Every time I get a brand new job, the very first thing I do is name my dad. And the very first thing he asks me is: How a lot are they paying you? The person’s obsession with {dollars} and cents is lore within the Drummond household. However his zealous curiosity within the measurement of my paycheck is for superb cause: Cash runs the world, in any case, whether or not you have any or not. So, Mr. Drummond figures, chances are you’ll as nicely attempt to make as a lot as you possibly can.
My inherited pathologies apart, WIRED’s curiosity in cash is as apparent as it’s huge: We cowl an trade awash in trillions of {dollars}, and that trade simply so occurs to be shaping every part about the best way all of us reside. However who precisely has that cash? How are they wielding it? And what does that imply for the remainder of us? To search out out, we dispatched some money-eyed WIRED reporters to far-flung locales: From the United Arab Emirates to Denmark to Washington, DC, to freaking Florida, we forged far and huge to deliver you some uniquely WIRED tales documenting wealth and energy throughout the planet.
Lastly, a gaggle of editors sat all the way down to assess our lineup. And we observed one thing, as we flicked via the drafts and infographics. Wherever on the planet we’d despatched a reporter, whichever nook of the know-how panorama we had been protecting, the holders of all of that cash? Males. All of them. Each. Single. One. Invoice Gates, who sat down with Steven Levy to speak about his new memoir (keep tuned), has loved 19 of the final 30 years atop the checklist of the world’s richest folks. Of the 30-odd crypto buyers in Trump’s inside circle, all of them are—anticipate it—guys. Even the younger folks hustling door-to-door within the Sunshine State, shilling photo voltaic panels in a determined bid to turn out to be millionaires by 30, are, nicely, males.
So let me be the primary to level it out: There’s extra testosterone on this problem than the final decade of Individuals’s Sexiest Man Alive editions mixed. Partly, that’s a actuality borne of circumstance: 87 p.c of billionaires around the globe are males, and ladies proceed to be vastly, outrageously outranked in govt positions throughout the tech trade. None of that even begins to account for racial variety, which paints a good bleaker image. And it’s one prone to proceed apace, as tech giants like Meta and Google chip away at their DEI investments. In the meantime, the on-line manosphere—newly emboldened by President Trump and his First Buddy Musk—continues to metastasize in scope and affect.
However I’ll take possession too. At WIRED, it’s our failure of editorial foresight and creativeness to have seen the plain—the blatant, persistent masculinity, web page after web page—solely on the final minute. To not have, earlier in our assigning course of, determined to interrogate the fraught and fractured gender dynamics of wealth accumulation, of company affect, of energy. All of which nonetheless, infuriatingly, belong practically completely to folks with penises, with boardroom-commanding baritones, and with a centuries-long head begin.
Don’t get me improper: You’ll get pleasure from this problem, each in print and on-line. We hope you be taught a factor or two about how the massive bucks in tech are being amassed and spent, and the folks—the lads—amassing and spending them. However from one lady in cost to all the fellows on the market, together with these featured in our pages: It is likely to be a wealthy man’s world for now, however belief me, ladies like cash too. And we’re coming to take a few of yours.
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