middle-class style of the new rich is not just a social pose. It’s not mere hypocrisy. Many of these guys grew up middle-class; that’s how they see themselves. They may now be worth “two commas” (as in one million dollars) or even “three commas” (as is one billion) but they still prefer to hang out with the guys they met in college. They prefer spare ribs and beer to caviar. And they want to preserve the bourgeois virtues of self-discipline, hard work and frugality that made them so successful.

Even more important, they want to cultivate these virtues in their offspring “I don’t want my children to be spoiled rotten,” Michael Dell of Dell Computer told me at a recent conference. Almost everybody in Silicon Valley says that now. And many self-made entrepreneurs have publicly said that they aren’t going to leave the bulk of their fortune to their children. They don’t want to raise a generation of slackers. Rather, as the head of one software company put it, “I want my kids to face the same challenges that I did, so that they too can have the thrill of overcoming life’s obstacles.”

I don’t know how long this ambivalence about wealth will persist in the minds of the new rich. Money does funny things to people. But at least for now, in the minds of its most successful citizens, America remains a classless society. I like seeing billionaires eating fried chicken and drinking Budweiser, but I’m not sure I really believe this.

(See also: The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence)