Silent Men Are Finding Their Voices: Morgan and Baker Illustrate Change in Relations Between Big Business and Public
Today, the richest businessmen like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates seem omnipresent. But a 1925 New York Times Magazine article noted the then-new development of businessmen speaking in public.
The journalist Charles Willis Thompson speculated on the main reason for the shift. Unlike the 1900s era of Theodore Roosevelt and trust-busting, the Roaring Twenties saw people living large, reducing much of the prior hostility towards the wealthy.
The business man [sic], especially if he were a "captain of industry" or in "big business," felt that he was looked upon with antagonism or at least with suspicion by a large part of his countrymen, and that if he spoke in public he was sure to meet with jeers. That was largely true, and therefore the change is profoundly significant.
It means that the relations between the millionaire and the majority have so far altered that the former can now be sure of meeting with the same sort of reception that anybody else would meet. The implications to be drawn from that fact cannot be exaggerated.
Today, of course, we hear directly from the rich all the time. Donald Trump is the president. Elon Musk might be the most-discussed person on the planet. Bill Gates has a new memoir Source Code out just this month and has been making the media rounds: Jimmy Fallon, The View, etc.
The 1925 claim that such people now met "with the same sort of reception that anybody else would meet" is debatable. But today, many of them certainly do their best to seem relatable to the common person.
Jeff Bezos reveals that he had to send his kids money on Venmo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3065&v=s71nJQqzYRQ
Bill Gates waits in line for burgers:
Elon Musk livestreams his videogame sessions, most recently for Path of Exile 2:
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1zqKVYPoZaMxB
But all that relatability only goes so far. Cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun recently spent $6.2 million on a banana:
Silent Men Are Finding Their Voices: Morgan and Baker Illustrate Change in Relations Between Big Business and Public
Published: Sunday, February 15, 1925